The Missing Framework That Connects Broken Trust, Burnout, and Your Bottom Line
By Dr. Debi Silber · Founder, The PBT® Institute · PBS® Researcher · Two-time TEDx Speaker
For years, HR has been asked to solve three problems that appear to be separate: the trust deficit that shows up in culture scores, the burnout epidemic that shows up in absenteeism and healthcare spend, and the retention crisis that shows up in turnover costs. Three problems. Three sets of programs. Three budget conversations.
What if they were one problem? What if the same root cause were driving all three — and what if addressing it once produced improvements across all of the metrics simultaneously?
The framework that unifies them
Post Betrayal Syndrome® (PBS®) is the missing link. My original PhD research identified PBS® as a distinct response and cluster of physical, mental and emotional symptoms that occurs when trust is broken in a significant way — and found that it produces measurable symptoms that show up simultaneously across the trust, wellbeing, and productivity dimensions that HR is tracking as separate problems.
The impaired trust that drives your culture scores, the chronic stress that drives your burnout metrics, the emotional exhaustion that drives your turnover — these are not three different problems. They are three manifestations of the same underlying condition in your workforce.
| One framework. Many symptoms. Every metric you’ve been trying to move, addressed at the root. |
What one investment can do
When organizations address symptoms of PBS® directly — through education and support — they are not investing in separate initiatives. They are making one investment that addresses the root cause of multiple simultaneous workforce challenges.
The trust scores improve because the trust breakdown has been addressed and given a pathway.
The burnout metrics improve because employees are moving through recovery rather than staying stuck in survival.
The turnover numbers improve because employees no longer have to leave to heal.
Three metrics. One framework. That’s the bottom line case for PBS®.
| Connect the dots in your organization · thepbtinstitute.com |
— Dr. Debi Silber is the world’s leading expert on how betrayal and broken trust affect human performance and the founder and CEO of The PBT Institute — the world’s leading organization devoted to betrayal recovery research, education, and transformation — whose research, validated across 100,000+ people in 50+ countries, has produced three groundbreaking discoveries transforming lives, teams, and organizations globally.