Trust as a KPI: The Pulse Survey Playbook

Catherine Mattice is the founder and CEO of Civility Partners, an organizational development firm that helps companies build respectful workplace cultures and turn around toxic ones.

In this episode of CultureClub X, she makes the case for treating trust as a strategic KPI: something you define, measure, and manage like any other business goal. You will learn how trust actually breaks down inside high-performing teams, why your engagement score is not the same as your culture, how to measure trust through behavior, and how pulse surveys turn culture into a genuine performance engine.

The business case is hard to argue with. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2026 report found that only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged in 2025, and that low engagement costs the world economy roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity.

The flip side is equally clear: in Paul Zak’s research for Harvard Business Review (2017), people at high-trust companies reported 50% higher productivity, 76% more engagement, 74% less stress, and 40% less burnout than people at low-trust companies. Trust is not a soft topic.

It is a performance variable.

How trust actually breaks down in high-performing teams

The most common way trust erodes is not a scandal or a single betrayal. It is the accumulation of small, subtle behaviors that no policy covers. Catherine points to microaggressions, gossip, incivility, and sarcasm: the kind of conduct that feels minor in isolation but compounds into what she calls death by a thousand cuts.

These behaviors slip past because they are not unlawful and not against the rules, so managers let them go rather than micromanage adult colleagues. Over time they grow more frequent and more aggressive, and the trust between people quietly drains away.

Understanding how microaggressions at work operate is the first step to addressing them before they harden into a toxic work environment.

Catherine knows this pattern from the inside. Early in her career she worked in HR for a company with one deeply toxic person, and she watched the complaints and turnover pile up. When her own concerns went unheard, her loyalty faded and her performance dropped. She made a conscious choice to disengage, a behavior we would now call quiet quitting, long before that phrase existed.

That is exactly how the spiral works: when people feel their employer does not care, they stop caring back, and their manager senses the withdrawal, which erodes trust further in both directions.

The same dynamic shows up today in quiet quitting examples and in the broader rise of disengaged employees.

The lesson is that small, tolerated behaviors are early warning signs, not background noise.

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Why your engagement score is not the same as your culture

Most organizations already run an engagement survey, and Catherine is clear that this is a good thing. But she draws a distinction that reframes the entire measurement conversation: engagement is an outcome of culture, not culture itself. A strong score is an indicator that your culture is probably healthy, yet it does not tell you what is actually happening underneath.

Treating the engagement number as the final word is how leaders miss the relationships, the psychological safety, and the day-to-day friction that the score quietly averages out.

Her recommendation is to widen the lens. Keep measuring engagement, but also measure relationships, psychological safety at work, and efficiency, asking blunt questions like whether people get what they need in a timely way.

Pair the numbers with a listening tour: walk around, ask people what the culture is really like in their own words, and notice where reality diverges from the dashboard. The goal is to understand the culture that produces the score, not to mistake the score for the culture.

That distinction is what turns a survey into a real read on employee sentiment.

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Culture comes from daily interactions, not the top

There is a comfortable myth that culture flows down from the executive team. Catherine pushes back hard. Leadership matters and can influence culture, but ask anyone what it is like to work somewhere and they will not describe the CEO. They will describe their team and their manager. Culture, in her framing, is defined by daily interactions, which means every single person carries the ability to shape it.

That is a more demanding idea than top-down culture, because it puts responsibility on managers and peers, not just on a values statement on the website.

This is also why values need to be refreshed, and refreshed in the right direction. Too many companies post core values on a website and run a nomination program, then wonder why behavior never changes.

Catherine argues that values should be treated as fluid and built from the bottom up: ask employees what the team already lives by, highlight those values, and let them guide behavior, rather than dictating a list from the top. Managers are the lever here, coaching people in the moment about how their behavior lands.

The catch is that organizations rarely give managers the skills, the permission, or the empowerment to do that coaching, so it never becomes part of the job. Reframing core values at work as lived behavior, not posted slogans, is what makes them real.

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What is really stopping trust from becoming a KPI

If the link between trust and performance is obvious, why is trust so rarely measured? Catherine’s answer is candid. The logic that cared-for people care back should not need an ROI case, yet in practice many CEOs still do not buy it, so HR is left building the business case before anyone will act. The fix she keeps returning to is structural: rebrand HR.

For too long HR has carried the reputation of the principal’s office, the place you avoid until something explodes. If HR instead becomes known as a coach, a helper, and a partner, people will bring the small conflicts early, which both resolves problems sooner and generates a measurable trust signal.

The same instinct that makes someone hide a problem is the instinct that, once removed, lets you measure trust through how freely people reach out.

This is also why an employee trust survey works best when paired with behavioral signals like exit interviews rather than standing alone.

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Making peer accountability real

Catherine’s change work leans heavily on peer accountability, which follows directly from the idea that culture lives in daily interactions. Her teams train people to be upstanders, because if everyone can hold each other accountable, then everyone is accountable for the culture. That is how communities function.

What blocks it inside companies is the familiar brush-off: someone raises a concern about a colleague and hears “that is just how they are” or “let it go.” Without explicit permission to get involved, people stay silent, and accountability never becomes shared.

Building real accountability in the workplace means equipping people to raise issues directly and backing them when they do.

When Civility Partners enters an organization, much of the work is bringing the elephants out of the room: facilitating the difficult one-on-one conversations between people and departments that have stopped talking to each other. The advice Catherine gives most often is also the simplest. Get people to talk about the conflict, because it has to come out.

It is not in our nature to dive in front of a bus, so a neutral outsider often has to create the safe space first, but the answer is almost always the same: surface the issue, talk it through, and it can only get better from there. The end state is an organization that owns that work itself, not one that needs a consultant forever.

Rebuilding human connection in the age of AI

On AI, Catherine’s answer is reassuringly consistent with everything else: people still have to be human, and you still have to have the conversations. AI can help at the margins, for example by letting you run a scenario through a tool that understands a colleague’s personality profile before a difficult conversation, so you choose the right approach.

And while some jobs will be replaced, new ones appear, because someone has to manage the AI that does the work. The risk is not the technology itself but what we let it do to our attention and our relationships.

She draws a sharp analogy to social media. Posting a photo and collecting likes gives a false sense of importance, and she suspects AI will have its own hard-to-predict effects on our personalities and mental health. The discipline, then, is self-awareness: keep the human conversations going, do not let the tool take over, and remember that simply talking about the uncertainty openly already helps.

Most organizations, she notes, are figuring AI out at the same pace as everyone else, so leaders do not need to pretend they are further ahead than they are.

Turning pulse surveys into a performance engine

Catherine’s closing argument ties the whole conversation together: culture belongs on the strategic plan, right next to market share, customer scores, and revenue. The mechanism is the same one used for every other strategic goal. Set a benchmark, build a plan, implement it, then check the data to see if it is working.

Pulse surveys give you that loop for culture. You can point to a specific question, run the survey again, and watch whether the score on that question improved, which is how you know change is actually happening.

But the survey only works if people feel heard, and feeling heard depends on action. Catherine is emphatic that humans are not cogs in a wheel, and that giving and receiving feedback is a basic need. So her practical tip is to publish the results, including the bad and the ugly, alongside what you plan to do about them.

Publishing does something subtle and powerful: it shows the employee who had a bad experience that they are not alone, which builds community and buy-in. She has seen the same effect with live anonymous polls in training, where people who feel fine suddenly see that half the room does not feel psychologically safe, and that data creates the buy-in to act. Without that visible follow-up, a survey changes nothing.

With it, you close the employee feedback loop and connect culture directly to engagement and performance.

People do not perform when they feel their company is not loyal to them, and they will not stay loyal if their ideas are never heard. Tie those behaviors to the goals leaders already care about, and trust stops being a soft sentiment and starts being a culture of performance.

That is the playbook: make trust a KPI, measure it through behavior, refresh values from the ground up, share accountability, and use pulse surveys to keep the loop alive.