Nobody trusts HR. It’s up to companies to fix it

Earlier this year, I wrote in Fast Company that 2026 could be the year companies finally begin taking employee well-being seriously. I also challenged HR leaders to seize the moment and help drive the requisite cultural change within their organizations.

Many people subsequently reached out to me to argue that well-being cannot be just an HR initiative and that, to truly succeed, it requires the full buy-in and ownership of leaders at every level, including the C-suite. I found myself instantly agreeing with them.

Back in January, my goal was to inspire HR leaders to make employee well-being a foundational value in their companies and to begin laying out how it could become institutionalized. But the more I thought about what that would require, the clearer it became that HR cannot embed well-being into how a company operates on its own. Responsibility must extend far beyond HR.

The source of the problem

For decades, companies have largely handed responsibility for the employee experience to Human Resources. It was HR that administered the engagement surveys, analyzed the results, and reported the findings. But the main drivers of employee engagement—workloads, caring and supportive leadership, flexibility, and job security—have always sat in the business itself, not HR. That’s why engagement scores rarely moved. Leaders treated the data as HR’s problem to fix, not their own. We’re at risk of making the same mistake with well-being.

Underneath that mismatch sits an untenable dual mandate: HR is expected to advocate for employees while simultaneously carrying out layoffs and job eliminations—decisions made by senior leadership, not HR. While the goal is for employees to trust HR to represent their interests, that trust erodes when those interests inevitably collide with business decisions.

Data confirms the disconnect. Leapsome’s 2026 Workforce Trends Report found that 81% of HR leaders believe they successfully advocate for employees in business decisions, while only half (54%) of individual contributors fully trust HR to do so. Similarly, while 72% of HR leaders believe they can challenge top-down mandates, only 45% of individual contributors agree.

Consequently, employee well-being needs to be managed the same way companies manage all other important business objectives. Someone at the top has to own it, managers must be accountable for it, employees need a continuous way to provide feedback—and there must be true consequences when line managers repeatedly fail to respond. Without those elements working together, well-being will remain something companies only talk about rather than something they systematically manage.

Someone At The Top Has To Own It

If we’ve learned anything from our decades of largely failed efforts to elevate employee engagement, it’s that the first step to making a serious and sustained commitment to employee well-being is putting someone at the top in charge. That person could be the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO)—and in many companies, that may make the most sense. But if an organization creates a separate Chief Well-Being Officer, the position must be a genuine C-suite role with direct access to, and support from, the CEO and executive team. The title matters less than the authority behind it. If senior leaders don’t regard this person as a peer who can question decisions, escalate concerns, and influence what happens next, the position will have no teeth and zero impact.

In 2022, Ernst & Young was one of the first companies to create the position of Chief Well-Being Officer. As a guest on my podcast recently, Frank Giampietro explained that in that position, his role is to systematically address the physical, emotional, financial, and social well-being of the firm’s people—extending well beyond programs and resources to culture and the broader work environment. Not every organization needs another C-suite title, but every organization needs someone at the highest level who has both the responsibility and authority for employee well-being. Importantly, that leader must be involved before consequential decisions are made, not brought in afterward to explain them.

Employees Need To Be Heard Continuously

One of the great failures of employee engagement surveys has been that they were conducted only once or twice a year, and the data was often stale by the time it was digested and distributed to managers. Add in the fact that survey feedback was infrequently addressed, if ever, and workers naturally grew to distrust that their voices were ever being heard.

In the future, companies should dispense with broad engagement surveys and replace them with shorter, more frequent pulse surveys that give leaders an immediate picture of how employees are experiencing work. Technology now makes it seamless to pose one or two focused questions and have responses almost instantly collated and summarized.

A concise pulse survey tells a manager (and their manager) what is happening on their team right now—whether people feel valued, whether workday start and end boundaries are being honored, and whether employees feel personally supported. Asking targeted questions—such as whether people feel safe at work, whether they have autonomy and agency, if they trust the organization, or if they are hopeful about its future—gives leaders the immediate ability to see pain points before they metastasize.

Listening like this, of course, can only be useful if the organization is prepared to respond; otherwise, the new survey becomes another useless and annoying ritual that asks employees for candor without giving them any reason to believe it will make a meaningful difference.

Managers Have To Be Accountable For What They Hear

Every manager should be expected to review feedback from their team, share what was learned, and discuss what can reasonably be changed. That must happen whether the feedback is positive or not, and when concerns cannot be addressed as employees would prefer. The manager’s boss—not HR—must make sure this happens. Making HR the police force would be a huge mistake as the person who supervises a manager is ultimately responsible for that manager’s performance and leadership.

As research shows, employee well-being is disproportionately influenced by workplace managers, and pulse surveys can identify those leaders whose teams repeatedly report they don’t feel valued, appreciated, trusted, or supported. In these cases, HR can help interpret the feedback and provide coaching, but the manager’s own boss should be asking why the same concerns continue to surface. True to a company’s commitment to well-being, managers who show little willingness or ability to improve must ultimately be held accountable and weeded out.

HR Should Own the System, Not the Outcome

None of this makes HR less important. It is far more likely to make HR a more viable business partner because of its newly gained alignment with workplace managers. HR’s future role will be to implement and oversee the listening system, analyze patterns across teams, help managers interpret and respond to feedback, and identify problems individual managers cannot solve themselves. If numerous teams are reporting burnout, deteriorating relationships with managers, or distrust, HR can bring those trends into the executive conversation and ensure they are heard and acted upon, not overlooked.

Ultimately, HR should own the system that allows the organization to understand employee well-being; leadership should own the outcome.

Put Well-Being In The Room Before Decisions Are Made

A critical pivot organizations now must make is to ensure that employee well-being is considered while major business decisions are being made—not after. When a company is contemplating layoffs, a major restructuring, a return-to-office mandate, or the deployment of AI that will fundamentally alter people’s jobs, either the CHRO or Chief Well-Being Officer should be in the room asking what those decisions will mean for the people who have to live with them.

That doesn’t mean well-being will always override financial or operational realities; businesses still must make difficult, painful decisions. But how those decisions are executed is a consideration routinely ignored today, as the drive for efficiency blinds leaders to both the short- and long-term implications of their choices.

In recent years, research has consistently shown that caring for people and their well-being isn’t the drag on leadership performance we once imagined—it’s a major catalyst for it. So, when companies give C-suite authority to well-being, equip managers to listen continuously, and hold them accountable for the culture they create, HR can stop playing referee. Leadership starts in the heart, but it lives in how we manage human beings every single day. If we want employees to give us their best, we must fully commit to giving them ours.

Source link