Newmeasures: Insights for an exceptional workforce
CATEGORIES: EMPLOYEE LISTENING
Key Findings From Our 2025 Employee Experience Trends Report
- Wendy Mack, Vice President
Every year we analyze our accumulated client data to provide a window into employee experience trends. Our 2024 data show that general engagement levels are steady, and executive engagement has bounced back after dipping in 2023.
As the world of work continues to evolve at a staggering pace, this newfound energy will be critical for crafting cultures that can ride the wave of constant change. While it’s evident that employees need a clear and compelling vision to get behind, they also crave opportunities to help co-create the future. Thus, leveraging employee listening to build workplaces centered around the human experience is more important than ever.
While most news is positive, organizations must remain vigilant in maintaining what works and improving as new challenges emerge. As I reflected on the overall trends and specific statistics, three findings stood out.
What sets our 2025 Employee Experience Trends Report apart from others you’ve read is our focus on organizations like yours. Major corporations often make the headlines, but small businesses are the foundation of the economy. We aim to provide insights relevant to your organization by benchmarking against peers who share similar dynamics and confront comparable obstacles.
Organizations in our dataset ranged from 12 employees up to 29,000.
The average organization employed around 2,800 people.
Finding #1: Senior Leadership Drive Engagement Levels to Soar or Plummet
A clear theme from the 2024 data is that employees are looking to senior leaders for motivation — and their engagement is rising or falling based on what they see. When leaders show up with confidence, clarity, and a compelling vision for the future, employees feel energized and engaged. But when that leadership presence is lacking, motivation takes a hit. This year, more than ever, senior leaders aren’t just influencing engagement, they’re defining it.
Finding #2: Employees Are Seeking a Mutual Exchange of Value
Reciprocity is a powerful human norm. When people work hard and pour themselves into a company, they want to feel that they receive benefits on par with their contributions. In today’s world of work that means not only fair compensation, but also the feeling that senior leaders reciprocate with attention and connection. This year’s data show that employees are most likely to leave due to factors such as compensation and benefits, a lack of career opportunities, feeling undervalued, and poor work-life balance. While relationships cause people to stay, the data clearly indicate that employees are making decisions to leave when what they receive doesn’t match what they feel is commensurate with what they are contributing.
Finding #3: Belonging Must Be Part of the Bargain
Since 2021, belonging has remained a top driver of employee engagement, proving that it’s not just a passing trend, but a fundamental need in the workplace. Employees expect more than surface-level inclusion efforts; they want a culture where they feel valued, heard, and connected. The best workplaces don’t treat belonging as an afterthought — they build it proactively.
Compelling Statistics
In addition to the key findings, I always look forward to the work our research team does to uncover relationships between perceptions and outcomes. Here are a few of the most compelling statistics from this year’s report:
2025 Employee Experience Trends
The goal of gathering employee feedback is to provide insights that inform actions we can take to enhance the employee experience and drive organizational performance. While the key findings outlined above are critical to note, we’ve also identified three emerging challenges in 2025. Organizations wanting to create compelling and differentiating employee experiences in 2025 and beyond must be aware of these trends:
Change fatigue
Productivity pressure
AI anxiety
To read our full analysis and learn how you can leverage employee listening to start tackling these trends in your organization and improve employee engagement and retention, download our 2025 Employee Experience Trends Report.
Wendy Mack
Vice President
Wendy Mack has been helping business and HR leaders transform their organizations for more than two decades. She is the author of numerous books and articles on the topics of leadership, learning, change, and communication. Connect with Wendy on LinkedIn.