.avif)
When we sat down with Charles Watkins, Equity Partner and Chief Diversity Officer at Kubicki Draper and Treasurer of the National African American Insurance Association, for this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, the entire conversation orbited a single word. Respect. Charles argued that respect is the operating layer underneath every other culture metric, and that companies who confuse it with politeness end up with neither. The leaders who get it right treat respect as a measurable outcome of how decisions are made, how power is exercised, and how accountability shows up at the top of the organization.
His framing was practical for HR leaders trying to defend culture work to skeptical executives. Respect is not a fluffy concept. It is what determines whether employees will speak up, whether issues will get caught early, and whether the organization can hold itself together through hard moments.
Why Respect Is the Quiet Driver of Every Other Culture Metric
Engagement, retention, and performance all sit on top of respect. has documented for years that the highest-performing teams describe their workplace as one where people feel respected by both their managers and their peers. The reverse is also true. When respect erodes, every other metric eventually follows.
Charles described measuring progress on culture by tracking the felt experience of respect, not just engagement scores. That distinction matters because engagement can stay artificially high in environments where people have given up trying to change anything. Respect captures what is actually happening between people in real time and gives HR leaders an earlier signal of where the culture is breaking.
SHRM research backs this up. Companies whose employees report low levels of respect see voluntary attrition rates that run multiples of their peers, and the financial cost shows up across recruiting, training, and customer outcomes. The case for measuring respect is the case for measuring the upstream lever of every other operating metric.
What Respect Looks Like in Daily Manager and Leader Practice
What does respect at work mean?
Respect at work is the consistent treatment of people as full participants in the organization. It includes how people are spoken to in meetings, how decisions about their work are made, how feedback gets delivered, and how the company responds when they raise concerns. Respect is observable in patterns and the patterns do not lie.
How does respect connect to psychological safety?
Respect is the foundation on which safety is built. People will only speak up about mistakes, disagreements, or concerns if they trust that the response will be respectful. When that trust is missing, safety collapses regardless of how many posters about psychological safety are on the wall. Charles emphasized that the two concepts are inseparable in practice even though they get treated separately in HR programming.
What Actually Works When You Build a Culture of Respect
Principle 1: Make respect measurable, not aspirational
Programs that aspire to respect without measuring it tend to drift. Strong programs add specific items to engagement surveys, run focus groups around the experience of respect, and watch for patterns in anonymous reporting data. The measurement turns respect from a value statement into an operational target.
Principle 2: Hold leaders publicly accountable
Respect at the top of the organization sets the ceiling for respect everywhere else. Charles argued that leaders need to be held accountable when their teams report low respect or high attrition, including in compensation decisions. Companies that hide or excuse leader behavior signal to the rest of the organization what really matters, and respect deteriorates fastest when employees see that signal.
Principle 3: Build ownership into the operating cadence
Respect becomes durable when ownership is distributed across leaders and tied to the regular operating rhythm. Quarterly business reviews include people metrics. Talent reviews include manager-level respect indicators. Compensation calibration includes whether the leader's team trusts them. With ownership wired in, respect becomes part of the operating model rather than a separate initiative.
Where Employee Relations Fits Into Cultures of Respect
Respect erodes when issues go unaddressed. Employee relations is the function that catches the issues early enough to repair the experience before respect collapses. Without ER, leaders have no way to see the patterns developing across their organization. With ER, the patterns become visible and actionable.
How ER enables real accountability
The right ER function provides a confidential intake channel, a consistent investigation process, and pattern data that lets leaders see where respect is being eroded. Investigations management tooling that captures and resolves cases consistently is part of how ER becomes a credible accountability mechanism rather than a complaint queue.
Common Failure Modes in Respect-Based Cultures
Conflating respect with politeness
Polite cultures can have very low respect. Politeness avoids friction. Respect engages it directly while still treating people as full participants. The difference is visible in whether disagreements get aired or buried.
Excusing high performers
Cultures of respect break down quickly when high-performing leaders are allowed to behave outside the norms. The signal employees take from those exceptions is that respect is conditional, and the rest of the culture adjusts to that signal.
Frequently Asked Questions About Respect and Accountability at Work
How do you measure respect at work?
Useful measures include specific survey items about how employees feel treated by managers and peers, qualitative themes from exit interviews, ER case patterns, and observable behavioral data such as participation rates in meetings.
What is the connection between respect and retention?
Employees who report low respect leave at substantially higher rates than peers, often without filing a formal complaint. The connection is direct enough that respect metrics serve as a leading indicator for retention.
How do you hold leaders accountable for respect outcomes?
Useful mechanisms include adding people-related metrics to leader performance reviews, tying compensation in part to team respect and retention indicators, and publishing dashboards that compare leaders across the organization on the same metrics.
What is the role of sensitivity training?
Sensitivity training is one component of a respect strategy when paired with structural change. On its own, training tends to produce a one-day boost. Tied to specific decisions about feedback, promotion, and behavior, it can support a meaningful cultural shift.
How do you create ownership for culture beyond HR?
Ownership grows when culture data shows up in the same conversations as financial and operational data. Quarterly business reviews, talent reviews, and compensation calibration are the natural homes for that data, and bringing it into those forums signals that culture is part of the operating model.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Charles Watkins's argument deserves close attention from HR leaders who are tired of watching engagement scores stay flat while attrition keeps moving. Respect is the upstream lever. Measure it, hold leaders accountable for it, and build the employee relations infrastructure that lets the company hear when it is breaking. Those moves do more for retention and performance than another round of values workshops.
HR leaders who want to operationalize respect should invest in three things. Add explicit respect items to engagement and pulse measurement. Distribute accountability with dashboards and consequences tied to leader compensation. Wire in the ER function that turns patterns into specific interventions. With those in place, respect becomes a measurable feature of the culture rather than a vague aspiration.
See how AllVoices supports the listening and ER infrastructure behind durable cultures of respect.
.png)
.avif)
.avif)
.avif)