Nearly 90% of chief executives say they are confident or very confident that their employees trust their leadership — but only 46% of employees agree, according to The BCG CEO Insomnia Index, published this month by Boston Consulting Group (BCG).

That gap of more than 40 percentage points between executive perception and employee sentiment is the focus of a commentary published on Fortune.com on Oct. 25, 2026, by Deborah Lovich, a managing director and senior partner in BCG's Boston office. Understanding why nearly half of employees do not trust the top boss, she argues, requires looking at how leaders show up day to day — and at the downstream effects on employees' joy and productivity.

Work Is a Product Employees Choose

At the heart of Lovich's argument is a reframing of the employment relationship. Every single day, she writes, each person chooses how much of their energy, creativity, and discretionary effort to bring to work. Employees are not obligated to give their best; they are customers making a purchase decision to exert energy or not.

The product in question is day-to-day work itself: the rhythms and routines of completing tasks, the culture, the administrative processes, the interactions with managers, and how the CEO and senior leaders engage with employees. All of it, she writes, is part of a product that employees choose to consume or not — and, like any product, it must be good enough that people choose it again tomorrow.

When employees' needs are analyzed with the sophistication of customer analytics, the most important features of that product turn out to be emotional, not functional. Pay, benefits, and flexibility matter, but they are table stakes. What drives genuine enjoyment, loyalty, and performance, according to Lovich, is feeling that your work matters and feeling respected, supported, and connected to the people around you.

She describes this as extraordinarily good news for leaders, because emotional features cost almost nothing to deliver. They simply require leaders who are willing to change their day-to-day behaviors.

Dropbox's 'Virtual First' Redesign

Lovich points to Dropbox as an example of an organization that treats the employee as a customer and work as a product. In the aftermath of Covid, the company redesigned work as a product that must delight its employees, and has publicly discussed the thinking behind its culture and communication model.

As part of the company's “Virtual First” approach, Dropbox used deep customer discovery and design thinking to develop what the commentary calls its very successful remote-first work model. The company experimented with flexible workdays instead of rigid schedules, clearer windows for collaboration, simpler rules for meetings, better ways to share and document work, and more intentional reasons for coming together in person.

Importantly, Lovich notes, Dropbox did not roll these strategies out as finished answers. It tried them out with employees, watched how they actually worked, adjusted what wasn't working, and tried again.

The payoff was real. According to Dropbox's internal data, the percentage of employees who said they felt “successful at work” jumped from 48 percent to 92 percent after Virtual First was implemented. Offer acceptance rates rose, attrition dropped, and the majority of candidates now cite Virtual First as a reason they want to join the company.

A BCG Client Case: The Frontline Leader Effect

The commentary also describes a client engagement Lovich worked on at Boston Consulting Group, in which the client sought to improve operational productivity without any big expense. When the BCG team analyzed the distribution of performance among the client's frontline managers, it observed that some teams performed much better than others. Digging in deeply, the team found the difference came down to the capabilities of the frontline leader — specifically, how they inspired, motivated, and coached their teams. In other words, how they met the emotional needs of their employees.

To replicate that performance across all teams, BCG worked with the small group of best-in-class frontline leaders to change daily work routines. Daily shift handover meetings were redesigned to make it a standard for leaders to do three things:

1. Explain the why. Don't just tell teams what to do; make sure to explain the rationale behind all directions.
2. Celebrate someone. Reflect on the shift that just ended and point out something someone did during the shift that was great.
3. Promote collaboration. Ask people to team together and help each other rather than coming to the leader with every question.

According to the commentary, the changes not only lightened the burden and eased the bottleneck on the leader's time, but also created a valuable sense of community among the team. By redesigning the work product as an important element of daily routines, work became more enjoyable for employees. The payoff was significant enough that the client's CEO referred to it specifically as a driver of financial performance in the company's Annual Report.

Five Little Things That Matter

The gap between a “transaction trap” workplace and organizations where work works, Lovich writes, almost always comes down to the little things that leaders do. Small shifts in daily behavior have a multiplicative impact on culture and employee motivation and, as a result, on value creation. And while the five practices she outlines are simple, she says there is strong behavioral science evidence behind every one of them.

1. Celebrate Your People

If leaders see something great happen at work — a hard decision, a tough problem solved, a compelling presentation, great coaching of another colleague — they should tell the person immediately how impressed they are and why. Lovich advises against assuming people know they are doing great things, or waiting until their annual review to say so. Leaders should pause and tell them directly, in person if they are together; a quick text, email, Slack message, or phone call works, too.

The behavioral science here, she writes, is robust: specific, timely recognition activates intrinsic motivation in ways that performance reviews and even bonuses cannot replicate. The cost is zero. The impact is disproportionate.

2. Go, See, and Help

Leaders should get out from behind their desks, their conference rooms, and their corporate headquarters and go to where the actual work is happening — and once there, look for ways to help. Even small acts of help, such as grabbing lunch for a busy team, going to the backroom to check inventory while an employee is helping a customer, or covering some calls in a busy customer service center, make a big difference.

Lovich acknowledges this is the old idea of servant leadership, but says it lands differently once you understand why it works: proximity signals that leaders value what employees do, and that signal changes how employees feel about their work more than almost any other intervention. Helping also shows employees that leaders are in it with them and that they value the work being done.

3. Be Interested

Leaders should ask people about themselves — their goals, their lives outside work, what they care about, what they are working toward. If someone is too reserved to open up, Lovich suggests sharing something about yourself first to create psychological safety before asking them to disclose. Research consistently shows, she notes, that feeling known as a person — not just as a role — is one of the strongest predictors of both wellbeing and performance at work.

4. Cocreate Everything

Nothing that affects employees should be designed, launched, or changed without involving the people it will affect from the beginning — not after decisions are made. Lovich invokes Amazon's famous practice of keeping an empty chair in meetings to represent the customer; to deliver for employees, she writes, fill that chair with a real employee, rotating regularly, with a mandate to gather input from their peers before and after every session.

Behavioral science research shows that when change is imposed from above, employees push back, productivity drops, and resentment rises — but when employees are involved, they support the change. Cocreation, per Lovich, has a double bonus: the work product is better because it is informed by the people closest to reality, and change management becomes largely unnecessary because the people who shaped the change already own it.

5. Do It First

Whatever leaders are asking their organization to do — embrace AI, spend more time with customers, communicate more openly, take smarter risks — they should do it first and talk about it openly. Not as a performance, Lovich stresses, but as a demonstration that they are not exempt from the changes they are asking others to make. If leaders will not do it, they should not ask employees to. The science, she writes, shows clearly that most change efforts fail because leaders do not model the change themselves.

What works is starting small, being consistent, and building habits slowly: a single specific piece of recognition delivered today, one conversation with a genuine question about someone's life outside work, one meeting where an employee is invited into the room.

Start by Starting

Start by starting, Lovich concludes. The leaders who do this build better teams, and companies where all leaders do it create organizations where people genuinely want to be — which she calls one of the most durable competitive advantages available to any business today. For leaders who want to go deeper on the same five daily practices, her bookMake Work Work* is due out from Berrett-Koehler Publishers in November.

Deborah Lovich is a managing director and senior partner in the Boston office of Boston Consulting Group. She previously served as a Future of Work fellow of the BCG Institute and is the author of Make Work Work: The Five Daily Practices of the Employee-Centric Leader (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, November 2026). More information is available at her website.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.