“The final goal … is to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.”
Bronisław Malinowski
A PeopleCentriX framework
Ten expectations. Three currencies. No ranking.
The ten things people expect from an employer, and the gap between what was promised and what is delivered on each — so you can write an EVP in the terms your people are already keeping score in. Built from twenty workforce reports and fifty years of research on the employment deal.
Twenty publishers survey a few hundred thousand workers every year, and no two top-fives agree. They cannot. Each is one sample, answering one list, for one publisher, in one month. There is no overall ranking of what people want. There never was — and every EVP written from one is built on a number that will not be there next year.
Download the FrameworkNo form. 10 pages, PDF.
What survives, once the labels come off, is a set of categories — ten of them, in three currencies — that keep surfacing whoever asks and whatever they ask. This page gives you all ten, the evidence behind them, and the one test that keeps outcomes out of your promise. Free, and yours to use.
The claim
There is no such thing as what employees want — only what one sample said, from one list, to one publisher, in one month.
Five claims, each one built on the last — and each one you could argue with.
- 1
The questions decide the ranking.
No survey lists every term; each lists what its publisher sells, such as pay, benefits, flexibility and well-being. A top five can only come from the menu.
- 2
The sample decides it again.
Same questions, different sector, country or month: different order. Every top five is true for one population and generalises to none.
- 3
Only the categories replicate.
Twenty reports, fifty years of instruments, one taxonomy: every term lands on the same ten rows. Rankings move; the map holds.
- 4
A top five is a state, not a trait.
It moves with what happens to you — a new boss, a threatened job, training withheld — not with who you are: across 517 samples, age, tenure, education and gender all sit at ρ ≈ 0.
- 5
Importance is one thing. The gap is what matters.
A term ranked first and honoured costs nothing; a term ranked eighth and broken leaks. Breach tracks engagement at ρ = −0.75 and exits at 0.11 (Rees, Brownell & Kickul, 2026).
The framework
People Expectations Framework™ — three currencies, ten dimensions
The expectation is what the person believes they are owed on a term — the promise as they hold it, whether it was written in the offer letter, said by a hiring manager, implied by the careers page, or simply assumed from what a decent employer does. It is formed before day one and repriced every time circumstances move. Nobody signed it. Everybody remembers it.
The experience is what the person judges they are actually getting on the same term, in the same words — not how they feel about it, which is the engagement survey’s question, but whether the promise is being kept. The distance between the two columns, row by row, is where the deal is honoured or broken. It is the only measurement that explains both the engagement score and the resignation.
Read together, the two columns are the first two links of the People Centricity Formula™: what people believe they are owed, and what they judge they are getting.
| Currency | Dimension and sub-elements | The expectation — what I believe I am owed | The experience — what I judge I am getting |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transactional what I’m given | 1. Compensation & benefits Fair pay, competitive package, priced benefits, recognition, pay transparency | To be paid fairly for what I contribute, on terms I can see | Whether pay keeps pace, the package is competitive, the process is fair, contribution is recognised |
| 2. Security Job continuity, income security, cost-of-living adequacy | That my job and income will hold | Whether continuity is credible, whether income covers the cost of living | |
| 3. Employability Skills currency, external marketability, portable credentials | To be kept marketable outside, not only useful inside | Whether skills stay current, whether another job is findable | |
| 4. Flexibility Where, when and how much; honouring the arrangement promised | The arrangement I was promised, on the terms I was promised | Whether it is honoured in practice, or withdrawn by mandate, manager or surveillance | |
| Relational how I’m treated | 5. Well-being Sustainable workload, boundaries, psychological safety, real support | That the organisation will protect my health and not consume me to deliver the work | Whether demands stay within bounds, boundaries are honoured, support is real rather than a poster |
| 6. Fairness, inclusion & voice Honest dealing, procedural fairness, inclusion, being heard | To be treated honestly, included, and heard on decisions affecting me | Whether promises hold, inclusion is real, voice changes anything | |
| 7. Belonging Connection, colleagues to rely on, leaders to believe, social atmosphere | That I will be part of something — with colleagues I can rely on and leaders I can believe | Whether connection is real across hybrid work, whether my manager shows up for me, whether anyone would notice if I left | |
| 8. Development Skills investment, progression, internal mobility | To be invested in — skills, progression, mobility | Whether opportunities exist, whether progression tracks skill rather than tenure | |
| Ideological what it’s for | 9. Meaningful work Work that matters, skill use, autonomy over how it is done | That my work matters, uses what I am good at, and is mine to shape | Whether contribution is visible, skills are used, judgement is trusted |
| 10. Purpose & values Worthwhile contribution, values acted on, conduct matching claims | That the organisation contributes something worthwhile and acts on its stated values | Whether conduct matches claims |
Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Expectations Framework™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/people-expectations-framework — free to use with attribution.
Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Centricity Formula™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/blog/the-people-centricity-formula — free to use with attribution.
One row, worked
Flexibility, read twice
Take row 4 and read it the way the framework asks: the promise as the person holds it, the delivery as they judge it, and the distance between the two.
1 · The expectation. “Hybrid, as agreed when I joined: two days in the office, three wherever the work is best done.” For a few people this is in the offer letter. For most it was said by a hiring manager, or simply understood — which makes it no less a term of the deal. It is transactional: explicit, bounded, and easy to check.
2 · The experience. A three-day mandate announced in March. Badge data reviewed since. A manager who now asks where you are on Fridays. Nothing in the offer letter has changed; the term has been rewritten by policy, by data and by a question.
3 · The gap, and what it does. The promise held; the delivery shrank. Because the term is transactional, the response is calculative rather than emotional: hours, effort and discretionary contribution are quietly repriced to match the new terms. Nobody resigns over Fridays. They just stop giving the Tuesday evening they used to give.
4 · The evidence. Randstad’s 2026 Workmonitor (27,062 workers, 35 markets) puts the share whose job lets them choose where they work at 53%, down from 60% a year earlier — while 43% say they would not accept a job without that choice. Expectation flat, experience falling: an Expectation Gap opening on one row, across a whole labour market, in twelve months.
Why it matters. An engagement survey would record that people feel less positive, and not why. Read the row twice and you know which promise broke, in which currency, and therefore what the withdrawal will look like — before it shows up in the numbers you already track.
The three currencies
Each currency breaks — and mends — its own way.
Transactional
What I’m given · rows 1–4
Economic and bounded. Break it, and people recalculate: hours, effort and discretionary contribution are quietly repriced. Calculative withdrawal.
First to go: the discretionary extra — hours, ideas, help nobody asked for. The job still gets done.
Relational
How I’m treated · rows 5–8
Open-ended, built on trust. Break it, and people feel betrayed. Whether a breach turns into a violation depends on the relationship that came before it. Emotional withdrawal.
First to go: trust in the organisation as a partner. Every later decision is read through the breach.
Ideological
What it’s for · rows 9–10
A shared cause. Break it, and people who were never personally harmed protest, speak up or leave on principle; those who stay withdraw their belief rather than their effort. Principled withdrawal.
First to go: identification. People stop saying “we” — and some stop pretending.
The order is the order of visibility, not importance: transactional terms are written down, relational terms are implied, ideological terms are almost never written anywhere. Which one a person feels first depends on their circumstances.
The evidence
Breach drains effort long before it costs headcount.
Meta-analytic correlates of psychological contract breach across 517 samples (Rees, Brownell & Kickul, 2026). Corrected ρ; by convention 0.10 is small, 0.30 moderate, 0.50 large. Bars to the left fall when the deal breaks; bars to the right rise.
What the graph says
Breach correlates most with what people give voluntarily — engagement at −0.75, then satisfaction, perceived support, commitment and trust, all around −0.5 — and with what they carry home: burnout rises at 0.42. Core task performance holds comparatively (−0.24). Intentions to leave move (0.40); actual departures barely do (0.11).
What it implies
A broken term shows up first as withdrawn discretion and depleted people, not as vacancies. Exit data is the last and weakest signal; by the time it moves, engagement has been gone for a while. Read the gap where it appears first: discretionary effort, trust in the organisation, exhaustion. And because breach is a discrepancy people monitor continuously and register through small, repeated shortfalls, the repair is standing clarity about which terms hold — not a one-off intervention.
Using the framework
Thirty minutes with a line leader tells you which promises you never made.
Take your EVP, careers page or offer letter and place every promise on one of the ten rows. Anything that will not land is an outcome or a brand line, not a term — and cannot be kept, because it was never made. Then count the empty rows. Most EVPs fill four, promise three of them in words no one could test, and leave the ideological currency to the sustainability report. That count is where the method starts. Four moves follow; the full method arrives in December.
Ask what they were promised, not what they want.
Four moves for the next time you rebuild an EVP, a listening strategy or a retention plan.
- 1
Ask both questions, on every row.
What do you believe you are owed? What are you getting? Two items per row, twenty in all. Never ask for a ranking — a ranking measures the questionnaire, not the person.
- 2
Segment by circumstance, not cohort.
What predicts a broken deal is what is happening to you, not who you are: abusive supervision (ρ = 0.39), job security (−0.37), training provided (−0.50), office politics (0.55). Age, tenure, education, gender: all ρ ≈ 0.
- 3
Read the gap, not the score.
A high expectation met is a strength; a modest one broken is a leak. Rank the rows by distance between the two columns, in the segments you can least afford to lose. That is your priority list — and it will not match the industry’s.
- 4
Write only terms you can keep.
An EVP is a promise with a signature on it. When a term moves — a mandate, a freeze, a restructuring — name it before people discover it. They monitor the deal continuously; they will notice before you announce.
Questions
Why ten, and other fair objections.
What is the People Expectations Framework™?
A map of the ten things people expect from an employer, grouped into three currencies — transactional (what I’m given), relational (how I’m treated), ideological (what it’s for) — with two readings on every row: the expectation as the person holds it, and the experience as they judge it. It is built from twenty global workforce reports published since January 2025, laid over the foundational instruments that have measured the employment deal since 1976.
How is it different from an engagement survey?
An engagement survey asks how people feel. The framework asks what they were promised and whether it is being delivered — row by row, in the words they use. The first takes the temperature of the deal; the second reads its terms. Keep both. Only the second tells you which promise is breaking, and therefore what to fix.
How is it different from EVP pillars?
A pillar is a brand element: it can be admired but not kept. A term is a promise, in a currency, that can be delivered or withdrawn — and tested against experience on its own. Rewrite your pillars as terms and the EVP stops being a poster and becomes a ledger, which is the only form of it your people were ever reading.
Why ten rows, and why is engagement not one of them?
Ten is what remains when twenty publishers’ labels are laid over the foundational instruments and the duplicates are struck. Engagement is not a row because it fails the provision test: an employer cannot change it directly by changing what it provides — it changes it by delivering on the ten. Engagement is the dashboard reading, not the promise. The same test removes work-life balance, which is two provisions wearing one name: flexibility (4) and well-being (5).
Is the order a ranking?
No, and it is deliberately not one. The order runs from the promises most likely to be written down (transactional) to the ones almost never written anywhere (ideological). Which row a person feels first depends on their circumstances, and it moves when they do — which is why any framework that ranks the ten is describing last year’s sample, not your people.
Can I use it, and what is it based on?
Yes — free, with attribution to PeopleCentriX, in your EVP work, your board paper or your own research. It rests on twenty global workforce reports from twenty publishers, all published since January 2025 (Appendix A), and eight foundational sources in psychological contract and job-design research (Appendix B). Every cell of the corpus grid is verified against the source document.
Appendix — method
How it was built
Twenty global workforce reports published since January 2025 that report what employees expect, want or value were read — one per publisher (Appendix A) — not for what it says people want, but for the categories it assumed before a single answer came in. Each report’s labels were laid over the foundational instruments that have measured the employment deal since 1976 (Appendix B), the duplicates struck, and one test applied to every remaining candidate: the provision test — can the employer change this directly, by changing what it provides? If yes, a term of the deal; if no, an outcome for the dashboard. Ten rows is what is left.
Limits, declared. Twenty reports are a corpus, not a census. A tick records that a question is asked, not how people answered it.
The evidence has limits too. The meta-analytic evidence base is 80% cross-sectional and mostly Western and white-collar; read the correlations as associations, not causes.
Why “expectations”. Rees et al. find expectation-based measures of breach track outcomes as well as promise-based ones — and better for support (ρ = −0.76 vs −0.64) and satisfaction (−0.63 vs −0.56). What people believe they are owed is a valid yardstick, promised or not.
Appendix A
Twenty reports ask the same ten questions — unevenly.
Twenty reports, twenty publishers, all published since January 2025, read against the ten rows. A tick means the report asks about that expectation and publishes a figure; a blank means it does not. Read the column totals as coverage — how often the industry asks — never as importance. Every column is populated. Only two of the twenty rows match. That is the finding. Flexibility is asked by nine of twenty reports; purpose and values by eight, the fewest. The blind spots are in the questionnaires, not in the people.
| Report | Pay | Security | Employ-ability | Flexibility | Well-being | Fairness & voice | Belonging | Develop-ment | Meaningful work | Purpose & values |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01. ADP 2026 People at Work | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| 02. Aon 2025 Employee Sentiment Study | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| 03. AXA 2026 Mind Health Report | ✓ | |||||||||
| 04. Deloitte 2026 Global Human Capital Trends | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| 05. EY 2025 Work Reimagined Survey | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
| 06. Gallup 2026 State of the Global Workplace | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| 07. Gensler 2026 Global Workplace Survey | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||
| 08. Glassdoor 2025 Worklife Trends | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||||
| 09. ILO 2026 World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends | ✓ | ✓ | ||||||||
| 10. Indeed Hiring Lab 2025 Workforce Insights Survey | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| 11. LinkedIn 2025 What Candidates Want (Talent Drivers) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 12. ManpowerGroup 2026 Global Talent Barometer | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| 13. Mercer 2026 Global Talent Trends | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| 14. Michael Page 2026 Talent Trends (US) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| 15. Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| 16. PwC 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| 17. Qualtrics 2026 Employee Experience Trends | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||||
| 18. Randstad 2026 Workmonitor | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| 19. Universum 2026 Talent Outlook | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| 20. WorldatWork 2026 State of Rewards | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Reports reporting the expectation | 13 | 15 | 11 | 9 | 19 | 13 | 15 | 17 | 10 | 8 |
Engagement, thriving, satisfaction, trust and eNPS are outcomes, not terms of the deal, and are never coded to a row — which is why measurement-led reports look sparse. Work-life balance is split by lever: control over where and when → flexibility; room in the load, stress and burnout → well-being. Two rows carry a caveat: the ILO reports labour-market conditions rather than what workers say they expect; the WorldatWork sample is largely HR professionals. Every cell traces to the source document.
Appendix B
Academic literature — the foundational instruments
Which foundational source each row descends from
| Rows | Descends from | What it contributed |
|---|---|---|
| 1–4 Transactional | Rousseau (1990, 1995, 2000); Herriot, Manning & Kidd (1997) | The inventory of employer obligations; the transactional–relational distinction and its inventory; the content analysis of what employers were expected to provide |
| 5–8 Relational | Rousseau (1995, 2000); Herriot et al. (1997); Freese & Schalk (2008) | Fairness, respect, support, development and social atmosphere as relational obligations; the review that consolidated how they are measured |
| 9 Meaningful work | Hackman & Oldham (1976) | Job content — significance, skill variety, autonomy — as an expectation in its own right |
| 10 Purpose & values | Thompson & Bunderson (2003) | The ideological currency: the organisation’s obligation to a cause the employee values |
| What the gap predicts | Rees, Brownell & Kickul (2026) | Across 517 samples, breach correlates with engagement at −0.75 and with actual turnover at 0.11; expectation-based measures predict as well as promise-based ones — the reason every row is read twice |
What the framework adds: the 2025–2026 evidence layer, the provision test that keeps outcomes off the list, and the two-reading structure — expectation and experience on every row.
The sources
Rousseau, D. M. (1990). New hire perceptions of their own and their employer’s obligations: A study of psychological contracts. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 11(5), 389–400.
Rousseau, D. M. (1995). Psychological contracts in organizations: Understanding written and unwritten agreements. Sage.
Rousseau, D. M. (2000). Psychological Contract Inventory: Technical report. Carnegie Mellon University.
Herriot, P., Manning, W. E. G., & Kidd, J. M. (1997). The content of the psychological contract. British Journal of Management, 8(2), 151–162.
Thompson, J. A., & Bunderson, J. S. (2003). Violations of principle: Ideological currency in the psychological contract. Academy of Management Review, 28(4), 571–586.
Freese, C., & Schalk, R. (2008). How to measure the psychological contract? A critical criteria-based review of measures. South African Journal of Psychology, 38(2), 269–286.
Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250–279.
Rees, R. R., Brownell, K. M., & Kickul, J. (2026). Beyond exchange and affect: An updated meta-analytic review and regulatory framework for psychological contract breach. Journal of Business and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-026-10123-1
Cite the framework as: Dulac, T. (2026, September). People Expectations Framework™. PeopleCentriX. https://www.peoplecentrix.eu/people-expectations-framework — free to use with attribution.
Put it to work
Your EVP is written once, in pillars. It is scored every day, in terms — and not by you.
Put your EVP against the ten rows. Which terms does it write down, which does it imply, and which does it never mention?
Every Sunday this autumn, WeAreHuman@Work reads one row against the year’s evidence. In December it hands you the method for an EVP you can keep.
When you want the gap measured in your own organisation — what your people believe they were promised, row by row, against what they are getting — that is People Centricity. It is what PeopleCentriX does.
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