Only 46% of employees trust their leaders. A BCG partner says the fix is simpler than CEOs think

Nearly 90% of CEOs say they are confident or very confident that their employees trust their leadership. But only 46% of employees agree, according to The BCG CEO Insomnia Index published by my colleagues this month. To understand why nearly half of employees don’t trust the top boss, we must look at how leaders show up, and the downstream effects on employees’ joy and productivity.

Every single day, each person chooses how much of their energy, creativity, and discretionary effort to bring to work. They are not obligated to give their best. They are customers making a purchase decision to exert energy or not. And that product is day-to-day work: the rhythms and routines of completing tasks, the culture, the administrative processes, the interactions with managers, and how the CEO and senior leaders engage with employees. It’s all parts of the product employees choose to consume or not. And like any product, it must be good enough that people choose it again tomorrow.

When you analyze employees’ needs with the sophistication of customer analytics you find that the most important features of that product are emotional, not functional. Pay, benefits, and flexibility matter, but they are table stakes. What drives genuine enjoyment, loyalty, and performance are feeling that your work matters and feeling respected, supported, and connected to the people around you.

This is extraordinarily good news for leaders, because emotional features cost almost nothing to deliver. They just require leaders who are willing to change their day-to-day behaviors.

An example of an organization that treats the employee as customer and work as product is Dropbox, which after Covid redesigned work as a product that must delight their employees .

As part of the company’s “Virtual First” approach, Dropbox used deep customer discovery and design thinking to come up with its very successful remote first work model. The company played with flexible workdays instead of rigid schedules, clearer windows for collaboration, simpler rules for meetings, better ways to share and document work, and more intentional reasons for coming together in person. And importantly, it didn’t roll these strategies out as finished answers. It tried them out with employees, watched how they actually worked, adjusted what wasn’t working, and tried again.

The payoff was real. According to Dropbox’s internal data, the percentage of employees who said they felt “successful at work” jumped from 48 percent to 92 percent after Virtual First was implemented. Offer acceptance rates rose, attrition dropped, and the majority of candidates now cite Virtual First as a reason they want to join Dropbox.

Another example is a client I worked with at Boston Consulting Group that was seeking to improve operational productivity without any big expense. When our team analyzed the distribution of performance of their frontline managers, we saw that some teams performed much better than others. When we dug in deeply, we saw it came down to the capabilities of the frontline leader. Specifically, how they inspired, motivated, and coached their teams. In other words, how they met the emotional needs of their employees.