Employee engagement is significantly higher when workers trust their leaders, ADP chief executive Maria Black has said, with employees who trust their chief executive and senior leadership 41% more likely to be engaged.
Speaking at the Most Powerful Women Summit in California, Black said trust in colleagues had an even stronger association with engagement. Employees who trust the people they work with are 60% more likely to be engaged, according to ADP data.
“Trust is a direct corollary to engagement,” Black said. “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.”
Her comments put responsibility for workplace engagement on management and senior executives, rather than treating it solely as an attitude employees bring to their jobs.
ADP’s research arm has previously found that every 1% fall in full engagement is associated with a 45% increase in the likelihood of voluntary attrition. Black said only 30% of employees were overly engaged at work.
She said the current climate had made trust more difficult to establish, citing echo chambers, overwhelming volumes of information and the challenge of distinguishing genuine material from content generated by artificial intelligence.
Black said she sought to remain connected to employees and business leaders through visits and listening sessions. She had recently spoken with 1,000 company leaders in Las Vegas and met employees in Florida, where she discussed workplace issues over ice cream.
“The only way to keep current is to be on the ground and be trusted,” she said.
Black also said companies had a responsibility to upskill and reskill their workforces as artificial intelligence changed the nature of work. ADP, which provides payroll and human capital services to more than one million clients across 140 countries, believes the technology’s impact will depend partly on how workers choose to use it.
“We know that, generally speaking, workers in today’s workplace don’t feel as though their employer has prepared them properly,” Black said.
She joined ADP as a sales associate in 1996 and became its president and chief executive in 2023. Black said artificial intelligence could help employees broaden their expertise, take on new responsibilities and increase their income, but warned that employers would need to support them through the transition.
“But we have to shepherd them there,” she said. “I think that’s the other part that sometimes we don’t spend enough time on.”
