AI shame and hybrid disengagement show why trust is the real workplace currency

Gerry Akkerman, Nastaran Bisheban, Doris Simcich, and Kin Lee-Yow, spoke on a panel at the CIO Association of Canada’s Peer Forum in Ottawa. – Photo by Jennifer Friesen, Digital Journal

After COVID, Gerry Akkerman gathered his team for food and conversation, hoping to rebuild a sense of connection once work has become mostly virtual. He asked them what really mattered about being together. 

One employee bluntly answered, “Sometimes you just need to touch and smell and feel everyone.”

He told this story at the CIO Association of Canada’s Peer Forum in Ottawa, and the room burst out in laughter (because, despite how well-meaning, nobody wants HR paperwork that badly), but the point was a lot less literal. In hybrid workplaces, connection is what keeps teams engaged instead of drifting apart.

Akkerman, CIO at Legal Aid BC, shared that perspective alongside other panellists who offered a reality check. Leaders know hybrid and AI are here to stay, but the hard work is figuring out how people adapt. Their lessons line up with what research shows. 

Both changes come down to trust. Hybrid showed what happens when trust is missing in how people use their time. AI is showing the same thing in how people use new tools. When people don’t feel safe admitting how they use new tools, they hide it. People are experimenting with ChatGPT like it’s contraband. 

The behaviour looks different — disengaging on one hand, concealing on the other — but the root cause is the same. People often don’t believe the system is designed with their best interests in mind.

That is what makes this more than an office debate or a tech rollout. It’s a question of whether Canadian organizations can build workplaces where people feel confident to connect and experiment without fear.

Leaders who design for trust (whether in a hybrid office or an AI pilot) are not managing change on the horizon. The dawn of this technology has long passed, it’s at least high noon. The real work is creating workplaces that can adapt to whatever the next hour brings.

Trust is the missing ingredient in hybrid

Nastaran Bisheban, vice chairman of the national board of directors of CIO Association of Canada, argued that hybrid is not new for technologists. 

Her teams were used to collaborating across time zones before COVID. The problem now is not whether hybrid works, but why people should come in at all. 

“There is no way anyone can pay me enough to be five days in the office,” she said. “It doesn’t happen. But three days, yes, I will follow and make sure that I have that.”

People are not rejecting offices, they are rejecting the idea of being there without purpose.

That tension is everywhere. A Stanford study of 1,600 Trip.com employees found hybrid cut turnover by a third without hurting productivity. Yet MIT Sloan warns that without deliberate design, hybrid can weaken innovation and culture.

It’s like the corporate version of owning a gym membership. You’re signed up, but if you never actually do the workout, nothing changes.

Akkerman brought it down to a personal level. 

He uses a simple question to track team health, asking if people have a friend at work. It became a conversation starter about belonging after COVID, just as it had when he brought his team together over food to rebuild connection. 

“Employees started saying, ‘It is great to be with your colleagues,’” he said. “There’s something different when you’re seeing them and they’re right in front of you.”

If belonging is one side of the hybrid equation, trust is the other. 

That was a point from Kin Lee-Yow, CIO at CAA Club Group. Mandates, he argued, are like forcing people to attend a party they didn’t RSVP to. Sure, they might show up, but they’ll be waiting to feign a text from their spouse that their kid is sick or their apartment has flooded. 

And for Doris Simcich, who manages global teams at AstraZeneca, the lesson is about flexibility. Calls at odd hours and travel to meet in person are the price of keeping relationships strong. 

“You can’t really beat face-to-face at the end of the day, especially when it comes to stakeholders and your team,” she said.

Whether you are running a lab in Europe, a legal office in Canada, or a tech team spread across three continents, hybrid works best when the time you are together feels intentional. The danger is slipping into compliance mode and measuring office days instead of measuring what those days actually deliver.

Hybrid work has shown that without trust, employees tend to withdraw. They keep their cameras off, come in begrudgingly, or quietly disconnect. The new challenge is that AI is revealing a similar pattern in reverse. Instead of hiding disengagement, people are hiding usage.

AI shame is the new disengagement

Hybrid exposed what happens when trust is missing in how people spend their time. AI is exposing the same thing in how people use new tools. In both cases, leaders are discovering that rules without trust only drive resistance underground.

Leaders are watching teams experiment with new tools, but without support, many are afraid to admit it. A 2025 WalkMe and SAP survey found executives and Gen Z are the heaviest AI users, yet they are the least likely to receive training or policy guidance. Nearly half admitted to concealing their AI use at work, a phenomenon researchers now call “AI shame.”

That kind of concealment is the mirror image of what happened with hybrid. In one case, people kept quiet about disengaging. In the other, they are keeping quiet about adoption. Either way, trust is missing.

Bisheban captured the tension when she described AI as “the kid that we are raising.” Left unsupervised, it could pick up bad habits. Raised well, it could expand what teams are capable of.

Changes happening in the workplace can quickly become a mixed bag. Leaders are excited, curious, cautious, and a little overwhelmed.

Simcich’s team tried to strip away the fear by creating a voluntary AI accreditation program. Employees could earn bronze, silver, or gold badges tied to their roles. Within a year, one in five had signed up. 

“This peer-driven lifelong learning type of curiosity and culture started to build,” she said. 

Programs like this can turn experimentation into collective learning, lowering the fear factor while keeping teams aligned.

Akkerman focused on governance. Legal Aid BC built its AI policy with legal counsel to set clear guardrails around bias, privacy, and accountability. 

“At the end of the day, you are the person at the keyboard accountable for decisions that are made by the outcomes,” he said. 

The governance challenge is bigger than one organization. A Deloitte global survey found two-thirds of boards admit they have little to no knowledge of AI, and nearly half are not discussing it regularly at all. CSIRO’s joint report with Alphinity shows only 40% of boards include a director with expertise in AI ethics, and few have published AI policies.

National research from Digital Journal shows the same credibility gap inside Canadian workplaces. One-third of employees say their company talks about innovation without following through, and trust falls sharply when promises are not backed by action. In organizations that deliver on their commitments, engagement nearly doubles.

“Nowadays it’s all about GenAI,” Lee-Yow said with a closing caution. “People think it’s smart. It is not smart. The smart piece is your people. Without that, it is still just a tool.”

Hybrid revealed the trust gap once. AI is revealing it again.

Whether it’s hybrid work or AI, leaders who focus on connection, confidence, and accountability will shape workplaces that can handle change without losing their people.

Final shots

• Hybrid work succeeds when leaders design purposeful connections, not blanket mandates
• AI is valuable only when curiosity is paired with guardrails, training, and accountability
• The biggest leadership skill is not mastering the tool but closing the trust gap

Digital Journal is the national media partner for the CIO Association of Canada.