Dive Brief:
- While 79% of employees say they like their company’s leaders and nearly three quarters say they trust them, more than half said “leadership lives in a different world than they do,” according to the results of a recent survey from recruiting company Howdy.
- Sixty percent of survey respondents said leaders don’t work as hard as they do, and 42% said leadership was held to a lower behavioral standard. In addition, 24% said leadership “doesn't even follow its own policies around PTO, working in the office, or basic professionalism.”
- Moreover, 31% of employees said they believe they could run their companies better than current leadership, and 28% say organizational leaders don’t value employees at all, per the report.
Dive Insight:
The July survey compiled responses of more than 1,000 full-time U.S. workers and found that trust is being challenged in part as a response to many unpopular decisions rolled out over the past few years, including return-to-office mandates, layoffs and artificial intelligence implementations.
In the last 12 months, 22% of workers reported having AI usage mandated by their employers, while another 22% said their company shifted to more AI product offerings and 10% said their company became “an AI company outright.” Furthermore, 13% of employees said they were either nearshored or offshored, and 10% received RTO mandates. One in four employees said their leadership completely changed.
“The cumulative effect of all these major changes is a workforce that feels out of the loop,” the report said, adding that 72% of workers said “leadership made at least one decision in the past year that made no sense to them,” with 16% saying this happened five times or more. Another 68% said they didn’t feel like they had any say at all in how their company was managed.
When AI mandates and RTO policies arrive at the same time, it can feel to many employees like leadership is trying to implement cost-cutting measures, according to the report.
Layoffs have only exacerbated employee mistrust. The report found that 27% of respondents went through layoffs at their company over the last year. Among those, 43% said “the cuts were not made to ensure the company's survival,” and 80% said that “they would rather see leadership take a pay cut” than lay off workers.
“The message is clear: employees will accept hard decisions made out of genuine necessity, but not ones they see as leaders protecting themselves first,” the report said.
A recent study from Hogan Assessments found that there’s a substantial divide between the most common executive behaviors and the qualities employees say are foundational to effective leadership. The gap between what companies value and what employees want from leadership may mean organizations are promoting the wrong people to supervisory positions, the study found.
Meanwhile, leaders themselves feel unsupported, according to a March report from the American Management Association. Out of more than 1,200 professionals surveyed globally, 71% said they had to do work outside the requirements of their formal jobs, while less than half of leaders (44%) said they believed they were completely ready to handle future expectations.
