The Expectations Arc: row six of ten.
"Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance."
New here? This is row six of ten. Start with #044 and the People Expectations Framework™, both free.
Last week, row five asked what the work leaves of you: recovery, not resilience. This week stays in the relational currency, the part of the deal about how I'm treated, and turns to the row most organisations believe they measure best.
They do measure it. Pulse surveys, engagement surveys, town-hall Q&As, a listening tour after every reorganisation. Ask HR whether the organisation listens, and you get a calendar.
Ask the part-time colleague who filled in the March survey, saw the results in June as a word cloud on a town-hall slide, and heard nothing after that. You get another answer.
Myers drew the line between the invitation and the dance. Row six draws the next one: the distance between being asked and being heard. You can be asked to dance and still have no say over the music.
The framework states the expectation plainly: to be treated honestly, included, and heard on decisions that affect me. And it names the three tests applied to it: whether promises hold, whether inclusion is real, and whether voice changes anything.
So here is my position, before the evidence: people judge voice by what it changed. Everything else is a survey calendar.
Expectation first, experience second, and then the line no listening dashboard shows: the answer.
— Tanguy
This week's content
Row six, read four ways: what people expect when they speak up, whether the promises they hear are kept, whether the tools reach everyone, and how silence is learned. Then the sixth Expectation Gap: a self-audit and five metrics.
🗣️ WHAT PEOPLE EXPECT 🗣️ | 2026 Employee Experience Trends | Qualtrics (2026) | Do people still want to be asked? Qualtrics surveyed 33,831 employees in 24 countries and 30 industries in September and October 2025. 42% want their organisation to listen to them more often; fewer than one in ten want it to listen less. 68% say they enjoy giving feedback. The usual story is survey fatigue. The data tells another story. The appetite is intact. What wears out is the waiting.
⚖️ WHAT PEOPLE GET ⚖️ | Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 | PwC (2025) | Do the promises hold? PwC surveyed 49,843 workers in 48 countries and regions and 28 sectors in July and August 2025. 58% trust their direct manager and can speak openly with them. 55% say their manager does what they say they will; 50% say the same of top management. Non-managers report notably lower psychological safety than managers. Four in ten cannot speak freely to their own boss. Almost half do not see the promise kept.
🧩 WHAT INCLUSION SEES 🧩 | Global Talent Trends 2026 | Mercer (2026) | Do the newest tools reach everyone? Mercer surveyed close to 12,000 people, 9,250 of them employees, in 16 geographies and 16 industries in September and October 2025. 72% of employees say some colleagues have better access to AI tools and training than others. 56% say that unequal access hurts their morale, and 35% would consider leaving over it. Inclusion is now tested on the newest resource first. Everyone can see who got it.
🛡️ HOW SILENCE IS LEARNED 🛡️ | Paradise Lost (and Restored?): A Study of Psychological Safety over Time | Academy of Management Discoveries (2025) | How long does the willingness to speak up last? Derrick Bransby, Michaela Kerrissey and Amy Edmondson followed more than 10,000 clinicians in a US health system across three survey rounds from 2017 to 2021. Newcomers arrived with more psychological safety than their tenured colleagues, then lost it, and took years to recover it. A strong departmental climate softened the fall. The authors trace it to an asymmetry: one dismissive response can undo the belief that speaking up is safe. People do not arrive silent. The organisation teaches them.
The Expectation Gap: row six
75% of employees say their employer should bridge divides. 58% say it does.
Here is the figure for your next people review, and four things it tells you.
Work is still trusted to listen to people. The hearing is unevenly shared. Edelman asked 33,938 people in 28 countries. 70% are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone whose values, background or sources differ from theirs. Among employees in 27 of those markets, three in four say their employer has an obligation to help bridge those divides; 58% say it does this well. The 17-point gap is the smallest Edelman finds for any institution. Inside it sits a sharper one. In Qualtrics' survey of 33,831 employees, 85% of senior leaders say feedback led to positive change; 48% of individual contributors agree, and the gap is widening. Same question, two ends of the hierarchy.
Row six, measured: the same employees, expectation against experience. Edelman Trust Barometer 2026, 27 markets.
Promises are kept one level at a time. Just over half of PwC's workers say their manager does what they say they will; for top management, half. Honesty now has a legal floor in Europe. Under the EU Pay Transparency Directive, an unjustified gender pay gap of 5% or more within a category of workers, left unremedied for six months, triggers a joint pay assessment with workers' representatives. The law now requires what good management should have offered anyway: an explanation.
Inclusion is drawn on the org chart. On the frontline, 50% believe they can challenge how things are done, down 7 points in a year; among part-time workers, 46%, down 14 (Qualtrics). Seven in ten of Mercer's employees can see that colleagues got better AI tools and training. Give the defence its weight: Qualtrics reads much of the perceived-action gap as action never connected back to what people said. Grant it. Then every unanswered survey works like the dismissive response Bransby and colleagues describe, delivered to everyone at once. A year later, the response rate falls, and the slide calls it survey fatigue.
Close the loop, or stop asking. Organisations that increased how often they listened saw experience scores up to four times higher than those that listened less (Qualtrics). The lever is the answer. Call it the Answer Rule: before any survey, consultation or listening session, name the decisions still open. Within a set number of days of it closing, publish what changed, what did not, and why. Thirty days is my rule of thumb, not a research finding. Then say it in the deal: we will always tell you what your voice changed, and what it could not.
People judge voice by what it changed. Everything else is a survey calendar.
Your turn. When did something you said at work last change a decision, and did anyone tell you it had? Hit reply; I read every one. And if you know a leadership team about to launch its next engagement survey, forward this before the questions go out.
🧭 The row-six self-audit
Three questions for your next leadership meeting. Yes or no.
Can we name three decisions from the past year that changed because of what employees told us?
Did we tell everyone what our last survey changed within a month of it closing?
Do our frontline and part-time people get the same answers and the same tools as our managers?
Three "no" answers mean your listening strategy is a survey calendar. The five metrics below show whether anyone is being heard.
📏 Five metrics for row six
No new inventions: five established measures, read together rather than one by one.
Seen action, by level. The share who agree their feedback led to change, split by grade. Benchmarks: 85% of senior leaders, 48% of individual contributors (Qualtrics).
Promise-kept rate. The share who say their manager does what they say they will, read by team and against the same question for top management. Benchmarks: 55% and 50% (PwC).
Days to answer. Time from a survey or consultation closing to a published account of what changed. There is no research benchmark; thirty days is a working rule of thumb. Set your own, and track it.
Challenge rate by contract. The share who feel able to challenge how things are done, for frontline and part-time staff, compared with everyone else. Benchmarks: 50% and 46% (Qualtrics).
Access gap, by group. The share who say some colleagues have better access to tools and training than they do, split by contract, level and location. Benchmark: 72% (Mercer).
🎶 Mixtape Monday
The Sound of Silence — Simon & Garfunkel (1964). The album it first appeared on sold so badly that the duo split up. A year later, their producer, Tom Wilson, overdubbed electric guitars, bass and drums onto the recording, without asking either of them, and it went to number one. The song had been there all along. It took someone acting on it to be heard. That is row six: the voice is usually already in the building. Tomorrow on LinkedIn: the song, and the slide most engagement surveys never show.
Next week — #051
🤝 Row seven: Belonging — Sunday 15 November
Row six asks whether promises hold and whether speaking up changes anything. Row seven asks whether anyone would notice if you left. Next week, we read the seventh Expectation Gap: the distance between being welcomed and being kept.
Ten rows, ten Sundays. In December, subscribers receive the complete Expectation Gap: all ten rows in one workbook, with the questions and five metrics for every row. Stay for the set.
— Tanguy
Mini-lexicon
Asked, not heard — the row-six finding: people judge voice by what their words changed, not by how often they were invited to speak. This edition's frame.
The Answer Rule — no question put to employees without a published answer: what changed, what did not, and why, within a set number of days. The row-six lever.
Psychological safety — Amy Edmondson's term for a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk. The condition under which people speak up, and the thing a response rate cannot see.
The Expectation Gap (row six) — the distance between "to be treated honestly, included, and heard on decisions affecting me" and what people judge they get: whether promises hold, inclusion is real, and voice changes anything. This edition's measure.
Belonging — the expectation to be part of something, with colleagues I can rely on and leaders I can believe. Read next Sunday as the gap between being welcomed and being kept. Row seven.
Method
The Expectation Gap sits inside the People Centricity Methodology™: Empathise, Strategise, Realise, Analyse. It is Empathise made measurable, the first two links of the People Centricity Formula™, read one row at a time.
References
Bransby, D. P., Kerrissey, M. J., & Edmondson, A. C. (2025). Paradise lost (and restored?): A study of psychological safety over time. Academy of Management Discoveries. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2023.0084
Bransby, D. P., Kerrissey, M. J., & Edmondson, A. C. (2024, July 11). Research: New hires' psychological safety erodes quickly. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2024/07/research-new-hires-psychological-safety-erodes-quickly
Cho, J. H. (2016, May 25). "Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance," Vernā Myers tells Cleveland Bar. The Plain Dealer. cleveland.com.
Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Expectations Framework™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/people-expectations-framework
Edelman Trust Institute. (2026). 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer global report: Trust amid insularity. Edelman. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
European Parliament & Council of the European Union. (2023). Directive (EU) 2023/970 of 10 May 2023 to strengthen the application of the principle of equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women through pay transparency and enforcement mechanisms. Official Journal of the European Union, L 132, 21–44. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2023/970/oj
Mercer. (2026). Global talent trends 2026: Driving exponential performance: Solving the human-machine equation. Mercer. https://www.mercer.com/insights/people-strategy/future-of-work/global-talent-trends/
PwC. (2025). Global workforce hopes and fears survey 2025. PricewaterhouseCoopers. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/workforce/hopes-and-fears.html
Qualtrics. (2026). 2026 employee experience trends. Qualtrics XM Institute. https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/employee-experience-trends/
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