If companies want more engaged workers, ADP CEO Maria Black says CEOs and senior leaders should start by asking themselves if employees trust them.
Speaking with Fortune executive editorial director Diane Brady at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in California this week, Black said trust and engagement gang together. Employees who trust the people around then at work with are 60% more likely to be dialed in, she told Brady,
“Trust is a direct corollary to engagement,” said Black. “So if we want to drive engagement, productivity, and a vibrant world of work that, candidly, I want to be in and I want my children to grow up working, we have to focus there.”
ADP’s finding turns some current thinking about employees being lackadaisical or blasé about work squarely on its head. Engagement is often seen as a metric about sentiment that can be measured and tracked, but is treated as something employees bring—or fail to bring—to their jobs. ADP’s data implies it depends pretty heavily on whether workers actually believe and trust in the people leading them, placing a lot of responsibility for engagement squarely on management and C-suites.
The company’s research arm previously found that for every 1% drop in full engagement, the likelihood of voluntary attrition increases by 45%. Black said only 30% of employees are overly engaged at work. Meanwhile, if employees trust CEOs and senior leadership, they’re 41% more likely to be engaged and 60% more likely if they trust the people around them that they work with.
The current moment is jam-packed with reasons not to trust, explained Black. Echo chambers, firehoses of information, discerning what’s real and what’s AI-generated, all accumulate to chip away at trust. At work, driving more focus and engagement comes down to whether people trust those around them and their leaders all the way up to the top. As a leader herself, Black said she gets boots on the ground and holds listening posts, noting that she arrived in California on the heels of a trip to Las Vegas where she spoke with 1,000 company leaders, and a Florida trip to chat with employees over the “universal love language of ice cream.”
“The only way to keep current is to be on the ground and be trusted,” said Black.
The other issue of the moment for business leaders is the obligation facing companies to upskill and reskill, she continued. ADP oversees payroll and human capital for more than 1 million clients across 140 countries and Black said the new AI era will only play out with human agency in terms of how people actually choose—or don’t choose—to engage with AI tools.
“We know that, generally speaking, workers in today’s workplace don’t feel as though their employer has prepared them properly,” said Black.
She joined ADP in 1996, starting as a sales associate and eventually rising to become president and CEO in 2023. She is the seventh CEO in the company’s history and said she has a ground level view from growing up in that business. As AI continues its expansion in new facets of work and life, Black said it can serve people well in terms of expanding their expertise beyond the current domain and, in turn, expanding their ability to increase their income as they take on new tasks and responsibilities.
“But we have to shepherd them there,” warned Black. “I think that’s the other part that sometimes we don’t spend enough time on.”
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