THE TRUST TAX The strange reason a lack of trust may be creating more work than you think - and why the economics of ownership may be very different

Trust is having a bad time.

The latest Edelman Trust Barometer puts the UK’s overall Trust Index at just 44. Only 29% of people report high trust in private companies. And two-thirds of UK consumers told YouGov they boycott brands that lose their trust.

The nights are getting darker, summer’s disappearing, and now I’ve turned up with this. Thanks, Stuart. Oh, I’m not finished yet. We’ve got the longest night to look forward to. Anyway, it gets worse. But it is psychologically interesting.

Because distrust doesn’t just change what we think about organisations. It changes what we do.

One 2026 study found 46% of UK consumers had ignored a genuine company message because they thought it was a scam. And when we don’t trust an organisation to do what it says it will do, we behave rather like someone who’s left the house and can’t remember whether they locked the front door. We check. Then we check again. We call. We email. We chase. Sometimes we chase the chase.

And every one of those perfectly rational little acts creates something the organisation probably didn’t want. More work. Which creates a rather interesting problem. Distrust doesn’t just lose customers. It manufactures work.

THE WORK DISTRUST CREATES

And right now, that lack of trust is creating a lot of work.

Take housing. Awaab’s Law means social landlords have to investigate hazards and complete safety work on much tighter timescales. But there’s another requirement that’s particularly interesting. They have to keep residents informed.

Because when something important is happening to us, getting the outcome matters. But knowing what’s happening matters too. If I don’t know whether you’ve received my repair request, I check. If I don’t know when someone’s coming, I chase. If you said you’d call and didn’t, I call you. And every time I do, I create more work for you.

The same thing happens in claims. The claimant doesn’t just want their claim settled. They want to know what’s happening to it. And in pensions, the customer doesn’t just want their money. They want to know the retirement they’ve spent 40 years preparing for is actually being addressed.

Uncertainty creates checking. Checking creates work. And the conventional response to all that work? We need more capacity.

But what if some of the capacity we need is already there? Buried underneath the work that uncertainty and distrust create.

THE TRUST TAX

All of this has a cost. I call it the Trust Tax.

A little toll booth the organisation accidentally builds into every customer journey. Every check, chase and “what’s happening?” extracts another payment. Except rather inconveniently, the organisation pays it.

And it can be enormous. In evidence to Parliament about housing repairs, Clarion reported that around 48% of its calls were customers chasing jobs they’d already reported. Think about that. Almost half the calls weren’t necessarily people asking the organisation to do something new. They were asking what was happening to something they’d already asked it to do.

And those calls aren’t free. UK contact-centre research has put the average cost of an inbound call at around £6. But the higher cost may be what happens next. Every person answering a call from somebody asking “What’s happening?” is a person who isn’t available to deal with something else. Distrust doesn’t just create cost. It consumes capacity.

And here’s the peculiar economics of it. The less customers trust the system, the more they intervene in it. The more they intervene, the more work the organisation has to deal with. The more work the organisation has to deal with, the longer everything takes. Which gives customers even more reason to chase.

So what looks like a customer-experience problem becomes an operational one. And what looks like a capacity problem may, at least partly, be a trust problem.

That’s the Trust Tax.

THE INVISIBLE MIDDLE

Which raises an obvious question. Why don’t customers know what’s happening?

Often, because nobody else quite knows either.

We have spent decades designing service organisations by breaking work into smaller and smaller pieces. It looks efficient. But chopping work up creates something we rarely see. Space between the pieces.

A claim waits for an assessment. Then for medical evidence. Then for someone else to pick it up. And while the organisation sees a series of activities, the customer experiences the space between them. The silence. The uncertainty. The waiting.

I call this The Invisible Middle.

The Invisible Middle is the space we create in work when we chop it into small pieces. And this creates a rather strange problem when we try to improve productivity. We naturally focus on the work we can see. How quickly did the handler assess the claim? How long did it take to review the medical evidence? How many claims did someone process today?

So we try to speed up those activities. More claims per handler. Shorter handling times. Higher utilisation. But the biggest problem may not be happening while anyone is working on the claim.

It may be happening between the bits of work. Sitting in a queue. Waiting for information. Waiting for someone else to pick it up. And that’s the strange thing about the Invisible Middle. Much of the lead time, the waiting and the cost accumulate in the very place we’re least likely to look.

When nobody is working on the claim at all.

It’s like obsessively checking your bank account while your money disappears down the back of the sofa. We’re measuring the pennies we can see while the pounds are hiding in the gaps.

THE BLACK HOLE

And this is more prevalent than you might think. I’ve spent the last 27 years studying service systems, and the same pattern keeps appearing.

My son had a flood in his flat. The insurer still calls it his “recent claim.” “Recent” is apparently a relative term. Anyway, the flat needed drying out and he needed a new kitchen. How long did it actually take to dry the flat and fit the kitchen? Eight days.

Which, admittedly, is quite a long time when you fancy a spaghetti bolognese. But the claim didn’t take eight days. There were assessments. Reports. Emails. Calls. People waiting for other people. And, of course, quite a lot of nobody doing anything at all.

So how long did those eight days of work take from beginning to end? Two years.

Two years without pasta. He’s furious. Dolmio’s share price has never recovered. Which makes the insurer’s continued use of the word “recent” rather ambitious.

And that’s not unusual. In housing repairs, it’s not unusual for a repair to take 50–60 days from beginning to end. In claims, I’ve seen claims taking 500–600 days. And in pensions administration, something as simple as changing an address can take 20–30 days.

Those numbers sound like an awful lot of work. But now look at the work that actually creates the value. The repair itself might take five or six hours. Even a complex claim may contain only two or three days of actual work. And changing an address? Less than five minutes.

So where did all the other time go? That’s the extraordinary thing. It isn’t in the work. It’s between the work.

The five-minute change of address disappears into a process lasting 20 days. The six-hour repair disappears into a process lasting 60. The three days of work on a claim disappear into 500. And eight days drying a flat and fitting a kitchen somehow disappears into two years.

We’re not talking about a few coins slipping down the back of the sofa anymore. We’re talking about a black hole. And almost everything we’re trying to improve - productivity, customer effort, cost, capacity and trust - is being pulled into it.

Yet conventional productivity thinking keeps staring at the five minutes, the six hours and the three days, trying to make the value-creating work faster.

While almost all the elapsed time is spent doing nothing.

THE UNPAID PROJECT MANAGER

But chopping work into pieces creates another problem. It chops up ownership too. Everyone owns a piece. Nobody owns the whole thing.

Except, rather unexpectedly, Mrs Jones.

Mrs Jones only wanted her bathroom leak fixed. Three weeks later she’s at the kitchen table with the plumber’s number, the surveyor’s email, six reference numbers and a notebook full of dates. By week four, the notebook isn’t cutting it. She’s taken out a subscription to Microsoft Project.

There’s a Gantt chart. Dependencies. Milestones. She’s considering a Monday morning stand-up with the plumber. Congratulations, Mrs Jones. You’ve just become the unpaid project manager of your own repair.

Nobody appointed her. Nobody trained her. And, rather disappointingly, nobody appears to be paying her. But somebody has to join the pieces together. And because the organisation has divided ownership between teams, contractors and specialists, that somebody increasingly becomes the customer.

In effect, you’ve outsourced the management of your process to Mrs Jones. And then something rather wonderful happens to the economics.

She calls. You pay someone to answer. She emails. You pay someone to read it. She complains. You pay someone to investigate it. She escalates because nobody seems to own the whole thing. You pay someone to deal with that too.

So Mrs Jones does the project management for free. And you pay for all the work her project management creates.

The customer does the work. You get the bill.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

So how did we decide this was efficient? For that, we need to go back about a hundred years. To Detroit.

I’ve actually worked at Ford’s River Rouge plant. It’s difficult to stand there without being slightly awed by what Ford created. Because for the problem he was trying to solve, the logic was brilliant.

If you’re making millions of identical products, breaking the work into small, repeatable activities can make production dramatically faster and cheaper. Instead of one person building a whole car, one person does one thing. Then another person does the next. And another. The work moves. The people specialise. The cars pour out.

There was just one small problem. A customer isn’t a Model T. Neither is an insurance claim. Or a pension. Or Mrs Jones’s leaking bathroom.

Yet somewhere along the way, we took an extraordinarily successful way of organising the manufacture of identical things and began applying the same logic to work that isn’t identical at all. Claims got divided into stages. Repairs into trades. Pensions into transactions. Customer service into departments.

We kept Ford’s idea of breaking the work into pieces.

It’s almost as if someone drew an invisible line through history and said: “Righto. That’s operations management sorted. Everything we ever need to know is here, at River Rouge in Detroit. Make sure nobody ever learns another damn thing. Now go and tell the accountants this is how we’re going to measure stuff.”

And we pretty much did.

I once heard a brilliant line about ageing, attributed to Clint Eastwood: “Don’t let the old man in.” I suspect if Peter Drucker had been having a beer with him that day, he’d have stolen it.

“Don’t let the old accountant in.”

Because the moment the accountant arrives, he sees something incredibly seductive. The pieces are easy to count. Cost per call. Cost per claim. Cost per transaction. Jobs per person. Minutes per activity.

The Invisible Middle isn’t.

So we optimise what we can see and account for. While the real money disappears into the spaces between it.

THE ECONOMICS OF OWNERSHIP

So what’s the alternative? Put the work back together. Give someone ownership of the customer’s problem and let them see it through.

At which point I can hear our old accountant spluttering into his tea. “One person? Doing all of it? Have you heard this young whippersnapper? Not in my factory.”

And he’s already reaching for the spreadsheet.

Specialists are cheaper. Division of labour is more efficient. Expensive people shouldn’t do inexpensive work. And here’s the annoying thing. He’s right about the arithmetic. He’s just counting the wrong things.

Because ownership removes work. Fewer handovers. Fewer queues. Less picking work up and putting it down. Less duplication. Less chasing. And considerably less need for Mrs Jones to renew her Microsoft Project subscription.

This isn’t some eccentric theory from the Low Effort shed. We’ve seen what happens when organisations actually design the work this way.

Portsmouth City Council adopted John Seddon’s Vanguard Method in its housing repairs service, studying the demand coming in, following work end-to-end and redesigning the system around flow rather than activity.

The results were remarkable.

Published accounts of the transformation report that average repair time fell from around 24 days to less than seven. Failure demand - calls and contacts created because something hadn’t been done, hadn’t been done right, or the resident didn’t know what was happening - fell from 60% to 14%.

One contractor reduced its cost per repair from £258 to £114 while substantially increasing the number of jobs it could complete.

That’s the economics of flow.

Do less unnecessary work and you create more capacity. Create more capacity and repairs move faster. Repairs that move faster generate less chasing, fewer calls and fewer escalations — which creates still more capacity.

Better service and lower cost aren’t competing objectives.

Sometimes they’re the same intervention.

The wider evidence points in the same direction. McKinsey’s work on organisations redesigning around end-to-end customer journeys reports 30–50% productivity gains and turnaround-time reductions of up to 80%. It also found that, in many organisations, just 20 end-to-end journeys account for more than 70% of costs and 80% of the customer experience.

In one financial-services transformation, service-delivery costs were on course to fall by nearly 20%, efficiency and quality improved by more than 35%, and employee-engagement scores increased by more than 20%. BCG reports a similar pattern from more than 100 client transformations: 15-25% lower costs, alongside significant improvements in customer advocacy and revenue.

I’ve seen the same pattern over 27 years in claims, housing repairs and pensions administration. Put the work back together and something rather peculiar happens. The customer does less work. The organisation does less work. And the person doing the job gets better work.

In the systems I’ve worked on, results can be dramatic: end-to-end time drops by a factor of 10, productivity increases by 2–3×, and costs fall by around 30%.

Not because people are working harder. Because we’ve stopped paying them to manage all the work the system shouldn’t have created in the first place.

And that last part, better work, matters too. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent much of his career studying what he called flow - the deeply absorbing state associated with challenging work that uses our skills, has clear goals and gives us feedback about how we’re doing.

Chopping someone’s job into tiny repetitive transactions isn’t an obvious recipe for that. Giving them a real customer problem, the skills to solve it, ownership of what happens next and the ability to see the result?

Now we’re getting warmer.

SO WHAT DO WE DO?

So where does that leave us? Perhaps with a different question.

Instead of asking “How do we get people to do more work?”, ask:

“How much of this work should exist at all?”

Because trust isn’t something you fix with a communications campaign. It’s an operational outcome. Customers trust the system when they know what’s happening, who owns their problem and the organisation does what it said it would do.

So what do leaders actually do?

The Low Effort Method has five steps:

1. STUDY WHAT IS REALLY HAPPENING.

2. BUILD A PICTURE OF THE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE, NOT THE PARTS.

3. MOVE FROM FACTORY THINKING TO SYSTEMS THINKING.

4. DESIGN FOR LOW EFFORT AND OWNERSHIP.

5. MEASURE THE WHOLE THING, LEARN AND IMPROVE.

That’s the method. I’m deliberately not going to explain all five here. You’ve had enough Stuart Corrigan for one Tuesday.

But there is one question you can take into work today:

Where is all the time going when nobody is working on the customer’s problem?

Find that, and you may find capacity, cost, and trust hiding there too.

Want to learn the five steps? https://www.loweffort.com