This decade has seen trust falling in employees against a landscape of growing deceit.

Indeed, statistics indicate that society’s stance on dishonesty is becoming more lenient. Findings from the British Social Attitudes survey reveal that condemnation of £500 in benefit fraud dropped from 68 per cent in 2016 to just 53 per cent in 2022.

This doesn’t mean we’re becoming a nation of grifters – countless factors come into play, from the cost of living crisis and continued economic uncertainty to growing distrust in institutions and the terrible examples set by leaders across politics and business alike.

The leadership problem

The potential impact of these changes on the workplace is vast, with consequences for employee engagement, trust, motivation, honesty, and more. But the primary concern shouldn’t be with employees: the biggest issue is leadership.

There’s been a worrying precedent in recent years of autocratic styles of leadership, which have potentially disastrous effects on behaviour. Research shows that the breaking of three different types of standards – legal, moral, social norms, and/or political mandates – leads to an increase in distrust. We’ve seen these shattered time and again by politicians on the world stage, which in turn has given business leaders an excuse to behave badly.

We know that distrust fuels conspiracy theories and poor behaviour. So it’s hardly surprising that the workforce feels the impact – employee satisfaction scores are at their lowest in 20 years. Change has to come from the top.

Psychological safety

Behavioural science can be a great tool for companies to help understand the hows and whys of deceit: studies have shown that people are prone to justifying dishonesty when it feels socially acceptable or personally beneficial, for instance.

But equally as importantly, employers can use behavioural science to help design interventions that promote transparency and accountability, reward ethical behaviour, and counteract cognitive biases.

One of the most common cognitive biases across leaders and employees alike is overconfidence (one study showed that 73 per cent of US drivers claimed to be better than average – which is statistically impossible).

Everyone, at every level of a company, needs to strive to suppress that bias. For leadership, that means creating an environment where speaking truth to power is permissible; a culture where people feel they can share ideas, debate, and discuss without things getting personal.

Google’s Project Aristotle is a great example of this in action: the initiative revealed that psychological safety – the confidence to take risks or admit mistakes without fear of judgement – is key to high-performing teams. Similarly, pharmaceutical giant Sandoz demonstrated how creating a psychologically safe environment boosted trust: during a six-week initiative focused on individual engagement, employee willingness to communicate openly increased by 12 per cent.

Transparency and accountability are key: these examples highlight how prioritising openness can counteract unethical behaviour while building collaborative and resilient teams.

The power of personas

Leaders must welcome and embrace the diverse thinking offered by everyone across their companies – the introverts and extroverts; the planners and visionaries; the go-getters and tech geeks; the artists and doers – and channel all those skills in service of one purpose and one set of values. It doesn’t serve anyone when a company’s workforce is reduced to a homogeneous set of robots.

That’s where using ‘personas’ – fictionalised profiles built on real data – can be so helpful in gaining insights to shape the way an organisation communicates. Personas enable internal communicators to focus on the truth in people: their wants, likes, idiosyncrasies, and drivers. It’s why behavioural scientists are always so interested in capabilities, opportunities, and motivations that shift behaviour (or what they call the COM-B model).

Southwest Airlines have done this well, creating personas that define the personality types who best deliver customer service and then creating conversation tools, communication, and data to help managers better communicate with their teams. It drove down customer complaints by 20 per cent.

ITV did the same when taking the organisation through a technology transformation. They created digital personas that described their employees’ relationships with tech: the platforms they used, the content consumed, and the length of time spent using tech. They collected this data imaginatively, through a quiz that gave employees the chance to play a game. The resulting personas guided how the communications were crafted and where they were placed.

Creative solutions

Transparent leadership is the only way to truly ensure that ethical considerations are embedded into decision-making processes. The Code of Conduct is still an organisation’s number one tool to guide ethical behaviour and integrity at work. But these are often long, unwieldy, and impenetrable – especially for time-poor employees.

Creative solutions are often required. NatWest faced countless revelations of its employees’ poor decision-making following the 2008 financial crash. The result? An employee base that was terrified of making decisions, fearing similar failure. The answer was a simple tool called The Yes Check, which employees could use to discuss any decision. It posed five simple questions: if any of the answers were ‘no’, staff knew to explore the Code of Conduct in more detail.

This stripped-back approach proved highly effective, enabling quick, confident choices while cutting through corporate jargon. Simple tools like this embed ethics into day-to-day actions, ensuring integrity becomes second nature.

Embedding integrity

The growing normalisation of deceit is a critical challenge for businesses: failure to act risks eroding trust, damaging morale, and undermining organisational success.

But these challenges are also an opportunity: companies willing to invest in psychological safety, persona-led strategies, and clear ethical frameworks can transform these risks into strengths.

By embedding integrity throughout their operations, organisations can rise above the age of deceit. Trust, resilience, and purpose will define the workplaces of tomorrow for those bold enough to lead with principle today. Ethical leadership is more than a moral obligation; it’s a competitive advantage.

Cliff Ettridge is director at The Team.

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