Employees are the stakeholder group closest to management, and precisely for that reason the group whose views are least examined. There is a performance review, an employee satisfaction survey, a team meeting. There is rarely a conversation that specifically addresses the question of whether employees believe the organisation does what it says it will do.
That distinction is not trivial. Satisfaction with workload, salary or atmosphere says something different from trust in the commitments made externally and internally. An employee can be satisfied with their work and yet be sceptical about the sustainability claim in the annual report, or about the announcement that reorganisations will be handled differently this time. That scepticism rarely surfaces in a standard survey, because it is not asked about.
The core question is not whether employees are proud of the organisation. The core question is whether they think commitments made are kept, and on the basis of what experience they think that. That calls for concrete examples, not a number on a scale. When did the organisation last announce something, and what came of it? What difference do employees see between what is said at a kick-off and what has actually changed a year later?
These questions lie close to the conversation that is also held externally. The difference is that employees see the execution up close. They know whether an internal policy that has been established on paper is actually applied in daily practice, and they often see that sooner than an external party such as a municipality or province or a regulator can.
The pitfall in employee surveys is anonymity that does not work. Employees often know who leads which team and therefore do not dare to answer freely, even if no name is attached to the question. A structured survey takes this into account by asking questions at a level where individual recognition is not possible, and by allowing room for explanation instead of only asking for a score.
Another pitfall is timing. A survey conducted shortly after a reorganisation or a difficult quarter measures something different from a survey conducted at a neutral moment. It is not possible to avoid this entirely, but it is something that must be taken into account when interpreting the outcomes.
The outcome of an employee survey often differs from the image management has of itself, and that is precisely the point the Trust Baseline focuses on. The internal survey among managers or directors produces a picture of what the organisation believes it has kept. The survey among employees produces a different picture. The difference between the two is not an error to be corrected, it is the first finding.
That difference often arises at a specific point: small commitments that are not kept. An announced meeting that does not take place, a promised follow-up that fails to materialise, a new process that exists on paper but is not followed in practice. This kind of thing is often seen as minor at management level, while for employees it is a signal about the reliability of all other commitments. A major investment that does not go ahead is often still explained and understood. A small detail that is structurally forgotten erodes trust faster.
This is the reason a commitment tracker exists alongside the Trust Baseline: a place where commitments to employees are recorded and tracked, so that there is something to fall back on when the question arises whether something has been kept. Without that record, it remains an impression, and impressions are difficult to refute or confirm.
We can bring into view the difference between what management believes it keeps and what is said internally about keeping commitments. We cannot establish what an individual employee actually thinks, before they say so themselves. That applies to employees just as much as to customers, suppliers or advocacy groups. The survey produces a picture, not a guarantee that this picture is complete or definitive.
The Trust Baseline is under construction. Those who want to work with this can sign up for the waiting list; there is not yet an instrument that can be deployed directly.
A structured conversation with employees often reveals something else: how much of the daily work consists of tasks carried out because the process demands it, not because anyone has looked at it again. Those who want to explore this question further can have the work scan from FTE TO AI calculate, per task, which part of the work can be taken over by AI.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.