The pulse of the workplace: Mid-year 2025 benchmark updates

It’s that time again: benchmark season! Every January and July, Culture Amp dives headfirst into the latest global employee experience benchmarks. We’ve been sifting through the data, and let us tell you, today’s workplace is a fascinating, ever-evolving entity. Buckle up, because we’re about to explore the trends shaping how we work, feel, and connect across the globe.

Employee engagement in 2025 shows both promise and peril. Our July-to-July data refresh reveals improvements in switching off from work, goal setting, and follow-through, alongside declines in energy and motivation.

The picture is filled with puzzling contradictions: Employees are performing the mechanics of work better, but companies are falling short on processes that may actually fuel progress.

Here’s what to expect from this edition of our biannual update:

• Insights into the overall state of employee engagement
• Top drivers of engagement in 2025 – including industry-specific findings and a focus on the impact of AI
• What our data reveals about the top 25% engaged companies
• Four contradictory signals of change in 2025

Engagement: Still on the decline

Employee engagement has been on shaky ground since the pandemic. Unfortunately, 2025 has yet to deliver a turnaround.

Employee pride dropped another percentage point in the last year, marking a 4% point dip since 2022. Extrinsic motivation to go above and beyond at work shows a similar downward trend.

Perhaps most concerning, though, is that short-term commitment has taken yet another step down. Employees are thinking more about leaving their companies than they were a year ago. While 55% of all employees agree that they rarely think about leaving their current post, that leaves nearly half saying they’re more than rarely thinking about leaving the company. Yikes.

Those are the changes we’re seeing in engagement, but what is actually driving employee engagement today?

What drives engagement in 2025

When resources are limited, focus becomes even more important. Companies with fewer tools to shape culture need to pinpoint the actions that create the biggest impact. That’s why, when our people scientists guide leaders, they emphasize drivers of engagement (the survey items most strongly correlated to overall engagement). By acting on these levers, companies can make targeted changes that actually move the needle.

When we look at the top drivers of engagement, both globally and across regions, we see the usual suspects.

In July 2025, at the global level, the top three 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

Every region has at least one of the global-level drivers as their local driver too.

What’s striking is the consistency. Across regions, the core drivers show only slight shifts in emphasis, but they always center on the same fundamentals: strong leadership, clear direction, and meaningful opportunities for growth.

The regional nuances uncover a broader truth: While there is some overlap in what drives employees around the world, the specifics of engagement are local.

While we nerdy people scientists love a strong correlation or regression analysis, there are other methods for assessing which factors of the employee experience most impact engagement.

For example, we could look at companies that are successfully keeping employees engaged to identify what they are getting right, which is what we cover in the next section.

Lessons from the top 25%

Even against what has been a challenging macroeconomic backdrop for many, some companies have successfully maintained high levels of engagement. To understand what engagement looks like when it’s working, we compared the top 25% of companies against those around the 50th percentile.

The clearest differentiator is leadership. Across all the survey items, the biggest gaps came from questions tied to leadership effectiveness.

Our data suggests that employee belief in their leaders’ capability, vision, and follow-through could serve as a “shield” for engagement when other pressures (i.e., the external market) mount. This possibility echoes the global drivers of engagement we explored in the previous section, where we similarly saw career opportunities, leadership strength, and confidence in leadership consistently rise to the top.

🌏 Regional spotlight: While market conditions are different in each region, all have seen large declines in questions pertaining to the company's ability to succeed since 2022. Europe, the UK, and Germany have all declined 10%, while North America declined 7% and APAC 6%.

Exploring what is happening among the top companies thus invites us to also ask what is happening elsewhere. Do all industries show the same confidence in leaders and the company, or are cracks appearing in those same drivers? The data suggests the latter, though not all sectors are affected equally.

Drivers in context: An industry view

As we mentioned above, it’s more effective to focus on the drivers of engagement rather than on fluctuations in favorability (i.e., which questions are going up and down). This is particularly true if your goal is to identify which actions will lead to the most effective improvement in engagement. So after identifying the top three drivers of engagement globally, we looked into how favorability was trending on those items by industry.

Because drivers are calculated by a positive correlation (when a particular driver goes up, engagement also goes up), declines are similarly linked. When we see engagement falling, it suggests that favorability for the drivers of engagement will also fall. But not all industries are seeing declines at the same rate.

Biotechnology, for example, is experiencing the slowest decline in favorability among the various driver questions. Comparatively, companies in new tech and financial services are seeing sharper drops in employee favorability. We speculate that new tech and financial services are being squeezed due to AI disruption, which we will explore in more detail in a later section.

While not a top driver of engagement, accountability popped up as one of the few areas where favorability has improved. Knowing that accountability is a predictor of company success and revenue growth, we’re hopeful that other areas will also experience an upswing soon.

As for the other signals coming out of our latest benchmark release, things are looking a bit muddled.

Four contradicting signals of change in 2025

For each big downtrend, we spotted a contradicting uptrend – and vice versa. These contradictions pop up regionally and globally. We will highlight a few of them here.

The first contradiction that caught our attention relates to energy. Since 2022, employees’ energy to manage the pace of work, overall sentiment about work, and sense of being valued by their managers have all declined. Yet, at the same time, employees reported an improvement in their ability to switch off.

At first glance, that looks like progress for work-life balance. But it may also reflect an omen of widening disconnect. It could be that employees are trying to conserve their limited energy by detaching from work, or rejecting “hustle culture” altogether. It’s not yet clear whether this shift signals healthier boundaries or a slow disengagement from work (consistent with notions of quiet cracking making headlines in this first half of 2025).

🌏Regional spotlight: Employees across all regions appear less likely to find the pace of work energizing, but we saw significant regional differences in the extent of these declines. Since 2022, the UK has declined the most with a 9% drop, followed by 8% in APAC, while Europe has only dropped 3%. North America has stayed relatively stable with a -1% drop.

When we moved on to analyzing our data by industry, a second contradiction emerged. In sectors experiencing high levels of AI disruption (e.g., tech, SaaS, professional services, and creative media), employees are 6% points more favorable on managing personal and work demands compared to those in industries being disrupted to a lesser extent (e.g., construction, agriculture, hospitality, and food service).

Interestingly, these industries also saw an uptick in healthy work-life balance over the past year. This presents the possibility that AI disruption could be key to unlocking a better balance between work and home.

Curioser and curioser.

So, what are companies doing about this? Here, we found yet a third contradiction. We see more employees agree that their companies provide opportunities to discuss survey results, suggesting leaders are opening doors to dialogue. The contradiction, though? Despite more employees saying they’re talking about survey results, fewer believe their companies will act on the results.

In other words, employees are being invited to speak up, but they’re less convinced that leaders can deliver on their promises.

And the fourth contradiction? This one had us completely wound up. Employee sentiment around goal setting has shown a steady upward trend since 2023, but constructive feedback shared within teams is trending down.

Global improvement in goal setting and checking in on goal progress is fantastic news, because we know how important clarity and direction are at work. When employees feel they have a clear path and are making tangible progress, it can be a powerful antidote to dips in energy and sentiment. This aligns with our research suggesting that effective goal-setting frameworks can meaningfully boost high performance.

These are the mechanics of performance management, but without regular constructive feedback, teams risk losing sight of their goals and diminishing their intended impact. Employees may know what they’re aiming for, but they may not know how to achieve it effectively, leading to stalled progress.

Taken together, these four findings point to an evolving employee experience defined by contradiction: declining energy but improved ability to switch off, disruption that may be creating new balance, dialogue without the anticipation of follow-through, and doing the basics (like goal setting) better but falling down when it comes to what actually improves progress.

The question for leaders is how to turn these mixed signals into momentum for engagement. At companies dedicated to delivering on people strategy, and improving work culture and the employee experience (which has been tied to revenue growth), leaders are focused on the opportunities ahead.

The takeaway: A world of opportunity

Data from our July 2025 benchmarks paint a picture of a workplace in flux. While challenges like dips in energy and motivation exist, there are also clear indicators of progress and opportunity. The global emphasis on goal setting, the regional nuances likely tied to economic realities, the impact of AI, and the consistent drivers of engagement all offer valuable insights.

For organizations looking to thrive, the message is this: Invest in your leaders, foster a culture of genuine care and development, ensure clear alignment between individual work and company goals, and crucially, act on feedback. By doing so, you’ll be able to navigate the current landscape while building a truly exceptional employee experience for the future.

Stay tuned for more insights as we continue to track the pulse of the global workplace!

Make data-informed people decisions that drive performance at scale

Culture Amp focuses on your most important asset - your people, turning employee insights into real business impact.

Book a demo