Business 4 min read By Alice Ashford
ADP CEO Says Trust in Leadership Drives Employee Engagement
Maria Black tells Fortune summit that employees who trust senior leaders are 41% more likely to be engaged, as ADP data links trust to retention and productivity.
Employees who trust their chief executive and senior leadership are 41 per cent more likely to be engaged at work, according to ADP chief executive Maria Black, who said companies seeking a more productive workforce should start by asking whether their staff trust the people running the business.
Speaking at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in California, Black said trust and engagement move together, with workers who trust those around them 60 per cent more likely to be dialled in to their roles. «Trust is a direct corollary to engagement,» she said. «So if we want to drive engagement, productivity, and a vibrant world of work that, candidly, I want to be in and I want my children to grow up working, we have to focus there.»
The findings challenge the common assumption that engagement is a sentiment employees either bring to the job or fail to bring, placing responsibility for workforce motivation squarely on management and the C-suite. ADP's research arm has previously found that for every 1 per cent drop in full engagement, the likelihood of voluntary attrition rises by 45 per cent.
Black said only 30 per cent of employees are overly engaged at work, a figure that leaves considerable room for improvement across the business world. The current environment, she argued, is packed with reasons for workers to withhold trust, from echo chambers and a firehose of information to the difficulty of distinguishing genuine content from AI-generated material.
For leaders hoping to rebuild that trust, Black said the answer lies in presence rather than pronouncements. She described holding listening posts and getting boots on the ground, arriving in California after a trip to Las Vegas where she spoke with 1,000 company leaders, and a visit to Florida where she talked with employees over what she called the universal love language of ice cream. «The only way to keep current is to be on the ground and be trusted,» she said.
ADP oversees payroll and human capital for more than 1 million clients across 140 countries, giving Black a broad view of how employers are responding to shifts in the labour market. She joined the company in 1996 as a sales associate and became president and chief executive in 2023, the seventh CEO in its history, a background she said gives her a ground-level perspective on the business.
Beyond trust, Black identified upskilling and reskilling as a pressing obligation for business leaders. She said workers generally do not feel their employer has prepared them properly for the changes ahead, and warned that the new AI era will only play out with human agency, in terms of how people choose, or decline, to engage with AI tools.
Black said AI can serve employees well by expanding their expertise beyond their current domain and increasing their earning ability as they take on new tasks and responsibilities. «But we have to shepherd them there,» she warned. «I think that's the other part that sometimes we don't spend enough time on.»
Her comments come as companies across Britain and other advanced economies grapple with sluggish productivity, tight labour markets and the challenge of retaining skilled staff. The ADP data suggests that investment in leadership credibility and visible communication may matter as much as pay or perks when employers try to hold on to their best people.
For boards and executive teams, the message is that engagement is not simply a metric to be tracked but an outcome shaped by whether workers believe in the people leading them. Black's own approach, built on travel, listening and direct contact with staff, offers one template for closing that gap.
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