Corporate leaders are failing to collaborate and it’s leading to a major trust crisis

Companies have undergone significant changes in the last few years, from the pandemic and the rise of remote work to the introduction of AI in the workforce. As business leaders scramble to keep up, many neglect to involve a key stakeholder group in their decision making: employees.

Only 30% of C-suite leaders involve workers in cocreating organizational strategy, according to Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends report, based on a survey of 14,000 business and HR leaders released this morning. And that’s a problem because executives’ failure to collaborate with employees forces staffers to lose trust in their company. 

Several factors can impact employee trust, according to Simona Spelman, U.S. human capital national leader and principal at Deloitte Consulting, including outsourcing, mergers, downsizing, shifting business models, and digital transformations. When leaders implement strategic changes that impact employees without consulting them, she says, workers may feel they’re receiving orders from the ivory tower that doesn’t understand their day-to-day life. That’s one of the reasons only 16% of workers report high trust in their employer.

To build trust, she says, leaders are responsible for evolving leadership models to include workers in decision making, such as helping to create new policies and metrics for employee performance evaluations. To source input, executives can invite employees to participate in different ways to offer ideas, including virtual focus groups, interactive whiteboards, extended hackathons, or idea jams.

The HR function and CHROs also have a unique role and impact in building trust and transparency, as they often are responsible for communicating decisions to the company’s workforce. But Spelman warns that for companies to leverage their HR leaders in such a way, they also have to let CHROs become key stakeholders for decisions surrounding the entire company, and not just focus on their function.

“Organizations that manage to make this change may find that their HR leaders are crucial allies and agents of change in building trust with workers,” says Spelman.

Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion

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