Employees are in a trust recession. Your comms might be making it worse.

Shel Holtz put the numbers to it in "The Trust Recession: Why Internal Communication Is Failing the Credibility Test." Only 21 percent of U.S. employees strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership, according to Gallup. And 86 percent of executives believe employees trust them highly, while only 60 percent of employees actually do. That's a 26-point gap nobody's talking about in the all-hands.

Shel applied the Kano Model to show why. Not all communications affect the employee experience the same way. Some are table stakes — skip them and you've got a crisis, but covering them doesn't build trust. Some genuinely increase trust the more you deliver them. Some prove the organization actually sees people as central. And some are just noise that looked like communication on paper.

Use this tool to audit your comms through that lens. You'll likely find you're over-investing in the wrong places and under-delivering in the ones that matter.

I built this. You can build something, too.

This started with Shel Holtz's article. It got me thinking: if the Kano Model maps this well to the trust problem in IC, what would it look like as an actual audit tool?

I made it with Claude Code. I'm not a developer. I got stuck, figured things out, changed my mind about what it should do, and eventually had something worth sharing.

If there's a framework you keep reaching for in your practice, there's probably a tool waiting to be built around it. Start there.

About the Kano Model

Noriaki Kano developed this framework in 1984 while teaching at the Tokyo University of Science. It was built for product development — a way to help teams understand that not all features affect customer satisfaction equally. Some features are expected and invisible until they're missing. Some create a linear relationship where more is better. And some genuinely surprise and delight in ways customers didn't know to ask for.

Forty years later, it maps to internal communications with uncomfortable accuracy.