If you only skimmed the workplace headlines this week, you saw two unrelated stories. A surveillance story — new laws, a booming monitoring industry. And a layoffs story — more cuts, smaller and quieter than before. Two beats, two reporters, two filing cabinets.

Read them together, though, and they collapse into a single story about leadership. Both are about the same choice every leader makes a hundred times a quarter, usually without noticing: the choice between control and candor. And your people are reading that choice far more accurately than your engagement survey is.

Workplace-monitoring software is racing toward a $12.5 billion market by 2028. Governments are now stepping in to force disclosure — Maine's new law, among the most restrictive in the country, is the latest. The intuitive fix seems to be transparency: just tell people they're being watched. And about 86% of employers do.

It doesn't work. Roughly half of employees assume they're being monitored no matter what the handbook says. Disclosure didn't dissolve the suspicion — it formalized it. You can now point to the policy that confirms what they feared.

But step back and ask the question almost no one asks: what do you think you're actually learning? That someone was online at 9:00 a.m.? That a camera was on? That's attendance data dressed up as performance data. And here's the uncomfortable truth underneath it —

You formed your real opinion of your people long before the monitoring started. In a handful of meetings. On their good days and their bad ones. The dashboard isn't changing your mind. It never was.

So the surveillance isn't producing insight. It's producing a feeling — in your people — of being watched, judged, and disposable. And the ones most offended by it are usually your strongest, because they have the most options and the least patience for being treated like a suspect.

Now the other headline. 87% of HR leaders say they've conducted or are planning layoffs this year (LHH, April 2026). That alone isn't surprising in this market. What's revealing is the shape the cuts are taking.

51%  of 2025 layoffs involved fewer than 50 people, frequently run in repeated waves rather than one announcement.  (Glassdoor 2026 Worklife Trends)

Fifty is not a random number. It's the threshold at which the federal WARN Act requires formal advance notice. When a meaningful share of layoffs cluster just under the line that would trigger disclosure, that's not a coincidence — it's a design choice. And it rhymes exactly with the surveillance story: do the hard thing quietly, and hope nobody makes you say it out loud.

The quiet layoff feels clean to leadership. No filing, no headline, no all-hands. People just "decide to move on." But your employees aren't tracking your press releases — they're counting the empty desks. You didn't avoid the layoff. You ran it in the dark and made everyone left behind watch it happen in slow motion.

Here's where both stories punish the leader who thought they were being shrewd. Each tactic backfires on precisely the people you most want to keep.

Surveillance alienates your highest performers — the ones with the leverage to leave. Stealth layoffs operate by design on the principle that some people will exit on their own; the people who can afford to do that are, again, your best. So both moves quietly invert your talent pool: they retain the disengaged who feel stuck and shed the talented who feel insulted.

And unlike "culture," the damage is now measurable. In 2025 employee reviews, Glassdoor logged a 26% increase in complaints about distrust and a 149% surge in employees flagging their executives as misaligned. Your workforce is writing the performance review of your leadership in public, in real time — and the through-line is that they no longer believe you'll be honest with them.

To be clear, this isn't a case for flying blind or never restructuring. Businesses change; sometimes roles genuinely have to go; being together in person is often where the best work happens. The issue was never the tool. It's the intent your people read in the tool. "Come into the office because we're better together" and "come in because we're hoping some of you quit" use the same desks and produce opposite cultures — and people can always tell which one they're living in.

So what does the other path look like in practice? Three things, and they're not abstractions:

1. Make your values load-bearing

Not poster-on-the-wall values — operating values. The kind that actually decide how people are treated when no one is monitoring them, and that a leader can be held to in the room. Values only build trust when they cost something to honor.

2. Point AI at people, not at their keystrokes

The same technology being sold to track attendance can be used to develop humans — to coach trust, leadership, and emotional intelligence at a scale no single manager could ever reach. One use makes people feel surveilled. The other makes them feel invested in. Identical tool, opposite signal.

3. Choose the honest conversation, every time it's harder

A real leader tells someone they're being let go. A weak one redesigns the building, spaces out the cuts, and keeps every wave a head under the law so the word never has to be spoken. Courage is far cheaper than leaders think. Cowardice costs you the trust of everyone still in the building — and they're the ones you were counting on.

Trust isn't the reward you get after performance. It's the precondition for it. When people believe their leaders will be straight with them, they hand over their best ideas, their effort, and their loyalty. When they don't, they hand over their notice.

Before your next leadership meeting, run this test. If your people judged you only by your last three real decisions — not your values deck, not your town-hall language — would they conclude you chose candor, or control?

Because that's the conclusion they've already reached. The only question is whether you've looked at it as honestly as they have.

Tom and I break down both of these headlines on this week's episode of We've Got Trust Issues.