Employee Experience Predictions for 2026
Introduction
This report synthesizes perspectives from more than a dozen Perceptyx Workforce Transformation Consultants and Behavioral Scientists who work daily with Fortune 500 organizations across industries. Drawing on longitudinal research from over 20 million employee survey responses, customer data, and frontline observations, these experts identify the trends they expect to define employee experience in 2026.
These predictions emerge from patterns already visible in employee feedback, from struggles customers are navigating now, and from research that reveals how the drivers of engagement have fundamentally shifted. Our analysis deliberately challenges conventional wisdom: that engagement scores alone tell the full story, that stable retention signals organizational health, that change initiatives can stack indefinitely without consequence. We examine how AI tools promise transformation but demand careful human oversight, why frontline workers face conditions that traditional annual surveys fail to capture, and how career mobility has become entangled with identity, fear, and rapid skill obsolescence.
Organizations that recognize these patterns early will be positioned to adapt; those that continue operating on outdated assumptions will find themselves increasingly disconnected from workforce reality.
When Engagement Metrics Mislead: Turning Data Into Insight
The U.S. labor market closed 2025 in a “low-hire-low-fire” environment, with nonfarm payroll showing little net change since April. November added just 64,000 jobs while unemployment rose to 4.6%, the highest rate since September 2021. For HR leaders, this stagnation creates a deceptive calm: retention looks stable and engagement surveys may show employees intend to stay. The question isn’t whether people intend to stay so much as whether they’re still showing up mentally and emotionally.
Most organizations treat engagement as a simple binary. HR leaders pull aggregate scores from annual surveys and declare victory or concern based on whether the needle moved. This approach misses complexity. Engagement indices typically combine four distinct indicators: pride in company, willingness to recommend, intent to stay, and intrinsic motivation. When leaders look only at the average, they lose the diagnostic value each indicator provides.
The Retention Trap
Consider what happens when intent to stay rises while intrinsic motivation falls. During economic uncertainty, employees often report stronger intentions to remain. Perceptyx observed this pattern during the 2020 pandemic. However, retention alone doesn’t guarantee productivity. If employees stay because leaving feels risky rather than because work is meaningful, organizations face a workforce that shows up physically but checks out mentally. Intrinsic motivation remains a strong predictor of high performance, and a dip signals productivity risks that aggregate scores obscure.
The push toward shorter surveys compounds this problem. One-question surveys sacrifice the predictive power that comes from measuring engagement’s component parts. Leaders need granularity to distinguish between employees who stay because they’re thriving and those who stay because they’re stuck.
When Strong Brands Mask Weak Management
Strong organizational brands can inflate engagement scores independent of what leaders actually do. One Perceptyx customer with exceptional brand recognition consistently posted high engagement numbers. Yet when researchers examined correlation between engagement and manager support, some locations reported high engagement alongside low manager support. Comments revealed borderline toxic behaviors that raw engagement numbers failed to surface. Geographic and cultural context matters equally. Survey response patterns vary systematically by region, reflecting cultural norms around expressing satisfaction rather than actual differences in experience quality.
“If people are sticking around, but they’re mentally and emotionally checked out, or they’re burning out, that could be a major flag for organizations that are physically retaining people but not positioning them for success.”
The Danger of Scores That Only Go Up
Many executives assume engagement scores should rise continuously, treating any decline as failure. Major changes naturally produce temporary dips as employees adopt wait-and-see postures. If scores don’t drop after significant policy changes, leaders should question whether the survey still captures actual sentiment. Tying bonuses to engagement scores can encourage managers to influence responses rather than improving conditions. Organizations then face metrics that look healthy while actual experience deteriorates.
In short, engagement data remains valuable, but only when leaders treat it as the beginning of analysis rather than the end.
Organizational Change Fatigue Is Real. Are You Spotting and Addressing It?
As 2025 closed, companies including Instagram, Fox, and TikTok announced five-day return-to-office mandates set to take effect in early 2026. These mandates arrived alongside continued restructuring, with tech companies alone laying off more than 66,000 workers between May and November. Perceptyx data shows that perceptions of how change is handled have declined for two consecutive years, even as change management has become the single strongest predictor of employee engagement.
Fatigue Hides in Unexpected Places
Organizations that directly measure change perceptions have a clear line of sight into how employees experience transformation. Nevertheless, change fatigue often surfaces through indirect indicators: confidence in senior leadership, belief in strategy, and career connection all decline when employees feel overwhelmed. Perceptyx consultants report seeing leaders surprised to find employees exhausted rather than energized by what they considered exciting pivots.
Change fatigue doesn’t discriminate between positive and negative change. Even changes employees support can deplete their capacity to absorb the next initiative. Well-being data provides another window into fatigue. Managers bear particular pressure during periods of change. One Perceptyx customer combined survey data with benefits usage to identify well-being declines before any movement in retention metrics.
Why Retention Numbers Lie During Uncertainty
Turnover becomes unreliable precisely when change fatigue is highest. During economic uncertainty, employees stay put regardless of experience. The 4.6% unemployment rate coincides with a "low-hire-low-fire" market. Persistently low turnover in this environment is often misread as evidence of effective change management, when it more accurately reflects constrained mobility. Meanwhile, declining likelihood to recommend, eroding accomplishment, and growing skepticism about career fit predict departure waves once markets loosen. Perceptyx research shows only 58% of executives express confidence in how their organization manages change.
What Separates Successful Transformation
Organizations that navigate change effectively establish clear priorities and communicate what they will not pursue. They align leaders around shared goals before expecting alignment from the broader workforce. They acknowledge difficulty rather than dismissing concerns as resistance. Belonging functions as psychological ground during uncertainty. Employees with strong belonging are 2.4 times more likely to feel supported during change. AI adoption has emerged as a specific test case: employees in organizations with clear AI policies are nearly eight times more likely to believe AI positively impacts workplace culture.
“The organizations that engage employees most effectively won’t just manage change. They’ll make the future feel real. If I don’t know where we’re going, or how my role fits into that future, how can I know if I belong today?”
“You can’t manage transformation if your people are running on empty. Change fatigue isn’t just a risk, it’s a signal. But it’s a signal that, if spotted early, can be addressed and become a source of strength.”
“Companies that align their leaders around shared goals, reinforce the right behaviors at all levels, and provide clear AI guidance will outpace their competitors by building clarity, confidence, and collective action.”
AI Can Listen, But It Can't Lead: What Still Drives Employee Experience in 2026?
AI adoption in the workplace crossed a threshold in 2025. McKinsey reports that 91% of organizations now use at least one AI technology, with 75% of knowledge workers integrating AI tools daily. ChatGPT alone exceeds 300 million weekly users. Yet our research has found that workers worry about job displacement, and many Gen Z employees doubt their organizations are using AI in ways that align with their values.
Active listening strategies have become mere table stakes. AI promises to accelerate these programs by processing vast unstructured data and surfacing patterns human analysts might miss. Chatbots and behavioral nudges are expanding what organizations can measure. Nevertheless, AI cannot replace human judgment. It can gather input and summarize patterns but cannot set priorities, make trade-offs, or build trust.
The Leadership Gap in AI Enthusiasm
Perceptyx research reveals executives and managers use AI more frequently and express greater enthusiasm than individual contributors. The problem emerges as enthusiasm cascades downward. Managers must simultaneously use AI themselves, translate strategy to teams, and support skeptical direct reports. For frontline workers, AI relevance may be unclear when jobs center on direct human interaction. Additionally, younger workers express more skepticism about ethical deployment, requiring transparency about data collection and safeguards.
Trust as the Foundation for AI-Enhanced Listening
Organizations that successfully integrate AI treat adoption as a trust contract: clear consent mechanisms, firm boundaries on data use, and visible follow-through demonstrating input leads to improvement. Healthcare illustrates both promise and peril. For example, AI-powered tools can reduce administrative burden, but raise questions about opt-out rights and data security. Our research has found that retail workers express some of the lowest trust in organizational AI deployment. The pattern holds across industries: employees who understand how AI will be used and retain agency over participation are far more likely to accept it.
Where Humans Remain Irreplaceable
AI excels at processing scale: analyzing thousands of survey responses, identifying sentiment shifts, flagging emerging concerns. What AI cannot do is provide context, empathy, and judgment. When survey results reveal declining engagement, AI can shed additional light on the problem but determining root cause and deciding appropriate actions to take requires human interpretation. Organizations that align AI investments with employee preferences will see better participation and more authentic feedback.
“AI can gather input, summarize patterns, and deliver insights. But it can't set priorities, make trade-offs, or build trust. Employees still need human leaders to interpret what AI hears and act on it.”
“Employee listening programs will begin to transform into continuous sensing systems where AI spots patterns in real time, and humans decide what they mean and what to do next. AI in listening is going mainstream, but only in companies that treat it like a trust contract. Everyone else is just building a smarter surveillance machine.”
Retention Is Not the Only Goal: Understanding Who Leaves and Why
The term "job hugging" entered workplace vocabulary in 2025 to describe employees clinging to positions not because they're thriving but because they fear what awaits elsewhere. With our research showing workers watching for opportunities even as quit rates remain below Great Resignation peaks, organizations face a challenge: retention numbers look stable while the workforce grows disengaged. The question, then, is whether those staying are the ones you need, and whether they're positioned to perform.
Beyond Intent to Stay
Perceptyx uses a four-item engagement index measuring pride, willingness to recommend, intent to stay, and intrinsic motivation. Intent to stay predicts retention, but high intent during economic anxiety doesn't signal health. The revealing metric is intrinsic motivation, which is the strongest predictor of performance. When intent rises while motivation falls, organizations face a stable but underperforming workforce. Employees who wouldn't recommend their employer are sending a clear signal: “We are present but not engaged, and likely to leave when markets improve.”
“When it comes to winning in retention, it’s all about the W: Who is leaving? What’s the primary reason? When are they leaving? And where possible, where are they going? By listening and gathering these insights, organizations move from reactive to strategic.”
The Leadership Connection
Change management and confidence in senior leadership have emerged as top engagement drivers. Employees who feel confident in leaders and see clear organizational direction engage at dramatically higher levels. Frontline workers present a specific listening challenge, as they often possess valuable operational insights that organizations fail to capture. Structured listening programs that give frontline workers genuine agency can rebuild their sense of feeling valued.
From Reactive to Strategic
The shift from reactive to strategic retention requires understanding the full picture: who is leaving, what drives departure, when in tenure they leave, and where they're going. Organizations that treat retention as simply keeping headcount stable miss the larger opportunity. The goal is not so much preventing attrition as building a workforce that performs, adapts, and drives success.
“Losing people from your organization has a real strategic cost, especially when people are highly tenured, possess specialized skill sets, or when they're considered high-potential employees. That's why it's important to understand who is leaving and why. Perceptyx has found that having a poor manager boosts an employee's risk of turnover by 5x.”
What Drives People to Leave
Our research has found that poor management is a significant predictor of attrition. Employees with poor managers are four times more likely to leave their jobs. Career development concerns follow, varying by stage: early-career employees want skill building, mid-career employees want trajectory visibility, and late-career employees want to stay relevant. Lack of belonging rounds out the top drivers. Compensation concerns have grown more prominent, but employees citing pay as their exit reason show significantly lower confidence in leadership in prior surveys. The compensation complaint often masks deeper concern about viable paths to success.
“If your only goal is employee retention, you're aiming too low. Listening isn't just about keeping people from leaving. It's understanding who's staying, why they're staying, and what they need to thrive. The real opportunity in 2026 is using employee voice to fuel effectiveness and endurance.”
Should Everyone See the Same Survey? Why Role-Based Listening Matters
The average employee survey has shrunk from 65-70 items to around 45 questions. Organizations face constant pressure to shorten further. Yet brevity creates tension: shorter surveys sacrifice specificity needed to understand meaningfully different experiences. A frontline manufacturing worker, staff nurse, and data scientist occupy fundamentally different environments. Asking identical questions produces data that's comparable but potentially irrelevant to any of them.
Mass personalization describes what leading organizations are implementing: listening programs that deliver tailored experiences at scale, asking the right questions of the right people.
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All
Branched surveys route different employee segments through different question paths. An hourly worker might see items about scheduling and physical conditions. An executive might see questions about strategic alignment. Perceptyx consultants report that branching has moved from occasional practice to near-universal recommendation. One customer reduced their core survey to just 12 items while deploying 55 branched questions. Each employee saw only 15 questions, but the organization captured granular data that generic surveys couldn't provide.
Branching can operate on multiple dimensions: response-based, demographic, and division-specific. The caution lies in maintaining valid comparison groups. The most effective strategies reserve personalization for questions where populations genuinely need different items while maintaining core measures that enable cross-group comparison.
Meeting Employees Where They Are
Every interaction people have with technology reflects algorithms tailoring content to preferences. Employees who experience this personalization elsewhere notice when workplace surveys feel generic. Response rates reflect this: when questions resonate with daily experience, employees engage more fully.
When questions feel disconnected, employees rush through or abandon surveys entirely. Targeted survey data, by contrast, enables targeted action planning. For example, a frontline population struggling with scheduling needs different solutions than professionals struggling with career visibility.
The Conversational Frontier
Conversational listening opens different possibilities through AI-powered dialogue that allows respondents to guide conversations based on what matters most. Stay interviews, exit surveys, and lifecycle touchpoints can all benefit from conversational approaches that probe deeper when responses indicate something worth exploring. The technology exists to move beyond generic surveys. Organizations that embrace role-based listening will surface insights competitors miss.
“In 2026, I believe many organizations will look to deliver a more curated approach to employee listening, one that enhances the employee experience through personalization and activates highly targeted action plans for behavior change.”
“We're going to see leading companies embrace mass personalization, including in employee listening and employee experience management. A frontline manager, a staff nurse, and a data scientist shouldn't necessarily answer the exact same questions. They have different work experiences, different work environments, and we have the opportunity to ensure that the listening program reflects those realities.”
The Frontline Listening Gap: Why Retail and Healthcare Workers Need Different Approaches
Frontline workers represent the face of organizations to customers and patients, yet their voices remain systematically underheard. Perceptyx research surveying 21,000 frontline employees found that 53% who deal directly with the public have encountered verbally abusive or threatening customers. Retail workers face the highest exposure at 61%.
Employees who've dealt with unruly customers are 1.3 times more likely to be seeking new jobs, 1.9 times more likely to disagree they work in a safe environment, and 2.2 times more likely to report work stress affecting physical health. Among retail workers, 81% report burnout, and 40% say their manager rarely checks on their stress.
Retail: When Annual Surveys Arrive Too Late
Retail frontline workers operate in fundamentally different environments. They're hourly, shift-based employees where needs change weekly. Traditional annual surveys capture a single snapshot that may be months old. Many retail customers are moving toward continuous listening, including conversational listening gathering feedback in the flow of work.
What matters to frontline populations differs markedly from corporate employees: belonging, feeling valued, having voice in local decisions, and growth opportunities. Perceptyx research confirms feeling heard is a top driver for retail frontline, ranking above compensation. High turnover means point-in-time surveys miss significant portions of the population entirely.
Healthcare: Beyond Pizza Parties and Resilience Training
Healthcare faces three simultaneous challenges: staffing shortages, layoffs from consolidation, and voluntary departures seeking better conditions. The retention crisis hits hardest among early and mid-career clinical staff. Nurses with three to ten years of experience now report highest intent to leave, pursuing cross-sector mobility to technology companies or outpatient settings offering greater autonomy.
Frontline healthcare workers have grown frustrated with responses addressing symptoms rather than causes. Resilience training doesn't address staffing ratios, psychological safety concerns, or emotional weight of care work.
Employees telling customer organizations that "we're sick of the pizza parties" is one example of widespread exhaustion with performative wellness initiatives implemented even as structural problems persist. Several healthcare organizations now track patient safety scores alongside engagement data, recognizing workforce instability affects care quality.
Listening That Leads to Action
The common thread is the gap between listening and meaningful response. Workers want their voices heard, but they need feedback to translate into concrete change. For retail, this means ensuring store-level leaders have both insights and authority to act locally. For healthcare, meaningful response requires addressing structural issues organizations have treated as fixed constraints. Both sectors benefit from short, frequent touchpoints, mobile-accessible formats, and conversational methods.
“Our research at Perceptyx shows that burnout among healthcare workers isn't just about workload. It's about feeling unseen and unheard. Caregivers are telling us they need more than pizza parties and resilience training. They need meaningful action on staffing, psychological safety, and the emotional toll of care work. Listening in healthcare is evolving, and leaders who respond with empathy and structural support are the ones retaining talent.”
“The retailers who win won't just listen more, they'll listen smarter. Real-time insights from frontline employees and local leaders will become as essential as revenue data in predicting performance. The organizations that act fastest on these signals will outpace their competitors in both talent and customer loyalty.”
“If you're still only running traditional annual surveys and calling that listening, you're behind. Frontline employees need real-time ways to speak up, and they need to see that what they say actually leads to change. By 2026, this kind of feedback loop won't be a bonus. It's how you keep people, protect your brand, and run smoother stores.”
Job Hugging and the Identity Crisis: When Staying Put Becomes the Risk
The voluntary quit rate has hovered around 2% for most of 2025, one of the lowest levels in nearly a decade. The Great Resignation has become the "Great Stay," with employee turnover falling from 177% in 2023 to roughly 50% in 2025. Workers are "job hugging," clinging to roles even when doing so limits growth or leadership potential.
Perceptyx's 2025 Benchmark Megatrends report found four of the top five drivers of intent to stay now relate directly to career growth. Employees planning to remain are three times more likely to believe they can achieve career goals at their current organization. Yet career growth fell out of top engagement drivers entirely in 2023 and 2024. Employees want development, but fear has overtaken ambition.
The Identity Beneath the Job Title
Work is a core component of identity, and AI threatens not just jobs but the sense of self that comes with professional competence. When defining skills face automation, the question becomes existential: who am I if my skill becomes obsolete?
This identity instability drives people to choose safety over growth. Employees are refusing stretch assignments, declining internal mobility, and downplaying ideas. Retention numbers may look healthy while actual experience deteriorates.
The Career Ladder Dissolves
The traditional career model assumed linear progression. AI disrupts this fundamentally, given that skills once capable of propelling advancement may be automated by next quarter. Advancement increasingly means lateral movement and skill acquisition rather than upward progression. Development needs vary by career stage: early-career employees want rapid skill building, mid-career employees want clarity about advancement, and late-career employees want targeted development honoring experience while keeping them relevant.
Managers at the Breaking Point
As experience collapses toward the manager, frontline leaders face impossible demands: execute strategy while mediating change, demonstrate AI proficiency while coaching anxious reports, project confidence while managing their own uncertainty. Perceptyx data shows managers are among the heaviest AI users but struggle cascading confidence about AI strategy to teams. Poor management drives turnover risk by five times, but the role itself has become unsustainable under current demands.
Making Growth Feel Possible Again
AI-enabled personalized development can deliver coaching at scale. Development conversations must shift from "what's your five-year plan" to "what skills are you building, and how might they serve you as your role evolves." Psychological safety takes heightened importance. Employees need confidence they can experiment without a career penalty. Internal mobility programs demonstrate that staying doesn't mean stagnating. Organizations that make it safe for people to raise their hands again will thrive in 2026.
“AI is reshaping what skills matter, but it's leadership that determines whether people feel safe enough to grow. Career mobility isn't blocked by technology. It's often blocked by culture, identity, and fear. AI can suggest paths. Leaders make people believe those paths are real.”
“One of the biggest EX trends I expect to see in 2026 will be the continued rise of something we're calling job hugging. While it's not a formal research term, job hugging describes a growing behavioral pattern in organizations where employees are clinging tightly to their current roles, even when doing so limits their innovation, their growth, or even their leadership potential, because change feels riskier than staying still. People aren't just protecting their jobs — they're protecting their identity while trying to answer that question: who am I if the thing I'm best at becomes automated? The organizations that will win next year will be the ones that make it safe for people to speak up, experiment, and grow again.”
“AI isn't just changing jobs — it's changing what a career is. The career ladder that we're used to is shifting. In 2026, mobility will look like learning fast, shifting roles, and building a personal brand around adaptability and trust. But here's the catch: if leaders don't create space for that kind of growth, people will cling to what they know, especially in a market that's uncertain. That's the real risk — not just AI, but career stagnation in the face of it.”
“Employee experience is becoming manager-centric. People take cues less from senior leaders and more from what their manager explains, models, and follows through on, so managers are the credibility bridge in non-stop change. That bridge only holds if they advocate both ways, translating strategy down and frontline reality up early enough to shape decisions. As AI tools reshape work fast, managers have to interpret what it means for roles and standards, coach new ways of working, and flag risks early. Equip managers in AI and it becomes a trust and capacity boost. Unequipped managers make it feel like disruption.”
The Frontline Leader Paradox: Hungry for Development, Last in Line to Receive It
Frontline leaders oversee most of the typical organization's workforce, yet they remain the last group to receive systematic development support. Perceptyx research shows 24% of employees report working for their worst manager ever, unchanged since 2023. Among employees with ineffective managers, 85% are actively job seeking and only 1 in 5 are fully engaged. Poor management costs U.S. businesses $408 billion annually in turnover and up to $211 billion more in lost productivity. The largest leadership population, responsible for the majority of employees, receives the least investment.
The traditional defense centered on scale. Organizations could justify intensive development for 200 senior leaders but struggled to deliver equivalent programming to 2,000 frontline managers. But AI-powered development tools, personalized nudging, and continuous feedback mechanisms have eliminated such excuses. The question in 2026 is no longer whether frontline leader development can scale, but whether organizations have the will and wherewithal to make it happen.
The Overlooked Majority
When organizations discuss leadership development, they instinctively think about high potentials and senior executives. Frontline leaders get attention only after other priorities have consumed available resources. Yet Perceptyx research has shown that these frontline leaders are hungry for development. They actively seek career growth and learning opportunities, and lack of these opportunities ranks among primary reasons they leave. When development is offered, frontline leaders engage at rates equivalent to high potentials. The investment gap reflects organizational priorities, not employee disengagement.
Because frontline leaders work closest to teams, development interventions at this level produce greater gains in team-level outcomes than equivalent investments at higher organizational levels. Behavioral changes translate quickly into measurable improvements. Organizations spending heavily on executive coaching while neglecting frontline development are optimizing the wrong lever.
The Change Translation Crisis
The gap becomes most damaging during organizational transformation. When companies announce strategic shifts, they expect frontline leaders to translate messages for their teams. But Perceptyx consultants observe a troubling pattern: frontline leaders often show parallel drops in clarity, empowerment, and confidence alongside direct reports. They're asked to deliver messages they don't understand, project confidence they don't feel, advocate for changes they haven't been equipped to explain.
Instead of serving as change agents, frontline leaders commiserate with teams. An us-versus-them dynamic emerges between frontline populations and senior leadership. Trust erodes precisely when organizations need it most. Effective change communication requires involving frontline leaders early, before messages cascade. They need the opportunity to ask questions and understand how vision translates into their specific responsibilities.
The Confidence Gap
Some organizations compound the development deficit with explicit distrust. Perceptyx consultants report customers who resist sharing survey results with frontline leaders because they doubt these managers can interpret data or create effective action plans. This paternalistic stance becomes self-fulfilling: leaders denied opportunity to develop capabilities never demonstrate competence in these areas.
Frontline leaders already consume operational data constantly such as production metrics, quality indicators, schedule adherence, and customer feedback. Employee experience data is simply another input. AI-assisted action planning and intelligent nudging can bridge the gap, delivering personalized development prompts without requiring frontline leaders to interpret raw data independently. Nudging alone, without traditional action planning rollouts, produces meaningful improvements in team-level outcomes.
360 Feedback as Intervention, Not Event
360 feedback remains powerful for building leader self-awareness, but awareness alone doesn't drive behavior change. Without subsequent support, insights decay rapidly. The gap between assessment cycles, typically 12 to 18 months, leaves leaders without mechanisms to track progress.
The emerging model connects 360 feedback to continuous enablement. Employee experience survey data identifies leadership gaps at aggregate level. Targeted leaders then receive 360 assessments paired with AI coaching and personalized nudges reinforcing development themes between formal interventions. Subsequent engagement surveys measure whether team-level outcomes improved, closing the loop between assessment, development, and impact measurement.
“Frontline leaders are often the last to get support, but the data tells us they're hungry for development. They're looking for career growth and learning opportunities, and when we provide those opportunities, they engage at the same level as high potentials. The return is substantial: when we invest in frontline leaders, we see greater gains in team-level outcomes because they're closest to the work. 2026 needs to be the year organizations stop treating frontline leader development as an afterthought.”
“Organizations tell me they're not ready, that we're trying to feed them a steak when they only need a hamburger. But 2026 is going to be transformative. AI is changing exponentially, not in six months but in two to three months. Organizations that don't get on board will be left behind by competitors who recognized the problem earlier. The scaling challenge that made frontline development difficult is gone. Continuous, personalized enablement through intelligent nudges and AI coaching can reach every leader at every level. The only question is whether organizations are willing to make the investment.”
What Does Good Look Like? Rebuilding the Employee Experience in 2026
The top drivers of employee engagement have undergone what Perceptyx research calls "the biggest shift we've ever recorded." A ten-year longitudinal analysis of over 20 million survey responses reveals that belonging and feeling valued, consistent top two drivers from 2016 through 2024, fell to bottom positions in 2025. Change management effectiveness and confidence in senior leadership now claim top spots. Employees have shifted from asking "How can I grow here?" to "Do I believe this company will succeed, and will I succeed with it?"
This reversal reflects years of accumulated pressure. Organizations have asked employees to do more with less since the pandemic, and engagement trends have followed a corresponding decline. Workers report workloads increased while investment in development, compensation, and advancement did not keep pace.
The Sprint That Never Ended
Periods of intense effort are survivable when understood as temporary. The problem emerges when urgency becomes permanent — when what was supposed to be a sprint extends indefinitely. The pandemic fostered this dynamic, as organizations discovered they could maintain output with fewer resources, and emergency adaptation hardened into operating models.
Consequently, the heroic effort became the new floor. Work has been treated like a series of sprints rather than a marathon, without building in recovery periods sustainable performance requires.
The Growing Drift Between Brand and Experience
Perceptyx consultants observe organizations with powerful employer brands where local experience fails to match the promise: strong pride paired with weak manager relationships or toxic team dynamics. This drift creates hidden risk. When the brand is strong enough, employees work through unsustainable situations.
The opposite pattern also appears: organizations that mandated return-to-office in cold ways see strong local teamwork paired with eroding confidence in senior leadership. What both patterns share is breakdown of consistency. The employee experience has become fragmented, with wider gaps between company feelings and immediate environment feelings.
What Good Looks Like
A good employee experience requires getting back to fundamentals. Margin means creating bandwidth for people to oscillate between output and recovery. Investment means showing employees through action that they matter: development opportunities, visible career pathways, and fair compensation reflecting value created. Alignment means consistency from brand promise to frontline experience. When leaders communicate vision, frontline workers should recognize it in daily reality.
Anticipating Success
At engagement's core sits anticipation of success. Employees who believe they will succeed bring the investment that discretionary effort requires. The shift in engagement drivers reflects this: when employees felt secure, they focused on growth questions. Now many first ask whether they'll have jobs in 90 days. Security concerns crowd out motivational factors. Trust in leadership becomes central but has multiple dimensions: competence, consistency, and care. The care dimension has come under pressure as organizations pursue efficiency and employees are left to wonder whether leadership views them as assets to develop or costs to minimize.
The Counterintuitive Answer
After years of overcomplicating employee experience with new programs and technologies, the path forward may lie in simplification. Organizations that have squeezed employees continuously might consider the obvious: stop squeezing. The alternative is "do less with less." Either find ways to meaningfully lighten the load, or accept that people will start delivering less as they feel they're receiving less. Reinvestment in people is not so much a matter of expending scarce budgetary resources as demonstrating through actions that employees still matter.
“When we ask ourselves what good looks like in terms of employee experience, it's not just about retaining people — even our best people. It's creating a culture and environment where people are able to anticipate success, so they don't just physically stay, but they're mentally and emotionally bought in. It's going to be an environment where organizations create enough margin and bandwidth for people to oscillate between output and recovery so that they can sustain performance long-term. We're going to see better alignment between leadership vision and frontline experience so that there's consistency between the brand promise and the way that we treat people at work. Finally, it's going to be about fostering a sense of belonging, which means that we need to have the time and space so that people feel seen, valued, and heard at work.”
“I feel that we have been overcomplicating and convoluting the employee experience based on what I've seen over the last few months and years. For years on end, we've been telling employees to do more with less. And we've seen a corresponding decline in engagement. When employees are continually asked to do more without seeing a meaningful impact on their level of responsibility, their development, or their compensation, it's understandable that it's taking a toll on their passion, their commitment, and their enthusiasm. So in terms of what a good employee experience looks like in 2026: start reinvesting in people. Start showing them, not saying, but showing how much they matter to the company.”
Conclusion
The employee experience challenges facing organizations in 2026 share a common thread: increasing complexity that resists simple solutions. Engagement scores that look healthy may conceal disengaged populations. Retention numbers that appear stable may mask a workforce too paralyzed by fear to pursue growth. Change initiatives that succeed by traditional metrics may be depleting the human capital required for future adaptation.
The shift in engagement drivers documented across Perceptyx's global benchmark database reflects a workforce recalibrating its relationship with work itself. Employees are no longer asking primarily whether they feel valued or whether they belong. They are asking whether their organization can navigate uncertainty, whether leadership decisions reflect stated values, and whether change will be handled in ways that preserve rather than deplete human capacity.
Employee experience in 2026 will be defined by the organizations willing to listen more carefully, act more thoughtfully, and demonstrate through sustained behavior that their people genuinely matter. The predictions in this report identify the conditions that make such transformation both necessary and possible. The responsibility for action belongs to the leaders who read them.
Closing
Contributors
- Lauren Beechly, Ph.D., VP, Workforce Transformation Consulting, Perceptyx
- Rob Beres, M.A., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Ame Creglow, M.S., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Jonathan Elbaz, M.B.A., Director, Leader & Workforce Transformation, Perceptyx
- Mary Ann Bucklan, M.S., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Sarah Jorgenson, Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Liz Culhane, Ph.D., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Laina MacRae, Senior Marketing Program Manager, Demand & Social Media, Perceptyx
- Michelle Mullins, M.A., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Oliver Lee Bateman, Ph.D., Senior Content Marketing Manager, Perceptyx
- Nicole Boyko, Ph.D., Principal Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Tiffany Patrick, M.B.A., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Heather Sager, Ph.D., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Stephanie Schloemer, Ph.D., Senior Workforce Transformation Consultant, Perceptyx
- Megan Steckler, M.A., Director, Behavioral Science Strategy, Perceptyx
- Michael Mian, Ph.D., Principal Consultant, Perceptyx
- Zachary Warman, M.S., Senior Behavioral Scientist, Perceptyx
- Bradley Wilson, Ph.D., Global Head, Workforce Insights & Innovation, Perceptyx
About Perceptyx
Perceptyx is the Employee Experience (EX) transformation company, providing enterprise-grade employee listening, analytics, and behavioral science that activates people and delivers business impact. More than 600 global enterprises, including one-third of the Fortune 100, use Perceptyx’s multi-channel employee listening, AI-powered recommendations, and personalized coaching to close the loop between insights and action. With an unrivaled technology platform and an in-house team of EX Experts, Perceptyx makes it easy for managers, HR executives, and business leaders to align their key business and talent priorities and drive positive organizational change.
For more info, or to speak with a member of our team, visit
www.perceptyx.com