Employee data trust: Why concern isn’t the enemy

Oct 12

Only 19% of employees say anyone at work has ever talked to them about the data their employer collects. Telling them will make some people more worried. Tell them anyway.

Gallup's latest US workforce study asked 22,573 employees in May 2026 whether they trust leaders to use workplace data responsibly. Only 20% trust them a great deal. Another 43% trust them somewhat, and 37% not much or not at all. Among engaged employees, 40% trust leaders a great deal. Among the actively disengaged, it's 4%.

Jenni and I spent the first big stretch of Episode 78 on this, and what stuck with me is how little anyone is told. Gallup splits the data into two types: activity data (hours worked, badge swipes, emails sent) and content data (what's in your emails, meetings and browsing). 59% of employees think their employer collects the first, 46% think it collects the second, and 15 to 21% simply don't know. Managers and leaders are barely ahead of everyone else, and nearly a quarter of managers aren't sure what data they could access.

Then came the finding Jenni framed as a dilemma. Employees who'd had a conversation about data use were more likely to trust leaders a great deal (26% versus 18%). They were also 8 points more likely to be concerned. So should internal comms spell everything out, or wait until someone asks?

I don't see a dilemma. To me, concern means people are paying attention. If the same conversation also raises trust, why would you skip it? I don't think most companies are lying to employees about data. They just aren't being forthright. And employees should be asking more than what their data is used for today. Could it be used for something else later? Is it an asset the company could sell? Trust good, concern not bad.

Jenni wondered whether anyone inside an organization knows the full picture, and I'd bet nobody does. Facilities holds some data, legal holds some, HR holds some, comms holds some, and sometimes health data turns up too. No one person sees all of it. Maybe that's a role waiting to be invented, an enterprise data officer who knows everything being captured. (If it shows up on a job board, Frequency is taking credit.) Until then, you can't explain what you collect when nobody can tell you what you collect. That's the first conversation I'd have with your IT and HR partners.

And that 20% isn't special to data. Employees don't trust leaders on much of anything right now, so this is the same trust gap turning up somewhere new. A plain conversation about data is one of the easier places to start closing it.

Also in this episode:

O.C. Tanner's 2027 Global Culture Report, built on 25,832 workers across 23 countries, argues that culture is an amplifier for whatever is already there, burnout or trust. It says compassion should be written into policy so care doesn't depend on landing a kind manager. My answer to Jenni's question: hire the right managers, because if you have to make compassion a policy, you've hired the wrong ones. The question we both took away is what your culture is amplifying right now. And when the same issues keep bubbling up, does anyone care enough to fix them? As Jenni put it, when it's everyone's responsibility, it's no one's.
Workvivo by Zoom billed its Employee Listening Summit as a summit. Jenni's ruling: at an hour and 15 minutes, it was a webinar. The useful part was Zoom's own case study from Chief People Officer Todd Reeves. Zoom swapped vague survey questions for specific ones about goals, feedback and career conversations, asked every manager to commit to one action with 30/60/90-day reminders, and learned from 17,000 comments that people mostly didn't understand why decisions were made. I'm fine with manager scorecards if they show what successful managers do instead of ranking people. I also brought back a line from my friend Julia Markish: only ask what you can act upon.
The Times reports British workers adding ADHD and neurodiversity notes to their email signatures to explain bluntness, typos or slow replies. A viral Mumsnet thread called it ridiculous. I'm all for it, and as the king of typos I'd need a long one. Jenni pushed on the bluntness piece: a note at the bottom of an email can't do the relationship work of asking about someone's weekend first. I learned that the hard way when a UK contact ignored two of my emails because she thought I was rude.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Frequency, with timestamps, links to every story and the full transcript.