Nearly 90% of CEOs say they are confident or very confident that their employees trust their leadership. But only 46% of employees agree, according to The BCG CEO Insomnia Index published by my colleagues this month. To understand why nearly half of employees don’t trust the top boss, we must look at how leaders show up, and the downstream effects on employees’ joy and productivity.
Every single day, each person chooses how much of their energy, creativity, and discretionary effort to bring to work. They are not obligated to give their best. They are customers making a purchase decision to exert energy or not. And that product is day-to-day work: the rhythms and routines of completing tasks, the culture, the administrative processes, the interactions with managers, and how the CEO and senior leaders engage with employees. It’s all parts of the product employees choose to consume or not. And like any product, it must be good enough that people choose it again tomorrow.
When you analyze employees’ needs with the sophistication of customer analytics you find that the most important features of that product are emotional, not functional. Pay, benefits, and flexibility matter, but they are table stakes. What drives genuine enjoyment, loyalty, and performance are feeling that your work matters and feeling respected, supported, and connected to the people around you.
This is extraordinarily good news for leaders, because emotional features cost almost nothing to deliver. They just require leaders who are willing to change their day-to-day behaviors.
An example of an organization that treats the employee as customer and work as product is Dropbox, which after Covid redesigned work as a product that must delight their employees.
As part of the company’s “Virtual First” approach, Dropbox used deep customer discovery and design thinking to come up with its very successful remote first work model. The company played with flexible workdays instead of rigid schedules, clearer windows for collaboration, simpler rules for meetings, better ways to share and document work, and more intentional reasons for coming together in person. And importantly, it didn’t roll these strategies out as finished answers. It tried them out with employees, watched how they actually worked, adjusted what wasn’t working, and tried again.
The payoff was real. According to Dropbox’s internal data, the percentage of employees who said they felt “successful at work” jumped from 48 percent to 92 percent after Virtual First was implemented. Offer acceptance rates rose, attrition dropped, and the majority of candidates now cite Virtual First as a reason they want to join Dropbox.
Another example is a client I worked with at Boston Consulting Group that was seeking to improve operational productivity without any big expense. When our team analyzed the distribution of performance of their frontline managers, we saw that some teams performed much better than others. When we dug in deeply, we saw it came down to the capabilities of the frontline leader. Specifically, how they inspired, motivated, and coached their teams. In other words, how they met the emotional needs of their employees.
To replicate that performance across all teams, we worked with the small group of best-in-class frontline leaders to change to daily work routines. Daily shift handover meetings were redesigned to make it a standard for the leaders to do 3 things: (1) explain the why—don’t just tell your teams what to do, make sure to explain the rationale behind all directions; (2) celebrate someone—reflect on the shift that just ended and point out something someone did during the shift that you thought was great; and (3) promote collaboration—ask people to team together and help each other rather than come to the leader with every question.
This not only lightened the burden and eased the bottleneck on the leader’s time, but it also created a valuable sense of community among the team. By redesigning the work product—an important element of the daily routines—work became more enjoyable for the employees. And the payoff was so significant the CEO referred to it specifically as a driver of financial performance in their Annual Report.
5 Little Things That Matter
The gap between a “transaction trap” workplace and organizations where work works almost always comes down to the little things that leaders do. Small shifts in daily behavior have a multiplicative impact on culture and employee motivation and, as a result, on value creation.
While these five practices are simple, there is strong behavioral science evidence behind every one of them.
- Celebrate Your People
If you see something great happen at work, let the person doing it know you think it is great. It could be a hard decision they made, a tough problem they solved, a compelling presentation they gave, great coaching of another colleague, whatever it is, tell them immediately how impressed you are and why.
Don’t assume they know they are doing great things. Don’t wait until their annual review to tell them. Just pause and tell them directly, in person if you are together, but a quick text, email, slack message, or phone call works, too. The behavioral science here is robust: specific, timely recognition activates intrinsic motivation in ways that performance reviews and even bonuses cannot replicate. The cost is zero. The impact is disproportionate.
- Go, See, and Help
Get out from behind your desk, your conference room, and your corporate headquarters and go to where the actual work is happening. When you get there, look for ways to help. Even small acts of help, like grabbing lunch for a busy team, going to the backroom to check inventory while your employee is helping a customer, or covering some calls in a busy customer service center, make a big difference.
This is an old idea of servant leadership, but it lands differently when you understand why it works: proximity signals that leaders value what employees do, and that signal changes how employees feel about their work more than almost any other intervention. And helping shows employees that you are in it with them and that you value the work they are doing.
- Be Interested
Ask people about themselves—their goals, their lives outside work, what they care about, what they are working toward. If someone is too reserved to open up, share something about yourself first to create psychological safety before you ask them to disclose. Research consistently shows that feeling known as a person — not just as a role — is one of the strongest predictors of both wellbeing and performance at work.
- Cocreate Everything
Do not design, launch, or change anything that affects your people without involving the people it will affect from the beginning—not after decisions are made. To help every team deliver for their customers, Amazon famously kept an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer. To deliver for employees, fill that chair with a real employee, rotating regularly, with a mandate to gather input from their peers before and after every session. Behavioral science research shows that when change is imposed from above, employees push back productivity drops, and resentment rises. But when employees are involved, they support the change. Cocreation has a double bonus: the work product is better because it is informed by the people closest to reality, and change management becomes largely unnecessary because the people who shaped the change already own it.
- Do It First
Whatever you are asking your organization to do — embrace AI, spend more time with customers, communicate more openly, take smarter risks — you should do it first and talk about it openly. Not as a performance, but as a demonstration that you are not exempt from the changes you are asking others to make. If you won’t do it, don’t ask them to. Again, the science supports this showing clearly that most change efforts fail because leaders do not model the change themselves.
What works is starting small, being consistent, and building habits slowly. A single specific piece of recognition delivered today. One conversation where you ask a genuine question about someone’s life outside work. One meeting where you invite an employee into the room.
Start by starting. The leaders who do this build better teams, and the companies where all leaders do this create organizations where people genuinely want to be — and that turns out to be one of the most durable competitive advantages available to any business today.
Deborah Lovich is a managing director and senior partner in the Boston office of Boston Consulting Group. She previously served as a Future of Work fellow of the BCG Institute and is the author of Make Work Work: The Five Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, November 2026).
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