‘You Don’t Get Me’

You see your work duties and your company in one way. Your manager sees them in another. To some degree, that’s always been a fact of the workplace—except that now, the gulf appears to be widening.

Indeed, a new study finds a substantial disconnect between the perceptions of senior leaders about their firms and the actual experiences of frontline workers. According to the study, more than three-quarters of frontline workers, 77% to be exact, feel senior leadership doesn’t understand what’s happening at their workplace on a day-to-day basis. In some industries—like retail, healthcare, and travel—the figure is 18% or less. “That’s an alarmingly high figure,” says Renee Whalen, North America consumer market leader for professional search at Korn Ferry.

To be sure, the data recalls the so-called “cluelessness” employees attributed to management during the aftermath of the pandemic, when studies routinely showed that the majority of them felt leaders didn’t understand their day-to-day struggles or value. Today, it’s issues like AI, tariffs, and remote work that are keeping executives from staying in contact with people on the ground. “Leaders are constantly pivoting or restructuring, because there is so much happening,” says Whalen.

Experts also attribute the disconnect to leaders’ change in tone when communicating around issues like layoffs, return-to-office mandates, employee productivity, and more. Gone, at least for the most part, are empathy and emotional intelligence—only 38% of CEOs and board directors in a recent Korn Ferry survey ranked emotional intelligence as a top leadership priority over the past three years, and only one in five are prioritizing employee engagement. It’s quite a reversal from just a few years ago, when firms were beefing up benefits packages with mental-health and well-being offerings and leaders were talking up mission and purposes and encouraging employees to share feedback in internal surveys, says Peter McDermott, head of the Corporate Affairs practice in North America for Korn Ferry. “Workers are less enabled to share their perspectives now,” he says.

For her part, Tamara Rodman, a senior client partner in the Culture, Change, and Communications practice at Korn Ferry, says that leaders, amid their rush to flatten organizational structures by removing multiple layers of middle management, lost a critical conduit to the pulse of frontline workers. Middle managers, says Rodman, are the proverbial ears to the ground keeping leaders apprised of how frontline workers are thinking and feeling. “That link is missing,” she says.

Given the pace of change in business, experts say that a lack of understanding between management and frontline workers, perceived or otherwise, could have reverberations far beyond talent issues. McDermott says the loss of trust and confidence in leaders could be devastating to culture. “Employees know what’s going on behind the scenes,” he says, “and they know if what leaders are saying is accurate or not.” More tangibly, a faltering relationship between leaders and workers could slow the adoption of AI tools or other innovations, as well as have a domino effect on cost projections, productivity, and more. “It could throw transformation efforts into disarray,” says Rodman.

As one measure, leaders can bridge the disconnect with frontline workers by drawing a clear line from corporate strategy to day-to-day work, says Karrin Randle, an associate client partner in the Culture, Change, and Communications practice at Korn Ferry. She also says that doubling down on internal communications—through engagement surveys, exit interviews, job-site reviews, and other channels—can foster a “multi-directional flow of information” and keep leaders connected to frontline workers. “In the same way that executives have to stay grounded in customer needs and client trends, they have to stay just as curious about employee needs,” says Randle.

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