These days, it’s hard to read the news without encountering a story about quiet quitting — the notion that swaths of employees have become so disengaged that they’re doing the minimum required to keep their jobs. To address this issue, many organizations are investing in better office spaces, hybrid work support, enhanced employee wellness, and more targeted collection of employee feedback. Other companies in an array of industries are taking a more punitive approach, such as withholding benefits or strong-arming underperformers into taking a buyout.

We contend that leaders need to take a fundamentally different tack, starting by asking the question, “How much do my employees trust me?”

Our research shows that trust is a critical driver of engagement. Trusting employees are 260% more motivated to work, have 41% lower rates of absenteeism, and are 50% less likely to look for another job. But consider this: We also found that roughly 1 in 4 workers don’t trust their employer. At the same time, most employers overestimate their workforce’s trust level by almost 40%. With this misalignment in trust, it’s no wonder that worker engagement is suffering.

Lack of trust is a huge and destructive problem with no easy fix. But, as we’ll show, systematic trust-building is a critical part of the solution. What has held many leaders back is that they have lacked a simple, robust way to measure, predict, and manage trust and to link specific actions they take to changes in trust levels. Without reliable methods of measurement, managers have struggled to know whether actions intended to enhance trust are actually working.

We spent two years developing and testing a novel platform called the HX TrustID that companies can use for free to gauge and tease apart the elements of employee trust and devise strategies for improving it. We are focused on trust-building because this an effective path to elevating human experience — the “HX” in Trust ID. (While our platform can be broadly applied to increase customers’ and other stakeholders’ trust too, here we focus only on its employee applications.) The platform builds on a simple, four-question survey that we validated by collecting 350,000 scores across more than 10 industries.

What makes the tool unique is that rather than providing a blunt overall measure of employee trust from low to high, it distinguishes between four different aspects of trust: humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability. By measuring their performance on each of these factors, leaders get a broad view not only of how well trusted they are but why they are trusted — or not — and what they need to do to increase trust levels.

In its basic form, the survey asks employees to indicate on a 7-point scale how much they agree or disagree with the following statements, each of which gauges leaders’ performance on one of the four factors.

• Humanity: My employer demonstrates empathy and kindness toward me.
• Transparency: My employer uses straightforward and plain language to share information, motives, and decisions that matter to me.
• Capability: My employer creates a good work experience for me and provides the resources I need to do my job well.
• Reliability: My employer consistently and dependably delivers on the commitments it makes to me.

In our research, few organizations got high scores from their employees on all four factors. While scores across the factors tend to be close for a given organization, there is usually some spread among them, with somewhat higher ratings on humanity, for instance, but lower ratings on transparency. The mix of scores points to areas where leadership should focus its trust-building efforts. (You can find guidance on how to conduct and score the survey and interpret the results in the HX TrustID Workforce Survey.)