Ask Australian employees what makes their workplace great, as I do all the time, and leaders come up straight away: approachable, accessible, easy to talk to.
Ask the same people what they’d change, and often it’s also leadership: accountability, fairness, and follow-through.
Analysis of Great Place To Work Australia employee comments shows:
- 16.2% of comments about what makes a workplace great cite approachable leadership or a flat, low-hierarchy structure (from a dataset of 26,595 comments)
- 14.3% of comments about what employees would change cite management and leadership, specifically accountability, favouritism, and inconsistent follow-through (from a separate dataset of almost 30,000 comments)
These kind of look like two unrelated findings. But read them together and they describe a specific and fixable gap, employees can find a leader easy to talk to and still not trust them to be fair, or to do something with what they’re told.
“Make senior leadership more accountable to outcomes and follow what they ask of others.”
“Management play favourites.”
These aren’t complaints about leaders being unfriendly, they’re complaints about leaders being unaccountable.
This matters more than it might seem
Most organisations invest heavily in the first version of leadership, open-door policies, casual town halls, leaders who know people’s names. Far fewer invest, deliberately and measurably, in the second, whether leadership decisions are consistent, whether promises get kept, and whether the same rules apply regardless of who’s asking.
An analysis of 2 years’ worth of GPTW data, found that Credibility, whether executives are seen to fully embody the organisation’s official values, is one of the strongest individual predictors for Australian employees’ intent to stay.
Approachability alone doesn’t carry that same weight in the data. Being liked and being trusted are related, but they are not the same investment, and they don’t come from the same programs.
What to do with this?
Separate the two conversations in your own listening data. If your engagement survey only asks whether your manager is approachable, you’re not measuring the half of what’s actually driving people out the door.
Make accountability visible, not just leadership presence. Employees don’t just want access to leaders. They want evidence that what they raise with leaders goes somewhere.
Audit for favouritism specifically. It shows up repeatedly in open-text comments as a named, specific frustration, not a vague culture complaint.
Do the Great Place To Work Survey. The GPTW survey specifically measures both of these things. If you want to find out exactly where your company sits when it comes to employees trusting their leaders, not just finding them easy to talk to, then its time to do the survey.
