When the power finally shifts your way, the temptation is to use it. After years of workers calling the shots during the Great Resignation, employers have reclaimed the upper hand. Hiring rates sit at a 10-year low. Job seekers are 12 per cent less likely to reject offers than they were two years ago. Workers are taking what they can get.
But here’s what should terrify every chief executive and HR leader: Just as employers gained leverage, they’re losing something far more valuable. Their employees no longer trust them.
Glassdoor’s latest workplace trends report, released this month, reveals a crisis hiding in plain sight. Mentions of “disconnect” in employee reviews jumped 24 per cent from 2024 to 2025. The word “misalignment” surged 149 per cent. “Distrust” climbed 26 per cent. These aren’t abstract metrics. They’re employees telling you, in their own words, that the relationship is broken.
Senior leadership ratings have been sliding since late 2023, dropping to their lowest point since the pandemic’s early days. The pattern plays out across industries, but hits hardest in management consulting, media and technology — sectors where leaders once commanded high trust during COVID-19’s uncertainty, only to watch it evaporate as they navigated layoffs, return-to-office mandates and AI transformation.
Misreading the room
The data suggests many leaders have misread the room entirely. Yes, the labour market has softened. Yes, workers have fewer options. But weakness is not the same as loyalty, and compliance is not the same as commitment.
Consider what Glassdoor calls the “forever layoff.” Small cuts affecting fewer than 50 workers now make up 51 per cent of all layoffs, up from 38 per cent a decade ago. These aren’t headline-grabbing mass terminations. They’re quiet, rolling eliminations that allow companies to trim payroll without drawing attention. Except employees notice everything. They see colleagues disappear. They absorb additional work. They wonder if they’re next.
This creates what the report aptly describes as “cultures of anxiety, insecurity and resentment.” You can’t data-mine your way to efficiency if you’re simultaneously data-mining trust.
The same dynamic plays out with remote work. Career opportunity ratings for remote and hybrid workers dropped from 4.1 to 3.5 between 2020 and 2025. The message employees hear is clear: Work from home if you must, but don’t expect to advance. Stanford economist Nick Bloom compared return-to-office mandates to jaywalking laws — “everyone knows about them, but compliance and enforcement are spotty.” Yet the damage isn’t in the mandate itself. It’s in the signal it sends about who matters and who doesn’t.
Retention without trust
Here’s the paradox: Employers think they’re in control because workers can’t easily leave. But retention without trust is just hostage-taking with a paycheque. And the costs compound silently. Disengaged workers don’t innovate. They don’t go the extra mile. They do exactly what’s required and save their energy for the job search they’re conducting in the background.
The truly alarming part is that many leaders seem unaware of the erosion happening beneath them. They see compliance and mistake it for buy-in. They see full offices — or fuller offices, at least — and assume the matter is settled. Meanwhile, their employees are writing reviews that mention “hypocrisy” 18 per cent more than they did a year ago.
A silver lining?
If there’s a silver lining in Glassdoor’s report, it’s modest: Early-career workers will finally see their real wages surpass 2020 levels in 2026, after years of inflation outpacing salary growth. But even this comes with a caveat. Those same young workers face a brutal job market, and when they do land positions, they’re less likely to reject offers — even bad ones — because options are scarce.
The dashboard is flashing red. You can ignore it because workers lack the power to quit. You can tell yourself that this is just business, that tough times require tough decisions, that employees will adjust. And maybe they will.
But trust, once lost, doesn’t return just because the market turns. When hiring eventually picks up — and it will — those same employees you kept in their seats through necessity will remember how you treated them when they had nowhere else to go. The forever layoff will become the forever grudge.
Right now, you hold the leverage. The question is what you’re willing to trade for it.
