Employees are closer to execution than anyone else. They hear what a customer says at the counter, see what a supplier delivers, notice when a commitment made to a regulator is not being met in practice. That information is already present in the organization before any external party forms an opinion about it. The question is not whether employees know something. The question is whether anyone has asked them, and whether the answer ends up somewhere.
The Trust Baseline asks two things at once. Internally: what does management think employees believe about the credibility of the organization on a number of themes. Externally, in this case among employees themselves: what do they actually think. The difference between those two pictures is the first outcome. Not the judgment of employees on its own, but the distance between what management assumes and what is actually alive internally.
That distance is often greater on topics that management regards as self-evident. A reorganization communicated upward as handled with care may have been experienced on the floor as something that simply happened to people. A sustainability ambition promoted externally may be seen internally as something the shop floor had no part in. This is not a matter of who is right or wrong. It is a difference in perception, and that difference can be made measurable.
This front door makes no claim about what employees think. We measure the difference between management's assumption and what employees say when asked. What they actually think, we only know the moment they say it themselves, in their own words, at their own moment.
That means the questions you put to employees must be formulated in such a way that there is room for an answer you did not expect. Questions about satisfaction produce satisfaction scores. Questions about recognition, about the feeling of being heard regarding earlier commitments, about what they themselves would ask if the roles were reversed, produce something different. Exactly what you end up with depends on the sector, the organization's prior history, and the topic being surveyed.
Employees rarely remember the large investment that did not go ahead. They remember the small commitment that was not honored: the team meeting that was promised after a reorganization and never took place, the follow-up that was promised and never came, the check-in that was announced and then disappeared from the agenda. Trust is not built internally through grand gestures. It is eroded by small things that were said and not done.
That is the reason a commitment tracker exists alongside the survey. Commitments made to employees, however small, are recorded at the moment they are made. Not to tick them off for form's sake, but to make visible which commitments are still open and which have been honored. An organization that keeps track of this naturally sees where the pressure is building up.
The relationship between management and employees changes along with the organization: a merger, a reorganization, a change in leadership shift what is alive within it. A one-time measurement captures a moment, not a movement. The signal rhythm repeats the survey at intervals attuned to the organization, so that it becomes visible whether the gap between assumption and reality is growing or shrinking, rather than only how things looked on a single day.
Employees are rarely the only group whose view of the organization differs from what management assumes. The same gap can exist in the question of what you want to know from customers, in the way regulators assess compliance with earlier commitments, or in what advocacy groups actually think of your societal positioning. The pattern is always the same: whoever asks discovers a difference that was already there before it was measured.
The Trust Baseline, the commitment tracker, and the signal rhythm for employees are currently being developed. There is nothing yet that you can put to use today. Anyone with an interest in this can sign up for the waiting list and will be informed as soon as the instrument becomes available.
The questions on this page concern what employees think and say. Another question, directly connected to it, is what employees actually do: what portion of their tasks consists of work that is repeatable, and what portion requires a judgment that cannot be automated. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates, per task, what portion of the work can be taken over by AI, based on the tasks as they are currently carried out. Where the Trust Baseline exposes the difference in perception, the work scan exposes the difference in task composition. Both start with the same question: what do you actually know, and what are you merely assuming.
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.