How to build internal culture on a T&S team

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that Trust and Safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

Today, I’m sharing another practical guide drawing on my 15+ years running T&S teams — this time on how to build a team where people feel able to raise concerns and act without fear. This is the eleventh guide I've written to date. You can see them all in one place here.

If you've got tips and tricks for building healthy T&S cultures or suggestions for what guides you'd find useful, drop me an email. For the first time in a few weeks, here we go!— Alice

My guide to getting T&S culture right

Trust & Safety teams are not immune to cultural challenges. Over the years, there have been well-documented cases of safety staff raising concerns about a specific takedown decision or strategic direction. Sometimes these concerns spread to involve employees beyond the T&S function or department. 

A lot of this comes down to culture — by which I mean the norms and behaviours that determine how information moves through a team. Good culture means frontline teams feel able to share what they're seeing, not just with colleagues in T&S but with the adjacent teams that need to understand or act on it.

When I think about the T&S failures I've seen up close, most of them were known about by someone before they became a problem. The issue was not always a lack of information; often, it was that the information did not travel far enough or fast enough.

Getting that right requires a few key ingredients. Before getting into them, though, it helps to be clear about what good looks like — and the warning signs that suggest your culture is getting in the way.

Why people get this wrong

Culture can sound like the “nice-to-have” part of running a T&S team. But the consequences of getting it wrong are huge. If people don't feel safe raising a concern, don't have time to investigate what they're seeing, or don't know how to get it in front of someone who can act, the whole process breaks down.

There are three patterns I've seen repeatedly, and I'll address each of them in this guide:

People don’t speak up early enough: If admitting a mistake, disagreeing with a decision or raising a concern feels costly, people will wait until they are certain before saying anything. By then, the problem may already be much harder to contain. Unfortunately, we see that time and time again.

Frontline knowledge doesn’t get utilised properly: Moderators often see emerging patterns, edge cases and changes in harmful behaviour before anyone else, but that early warning is useless if they have no time to investigate it or no clear route for getting it to policy and management.

Leadership doesn’t act on what T&S knows: Even when the right information reaches managers, it can wither if it is framed only as a T&S problem. Platform leaders are always juggling risk, cost and company priorities, so someone has to translate the issue into a decision or trade-off they can act on.

What good looks like

A healthy T&S culture isn't one where everyone agrees or where nobody makes mistakes. In my experience, it's almost the opposite: people are comfortable enough to say when they think something is wrong, and mistakes come up early enough that you can still do something useful with them.

A simple test I use with my teams — and one that runs counter to some leaders’ approach — is to ask where you first heard about the problem. If the answer is your own team, that’s a good sign that the culture you’re building is strong and what you’ve set up is working. If it is a user, a journalist or a regulator, it means there are gaps in the escalation chain, delays in surfacing problems or both — all signs that something in the culture isn't working.

Step-by-step

Step 1: Make it safe to raise concerns

Psychological safety means people believe they can report a mistake, disagree with a decision or say the work is affecting them without paying for it afterwards. In T&S, where mistakes can have real victims, treating every error as a discipline problem is tempting. But that produces a team that hides mistakes rather than one that makes fewer of them.

I default to giving people autonomy until there's a reason not to. What loses it isn't making a mistake: it's refusing accountability, showing no curiosity about why something went wrong, or repeating the same error without improving. The same principle applies to wellbeing. Rotation limits, exposure caps and access to appropriate support should be structural protections rather than something moderators have to ask for.

Step 2: Give people time — and somewhere to share their insights

Moderators notice things dashboards don't: emerging patterns, novel edge cases and gradual shifts in how harm appears. But spotting a pattern, checking whether it holds up and documenting it all requires time. If every available hour is allocated to throughput, people can see the same problem repeatedly without ever surfacing it.