Editorial
Your employee engagement surveys look good on paper, but your instincts and business signals suggest otherwise. C-Suite and HR leaders should add business data to uncover the trust conditions where honest, active participation and actionable business insights thrive.
When trust is low, silence and a culture of compliance not only stall your people analytics strategy but can cost you millions in business performance.
When Employee Engagement Turns Into Silence
Summer in Chicago is my favorite time to catch up with fellow humans and swap real work stories. Here’s the most recent one that made me pause: An organization offered a higher bonus multiplier for teams that achieved 100% response rates on engagement surveys. Everyone received regular team progress updates. Teams that fell behind were invited to “required” meetings.
The rationale? The company stated that their “proactive” approach ensured all employees would benefit from their generosity. The reality? It would be the third consecutive year they struggled with low participation rates and flat scores.
I don’t endorse the above approach, but have noticed an ongoing pattern where organizations struggle to encourage employee participation in feedback loops, anonymous or not. Employees fear retaliation for speaking up in an uncertain economy — and for good reason. Former colleagues are convinced that their honesty in HR forums factored into their layoff. Others see employee surveys as pointless because truthful feedback rarely drives change, and it’s seldom shared beyond HR and the senior leadership.
Trust is the missing metric. Bribery and pressure disguised as listening in good faith will not result in truthful participation. Instead, it's the fastest way to erode psychological safety. The cost of doing so is silence.
The Hidden Cost of Compliance: Use Business Metrics to Verify Trust
In a “check-the-box” culture, leaders apply pressure to participate in employee surveys. Employees comply, withholding the truth.
On paper, the results look good: high participation and “positive” scores. The headline is “everything’s fine.” But a second look at other metrics reveals things are off.
- Attrition is rising.
- High performers are asking for stress-related leave.
- Customer satisfaction is down while operational goals keep getting missed.
You start to wonder if anyone is connecting these dots or if the silence of compliant engagement is more comfortable to ignore.
Avoiding the hard truths about the lived experience of employee engagement can be costly. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace Report 2023, employees who are not engaged or actively disengaged account for an estimated $8.8 trillion in lost productivity. The same year, a McKinsey article highlighted that organizations that prioritize specific engagement drivers can save an estimated $56 million annually.
Why do many organizations tolerate financial waste when it comes to employee engagement initiatives? Similar investments made to improve customer satisfaction scores or eliminate production defects are regularly praised for driving measurable results. These are “quantifiable” business metrics, the so-called “hard data” that is tightly monitored for ROI.
Meanwhile, employee engagement still carries the stigma of being a “soft” or feel-good metric rooted in emotion and not direct business impact. As a result, employee loyalty is not taken seriously.
If you want to cut financial waste, treat trust and honest feedback as the critical business drivers they are. Cross-check them with your business data, like overloaded manager spans of control, slow project cycle times and attrition. Use them to surface cultural and operational blind spots. That’s how senior and HR leaders show that they’re actively listening in good faith and care to take action. The business results will follow.
The Trust Audit: 3 Data Red Flags Hiding in Plain Sight
If trust and honest feedback are critical business drivers, then people analytics —backed by hard data — should be a regular agenda item at operational reviews and board meetings. Here are three ways to approach it:
- Silent Red Flags: Data that is inaccurate, incomplete or misleading. Think engagement surveys or exit interviews with responses consistently marked as “N/A,” blank comments or flat results after layoffs, financial losses or major leadership changes.
- Mismatch Red Flags: Data that, when combined, sends mixed signals. You see high team connection scores, but they’re paired with neutral manager ratings, customer complaints and a spike in internal transfers.
- Hidden Cost Red Flags: These insights hide in what’s not being said or used. Productivity and customer metrics look strong with high “connection to purpose” scores. However, your open-text feedback references burnout coupled with low time-off usage, high turnover and product release timelines that lag or stall altogether.
Once you have identified the hard truths, take action to close the gaps and communicate changes openly to employees. Your leadership credibility and a trust-based culture thrive at this junction.
What Shared C-Level & HR Leader Accountability Looks Like in Practice
Building shared accountability for a culture where employees openly express their lived realities takes time. Its foundation resides in modeling behaviors that bridge the trust-credibility gap: the courage to hear the truth, the vulnerability to acknowledge areas for improvement and the commitment to consistently follow through with action.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
For HR leaders:
- Design employee engagement and listening programs that protect trust by prioritizing anonymity and making space for different views.
- Be transparent on why you’re collecting data and how it will be used before you collect it.
- Show you listen and take action: “You said X, we did X.”
- Use tools like empathy and journey mapping to uncover root causes, layering qualitative feedback from exit interviews, customer complaints and review sites like Glassdoor and Yelp.
- Train managers on how to invite feedback without defensiveness and follow through on concerns raised.
For C-level leaders:
- Show in tangible ways how trust and honest feedback are key business metrics.
- Create the space for your CHRO and direct reports to be “contrarians in residence” and “gut checkers.”
- Reward truth-tellers and not the “yes people” to strengthen psychological safety.
- Identify the senior leadership habits, yours included, that fuel a compliance culture: fear, indifference or control.
- Model transparency. Share what you're listening to and what you’re willing to change.
Senior and HR leaders should always ask “And what else?” before jumping to solutions. When hard truths are shared, say: “Tell me more.” Your whole organization is watching. They’re deciding whether to remain silent or remain at all.
What you choose to ask about, reward and act on tells your organization what really matters, especially when it comes to honesty and trust. Do your employees trust the signal you’re sending?
Editor's Note: Read more thoughts on the relationship between trust and employee engagement below:
- The Real Workplace Crisis Isn't Loyalty - It's Lack of Psychological Safety — AT&T CEO John Stankey's memo suggests loyalty is dead. Loyalty isn't dead, it’s earned by leaders who foster trust, fairness and psychological safety.
- The New Playbook of Employee Experience — Organizations that treat engagement as an outcome of good design, not a program to fix, will build meaningful employee connections.
- 'Hardcore' Work Culture Is a Shortcut to High Turnover — How do you balance employee experience with a focus on increased productivity? It isn't easy, but it's possible. Here's how.
Learn how you can join our contributor community.
