Key Highlights
- High-trust, high-performance workplaces treat listening as a continuous system, linking strong feedback cultures directly to employee confidence.
- Leading employers are rebuilding culture by equipping managers to have real conversations.
- Catch Rebecca Moulynox live as part of a panel on the main stage of the National HR Summit by HRD on March 31, 2026
Somewhere between last year’s third restructure announcement and the fifth exciting new direction email about AI, a wave of Australian employees disconnected. Not dramatically, maybe nobody flipped a desk. They just started doing the minimum, tuning out in town halls, and maybe even updating their LinkedIn profiles on a Sunday evening. The Great Resignation may have cooled, but the Great Disengagement has settled in.
In Great Place To Work® Australia and Johns Hopkins University Well-Being at Work report, Australia’s Well-Being at Work Index fell to 4.07 in 2025, down from 4.23 in 2023 and back to roughly early-pandemic levels. Here well-being is an umbrella term that covers everything from engagement to happiness, commitment and performance, and when it slips, culture usually slips with it.
I spend my days looking at workplace culture data across Australia and New Zealand, and the pattern is stark. Organisations that treated culture as a soft priority during the disruption years are now dealing with the consequences of weaker connection, lower trust, and teams that feel more fragmented than aligned. Here’s what the best are doing differently.
Make listening a system
The highest-performing workplaces don’t run an annual engagement survey and call it a day. They build continuous feedback loops, pulse checks, skip-level conversations, stay interviews, manager check-ins, and, crucially, they close the loop.
That last part matters more than many leaders realise. In our 2026 Best Workplaces for Women in Australia data, women with little or no confidence in their executive team recorded a Trust Index score of just 34%, compared with 95% among women with a great deal of confidence in leadership. That 61-point gap is a reminder that trust is built or broken in the everyday experience of being heard, informed and taken seriously.
ALSO READ: Building a More Compassionate Workplace
Get specific about seen, heard, and valued
Every organisation says it values its people. The organisations employees believe are the ones that make recognition concrete: timely, specific, personal, and not reserved for end-of-year awards or top performers.
Recognition also connects directly to whether people stay and advocate. Among women in Australia’s 2026 Best Workplaces for Women, 83.9% said “I want to work here for a long time,” compared with 79.2% in certified workplaces overall, while 85.9% said they would strongly endorse their company to friends and family as a great place to work. That’s not just a morale boost; it’s retention and reputation working together.
Give managers the tools to have real conversations
Most disengagement starts closer to the ground than you might think: a manager who avoids hard conversations, misses the signs of overload, or simply doesn’t know how to talk about career growth, wellbeing, or psychological safety in a useful way.
That capability gap matters because employee experience is not evenly distributed across the organisation. Great Place To Work’s 2025 Australian well-being research found that individual contributors (so, people with no direct reports) reported well-being scores of around 4.12, while executive and C-level leaders scored far higher at 4.64. In other words, the people with the most power often have a materially different experience of work than the people they lead, which is exactly why managers need better tools, better training, and more time to listen properly.
Connect inclusion to performance
The organisations leading on engagement have stopped treating inclusion as a standalone initiative and started embedding it into everyday operating rhythms. Who gets heard, who gets access, who gets recognised, and who gets stretch opportunities?
In the 2026 women’s report, only 65.8% of women said people are paid fairly for the work they do, fewer than 72% believed promotions go to those who most deserve them, and just 68.4% felt included in decisions that shape their working lives. Roughly three in ten women also believe their manager plays favourites. Those are not peripheral issues; they are the day-to-day signals employees use to decide whether this workplace is fair, and whether giving extra effort is worth it.
The same report also shows what better looks like. Across certified workplaces, 84.9% of women said their workplace is psychologically and emotionally healthy, 86% said they can be themselves at work, and 86.4% said they are treated as a full member of the organisation regardless of position. When inclusion is felt in everyday interactions people are more likely to speak up, contribute fully and stay engaged.
ALSO READ: Better Work Design Reduces Burnout Before It Starts
Build well-being into how work happens
One of the clearest messages from the Australian data is that well-being cannot sit off to the side as an HR program. It has to be built into job design, leadership behaviour, communication norms and workload management.
That’s especially urgent in the current environment. The 2025 Well-Being at Work report showed that up to 80% of Australian office workers reported burnout linked to heavy workloads and staff shortages, while the broader national context now includes psychosocial hazard obligations and Right to Disconnect protections. A cultural reboot is about creating workplaces where people trust their leaders, feel supported by their managers, and have the boundaries, meaning and connection required to do sustainable high-quality work.
The thread, backed by miles of data, running through all of this is that people do their best work when they trust their leaders, feel connected to their colleagues, and believe their contribution genuinely matters. It’s the operating system of a high-performing workplace.
I’ll be unpacking these ideas further on the Main Stage at the National HR Summit Australia on 31 March, alongside leaders from Google, IKEA and Commonwealth Bank. For organisations grappling with how to rebuild culture in a workforce that’s been through a lot, this is the work now.
SEE REBECCA MOLYNEUX LIVE
Rebecca will be part of a panel on the main stage of the National HR Summit by HRD
March 31, 2026
REGISTER HERE
Cultural Reboot – Rebuilding Engagement in the Modern Workplace
As digital disruption, restructures, and shifting expectations test the bonds that hold teams together, the challenge for HR is clear: rebuild authentic connection and trust to develop high-performing teams. Join this session to hear how forward-thinking companies are reimagining inclusion and culture—ensuring every employee feels seen, heard, and demonstrating how a strong, people-first culture drives real business growth and impact.
