In an October 2026 study, Boston Consulting Group asked 645 CEOs whether their employees trust leadership. Nearly 90% said yes. Among 500 employees asked the same question, only 46% agreed.
A gap that wide means CEOs and employees are seeing two different companies. If you manage people, you are standing in the middle.
Trust in leadership has been sliding for some time, and the 2026 data makes it hard to ignore. Glassdoor’s average senior leadership rating fell below 3.5 in April 2026, its lowest monthly level since 2017. In May, Gallup found that only about one in five U.S. employees strongly trust their organization’s leadership. In March, a FranklinCovey study put trust in direct leaders at 43%.
Glassdoor points to one cause it calls “forever layoffs”: a steady series of small cuts with no clear end, rather than one large round people survive and move past. This article looks at what that pattern does to a team, why the usual approaches to rebuilding employee trust fall short, and what middle managers and senior leaders can do this quarter to limit the damage.
What Forever Layoffs Look Like From the Inside
The old pattern was familiar. A company announced a restructuring, cut 10% of staff in one day, held an all-hands, and told everyone the hard part was over. People grieved, updated their resumes, and mostly got back to work.
The new pattern is quieter and, in many ways, worse. Glassdoor found that half of 2026 WARN Act filings involved fewer than 50 people. Cuts that size rarely make headlines. A few desks empty on a Tuesday, and no one says anything because, officially, nothing big happened.
Federal data indirectly supports this. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for April 2026 put total layoffs slightly below the pre-pandemic monthly average. The volume is not unusual; the rhythm is. When cuts come in small, unpredictable waves, no one gets to exhale.
It shows up in what employees write. In May 2026, Glassdoor reviews mentioning job insecurity rose 63% year over year. Over the same period, mentions of “misalignment” rose 95%, “disconnect” 52%, and “distrust” 18%. People do not use those words about their workload. They use them about leadership.
Earlier Glassdoor research shows the damage compounds. One round of layoffs lowers a company’s average rating by about 0.13 stars on a five-star scale. Among current employees, a second round has twice the impact over the following four months. Each new cut lands on a team that has not recovered from the last.
The Perception Gap at the Top
If the mood in your leadership meetings feels fine, that is part of the problem. The BCG study found a gap between what CEOs believe and what employees feel on almost every topic it measured.
On AI, four in ten employees said their CEO has not been open enough about how it will affect their jobs and careers, yet only 15% of CEOs worried their approach could damage trust. On wellbeing, nearly 70% of CEOs expected employees to trust them to prioritize it in funding decisions; only 36% of employees did.
Julie Bedard, a managing director and partner at BCG, described the gap as long-standing and said it has widened as the employer-employee relationship has grown more transactional at some companies. When people see their job as a line item that could disappear next quarter, they act like contractors: they do what is asked and little more.
BCG measured that effect, too. Among employees whose trust in their CEO grew because of how the CEO handled AI, half said they were more willing to go above and beyond than three months earlier. Among those whose trust fell, fewer than 10% said the same, at least a fivefold difference in discretionary effort.
Perceptyx data covering roughly 23 million employees points the same way. Confidence in senior leadership is 77% among executives and 73% further down. The gap is smaller, but the people closest to decisions still feel best about them.
What Happens to the People Who Stay
After a layoff, leaders often tell themselves a comforting story: the people who stayed will be grateful and work harder. The research says otherwise.
Joel Brockner of Columbia Business School has studied layoff survivors for decades. His work shows they more often respond with anger, fear, and distrust than gratitude. They watched colleagues get walked out, and many now carry part of those colleagues’ work on top of their own.
A widely cited Leadership IQ survey of layoff survivors found that 74% said their own productivity fell after the cuts, 69% said the quality of their company’s product or service declined, and 77% saw more mistakes from coworkers. That describes a team both exhausted and anxious.
Recovery also takes longer than executives expect. In a Lattice survey, 74% of HR leaders said morale and productivity need four months to more than a year to recover, while 66% said their C-suite expected full recovery within three months. Add forever layoffs to that math. If recovery takes six months and the next cut comes in four, the team never returns to baseline. You end up managing a group stuck in the early stages of grief.
Middle managers carry the heaviest load. You did not make the call and may not have seen it coming, but your team looks to you the next morning. LifeLabs Learning’s mid-year 2026 report found that 56% of HR and business professionals rated manager coaching and feedback skills five out of ten or lower. By their own organizations’ measure, the people holding teams together are under-equipped.
Why the Usual Fixes Fall Flat
After a rough stretch, the instinct is to roll out something visible: a new values poster, a pulse survey, a town hall where the CEO says “our people are our greatest asset.” Teams have seen all of these, and amid forever layoffs they often backfire because people read them as theater.
Trust depends on predictability. You trust someone when you can anticipate what they will do and they follow through. Forever layoffs break that. If cuts can come at any time for reasons no one explains, no culture messaging will make people feel secure. They are watching what happens, not what is said.
Gallup’s September 2026 research points to a related problem: only about one in five employees strongly trust their leaders to use workplace data responsibly. As companies feed productivity metrics into AI tools, employees wonder whether those numbers will decide who is cut next. If you have not explained how the data is used, they will fill in the blanks, rarely in your favor.
What Leadership Transparency Looks Like in Practice
Leadership transparency does not mean sharing every board slide. It means people can understand how decisions are made, even when they disagree. For managers at every level, that comes down to four practices.
Start with the rules. If your company uses criteria for workforce reductions, such as role redundancy, business unit performance, or skills mapping, share them. People handle bad news better when they understand the logic; what breaks trust is the sense that cuts are random or political. If you do not know the criteria, ask, and tell your team you asked.
Next, be honest about timing. If you know no reduction is planned for your team this quarter, say so, and be specific about what that covers. If you do not know, say that. False reassurance is the worst option. A manager who says “nobody here is going anywhere” and loses two people a month later has spent credibility that will be slow to return.
Raise AI before your team asks. The BCG data suggests much of the trust damage happens there. If your organization is piloting AI tools in your function, explain what they are for, which tasks they affect, and what the plan is for the people doing that work now. If the plan is unclear, press senior leadership for answers instead of going quiet with your team.
Close the loop on decisions. Two or three weeks after any change, come back and explain what happened, what you learned, and what comes next. Most leaders skip this step, but it turns a one-time announcement into a pattern people can rely on.
What Senior Leaders Owe Their Managers
If you run a function or business unit, your managers translate your decisions into daily work. They cannot rebuild employee trust with information they do not have.
Brief managers before announcements, not alongside everyone else. Give them the reasoning, not just talking points. Tell them what they can and cannot share so they are not guessing when someone asks a direct question in a one-on-one.
Look hard at the pattern of cuts, too. If your company has run three small rounds in nine months, the research suggests each did more damage than the last. One larger, clearly bounded reduction, paired with an explicit commitment about what follows, may do less long-term harm than another year of unannounced trims. That is a business judgment, but make it with the trust cost on the table.
Finally, measure trust directly and at every level. An engagement-only survey can miss the kind of gap Perceptyx found between executives and everyone else. Ask employees whether they understand how decisions are made and whether they believe what leadership tells them. Then share the results, including the unflattering ones.
Conclusion
This year’s data is consistent. Glassdoor’s senior leadership ratings hit their lowest level since 2017. Only 46% of employees told BCG they trust leadership, while nearly 90% of CEOs assumed they did. Mentions of job insecurity in Glassdoor reviews rose 63%. Underneath it all, forever layoffs keep teams in a cycle of loss with no room to recover.
This does not mean leaders are bad people. It means the way many companies cut costs carries a hidden price in effort, quality, and retention. In Monster’s January 2026 survey, 56% of workers had left a job mainly because of a bad manager, and 55% had stayed longer than planned because of a good one. The manager relationship is often what keeps people in place.
Treat trust in leadership like any other asset you manage. Know where it stands and what drains it. Be clear about the rules, honest about what you do and do not know, and consistent enough that your team can predict your next move. Layoff survivors are watching. What they see from you in the coming months will shape whether they stay and whether they bring their best work.