Ninety-eight percent training completion.

A fully constituted Internal Committee. Zero complaints this year. Leadership teams present these three numbers together with real pride (and nothing wrong in that), and together they’re meant to say: we are safe here.

But that need not be the reality. What these numbers show is that the company followed a checklist.

Two numbers worth reading together

Complaints across India’s listed companies have nearly tripled between FY22 and FY25, IT services and banking alone accounting for roughly two-thirds of all cases among the country’s largest firms.

Meanwhile, one assessment of India’s PoSH Act enforcement puts implementation at just 34 out of 100.

These two numbers read together demonstrate a slow yet growing trust in the POSH mechanism. This isn’t simply harassment rising. It might be a signal that people are, for the first time in many workplaces, choosing to trust the POSH mechanism, colliding with the implementation layer that that has not been built in terms of capacity and capability.

Zero complaints which means nothing

Let’s acknowledge one truth: the workplace people actually trust is not the one with the fewest complaints. A company with zero complaints could mean a genuinely safe workplace. It could just as easily mean people have quietly concluded the mechanism doesn’t work, so why bother. I’ve seen both kinds of organisation up close. On paper, they look identical. On floor, you can feel the vibe.

So what should we measure that gives a real picture?

So what should replace complaint counts and training completion rates? Five things I’d put in front of any board serious about this.

Resolution timelines. What share of cases actually close within the statutory ninety-day window? A system that misses its own deadlines is telling people not to use it.

Internal Committee composition, specifically whether the external member’s seat stays filled. A vacant external seat is a structural defect most annual reports never disclose.

Leaders and Managers specific training completion, tracked separately from the all-employee number. That separation is usually where the real gaps hide.

The quality of annual reports, the detailing and the transparency.

And recurrence: do the same names keep showing up as respondents, and were the interim measures and recommendations an IC recommended ever actually implemented? A flat complaint number will never show you that pattern.

The metric which will actually surprise a board

There’s a sixth metric I’d add and it’s the one that tends to make a room go quiet: attrition among women in year two to four of tenure, plotted against complaint volume for the same period. In a company with genuinely low trust, you’ll often see attrition in that band running well above the rest of the workforce, with almost no corresponding rise in complaints. Nobody’s filing anything. They’re just leaving, quietly, and citing ‘personal reasons’ on the way out, better opportunity, family reasons, whatever keeps the exit interview short. I’ve sat through more than one of these exit interviews myself, watching a woman give every answer except the real one, because by that point she’s already decided the system won’t work. That gap, high attrition, low formal complaints, is a far more honest signal than either number alone, and almost nobody puts the two on the same slide.

What this metric costs you to do

None of these are hard to track and monitor. It just requires looking past the numbers that make us comfortable, toward the numbers that tell you that something needs to be done. That’s the real meaning of moving beyond compliance. It isn’t a values statement about culture. It’s a decision to govern this the way you’d govern any other material risk, with real metrics, tracked over time, owned by someone senior enough to answer for them

Link – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-workplace-people-actually-trust-look-like-sonica-edxxc/