Fixing the enterprise engagement gap: What the data tells us

As Director of People Science Research at Culture Amp, I study the employee experience: how to improve it, and which parts actually move the needle on key business outcomes.

No matter what we’re looking at, we inevitably have to control for company size. It’s one of the great confounders. It’s a key variable that can explain away trends, flatten insights, or shift the meaning of our most compelling findings. Without controlling for company size, the picture isn’t just incomplete; it’s misleading.

In this article, I’ll share our most robust findings about the employee experience by company size from over 3.1 million employees from 4,590 companies from July 2024 to July 2025. And since “change your company size” is not a feasible takeaway, I’ll go on to explore what leaders – especially those at large companies – can do to bolster employee engagement.

The engagement seesaw

Let’s start at the highest level – engagement. We define engagement as the level of enthusiasm, connection, and commitment employees have toward their company.

Interestingly, as company size scales, engagement trends go in different directions. When it comes to enthusiasm, pride, and connection, we see a linear, downward trend as a company gets larger, with the starkest difference being in pride. However, when it comes to commitment, the largest companies have an edge.

We also noticed an intriguing crossover between motivation and commitment. In smaller companies (0-200 employees), more employees are motivated than committed to staying for 2 years – but this flips by the 500-employee mark.

This makes intuitive sense. In larger companies, employees may feel more like a number and less connected to the company as a whole. This is counterbalanced by the inherent stability of a larger organization, which may attract and retain employees who prioritize job security and prolong their tenure at the company regardless of how engaging they find the employee experience. In short, the employees who are attracted to large organizations may be different from those who decide to join startups, resulting in different engagement profiles.

Spotlight: Quiet quitting
While this combination of low motivation and high intent to stay may seem to fit the definition of “quiet quitting,” the data above reflects only the general workplace trend.

In our research on quiet quitting, we found that once we actually dug into the data and looked carefully into how individual employees replied, only 3% of employees at companies with 5000+ employees fit the definition of quiet quitters (not motivated but committed to stay).

Larger companies are struggling more with the top drivers

As we’ve often written, engagement is an outcome. You can’t directly make someone more committed or motivated, but you can learn which levers to pull to improve those outcomes.

To do this, we use driver analysis to identify the top drivers of engagement. At the mid-year point of 2025, the top three global drivers of engagement are:

1. Confidence in leaders
2. Leaders demonstrating that people matter to the company's success
3. Whether the company contributes to the employee’s development

These drivers have been remarkably consistent over the years and across demographics (e.g., industry, gender, age), though there are some regional differences which we’ve explored in another recent blog.

Again and again, we’ve found that the factors that make employees want to go above and beyond and stay with an organization are great leadership and career growth potential.

So, how does company size impact perception of these two areas?

The Dunbar dilemma: The scale vs. connection challenge at large companies

Our data shows that perceptions of leadership fall steadily as a company scales, with large companies clearly struggling more than smaller companies.

We found that large companies score lower on all questions related to leadership, with the largest companies (>5000) scoring 10% points lower than the smallest companies (0-100) in the following areas:

• Leaders instilling confidence
• Leaders demonstrating that people are important to the company’s success
• Leaders communicating a motivating vision

However, there was one question for which there was a more modest difference (5%) between large and small companies: leaders keeping people informed. This suggests that leaders at enterprise organizations have been relatively successful at honing their communication skills at scale.

Looking at the overall trendline across all leadership questions, we see the steepest drop in engagement happens right at the start of a company’s journey (crossing the 100 employee mark). Sentiment remains relatively stable past the 500-employee mark. Intriguingly, this closely reflects Dunbar’s number – the theory that humans can only have 150 meaningful friendships and 500 acquaintances.

This perhaps suggests that perceptions of leaders decline at this point because the company’s size has passed the critical point at which the average employee can have meaningful and direct relationships with their leaders.

The takeaway? The more large companies can humanize their leaders and make employees feel a true, personal connection with them, the better.

The development contradiction: More resources but less satisfaction

Next, we looked at how perceptions of development change across company sizes and found some intriguingly contradicting trends.

Our data shows that while large companies have the resources to provide more formal learning and development and clear career progression, employees at smaller companies are more likely to believe that the company contributes to their development.

What might explain this contradiction?

Well, when it comes to development, we at Culture Amp like to use the 3 E’s model, which outlines three primary types of development:

1. Education (formal training)
2. Experience (on-the-job skill practice)
3. Exposure (learning by observing or watching others).

Further, it’s commonly hypothesized that 70% of learning comes from experience, 20% from exposure, and only 10% from education.

In the context of our findings, this suggests that while large companies provide more opportunities for education, smaller companies provide more opportunities for learning from experience and exposure. Just think of the trope of the startup employee “wearing many hats” and “jumping into the deep end.” Moreover, employees at smaller companies naturally spend more time collaborating closely with coworkers, both across roles and levels. It’s only once a company scales that a stark hierarchy necessarily appears, cutting employees off from exposure to work at higher levels.

What uniquely engages employees at large organizations

If the typical top drivers of engagement aren’t where large companies naturally excel, maybe there is something else employees are looking for in enterprise organizations.

In this section, we investigated what’s uniquely engaging for employees at large organizations (5,000+ employees). To do this, we looked at the correlation between each question and engagement for small (0-100 employees) and large companies. Generally speaking, we consider a correlation above 0.5 "high” and above 0.7 “very high.”

For large companies, we found that connection and consistency were uniquely engaging, with a correlation of 0.77 and 0.74, respectively.

These findings suggest that the areas most important to employees in large companies are the exact areas that companies find most challenging as they grow. In other words, employees crave connection, despite belonging in organizations with company sizes far beyond Dunbar’s number. They crave clarity in how their work contributes to the broader company and consistency in how their work is evaluated.

The obstacle is the way

While it’s true that many things (i.e., motivating employees and establishing a connection to leadership and the company as a whole) become more difficult at scale, these exact obstacles may be where companies need to focus most to succeed.

While they may face more obstacles, large companies have the benefit of more resources. Here’s what large companies can do to focus on both the common and unique drivers:

• Development: Large companies have the advantage of scale. Utilize that by implementing things like job rotations and reverse mentoring programs.
• Leadership: Create opportunities for employees to interact directly with leaders, including skip-levels, live Q&As, leadership office hours, and even leadership embedding (rotating executives to spend full days working within different teams/locations).
• Connection: While connection might not naturally form like it does in a small community, the larger the company, the more likely it is that employees who share a niche interest will connect. Establish opportunities for connection with initiatives such as ERGs, matching employees for video coffee chats, or onboarding cohorts where employees can “find their people.”
• Consistency: Scale is a huge benefit when it comes to evaluating people fairly. Large companies have the resources to create job leveling and competency frameworks and the sample size to conduct true calibrations and equity audits.
• Clarity: While employees may not have the benefit of speaking directly with leaders about their role at the organization, large companies are more likely to have the technology for clear goal tracking and the data to show employees the direct impact they’re having on the business.

Listening at scale

Size is just a number. There are small companies that feel like huge bureaucracies and large companies that have created tight-knit communities. As with most things, there is more variance within each company size than between. Start by understanding the experience in your unique organization and what levers are most important to your employees. This is especially important in large organizations where it becomes more difficult for leaders to have “their ear to the ground.”

Armed with your employee’s feedback, you can take targeted action to turn scale into your advantage.

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