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There is a moment at work that most people never say out loud.
It is the moment you stop wondering whether anyone appreciates you — and start wondering whether this place will still be here in a year.
If that shift has happened to you, you did not imagine it, and you are nowhere near alone. A decade-long study of employee engagement drivers has just recorded that exact change happening across millions of people at once. For nine straight years, the two things that best predicted whether someone was engaged at work were belonging and feeling valued. Then both of them dropped to the bottom.
The obvious headline writes itself: workers have stopped caring about belonging. That reading is wrong. What actually happened is far more human, and far more useful to know.
How the employee engagement drivers changed
The finding comes from Perceptyx, a firm that runs employee surveys for large organisations and has been asking the same questions since 2016. Looking across more than 20 million survey responses, it reports that belonging and feeling valued — the consistent top two drivers from 2016 through 2024 — fell to the bottom positions in 2025. The company describes it as the biggest shift it has ever recorded. That is Perceptyx characterising its own data, not an independently replicated result, but it is a very large pile of data to shift.
What climbed into the top spots instead was change management effectiveness, and confidence in senior leadership.
Strip the corporate packaging off those two phrases and they are asking something very plain. Does anyone here actually know what they are doing? And is somebody going to tell me the truth about what happens next?
Why “driver” does not mean what it sounds like
Here is the part almost every summary of this research gets wrong, and it turns the story inside out.
In this kind of study, a driver is not a wish list. Nobody was handed a menu and asked to rank what they want most from a job. A driver is the factor that most strongly predicts how engaged someone is — the dial that, when it moves, drags everything else along with it.
So “belonging fell to the bottom” does not mean people stopped wanting to belong. It means belonging stopped being the thing that moved the dial.
That is a completely different finding, and anyone who has lived through a shaky season already understands it in their body. You can genuinely love the people you work with and still lie awake at three in the morning. A warm team does not answer the question will there be money coming in six months from now. When the ground feels solid, belonging is what lifts you. When the ground feels like it is moving, nothing lifts you until you know where the ground is.
Nobody repaints a house they think is about to be taken away from them.
Which means the kindest thing in that Perceptyx data is also the most easily missed: people did not become colder. They became frightened, and frightened people ask smaller, more basic questions. Belonging is still what they want. It is simply no longer the first thing they need.
The rest of the picture is rough
The same research describes a workforce running on empty. Eighty-one percent of retail employees report burnout. Fifty-three percent of customer-facing staff say they have faced abusive interactions — rising to sixty-one percent in retail. Roughly a quarter of employees say they are working for the worst manager of their career, and among those with an ineffective manager, the overwhelming majority are actively looking for another job.
These figures come from surveys of employees at large, mostly American organisations, so treat the exact percentages as describing that population rather than the whole working world. The shape of it, though, will be familiar almost anywhere: too much coming in, too little said about what is coming next, and a manager who may be just as lost as everyone else.
It also lines up with something measured separately — that loneliness at work has climbed sharply even in rooms full of coworkers. People are not short of company. They are short of solid ground.
If you are reading this and quietly recognising yourself, it can help to just name where you actually are. Our free Am I Burned Out at Work? check takes a couple of minutes and gives you plain language for something that is usually just a fog.
What people are actually asking for
If the research is right, the thing that would help most is not a thank-you, a pizza, or a wellbeing webinar. It is information — delivered honestly and often.
Three things seem to matter, and none of them cost money:
- Say what you know, and say what you do not know. “I don’t know yet, and I’ll tell you the day I do” is not weakness. It is the single most stabilising sentence a leader can say, because it ends the guessing.
- Repeat it. Certainty is not a memo. It wears off. The thing that steadies people is not one big announcement but a small, boring, reliable update that keeps arriving.
- Give a direction, even a rough one. People can walk a long way on a vague map. What they cannot do is walk with no map at all.
And if you are on the receiving end rather than the giving end, there is one thing worth holding onto: the exhaustion you feel is a response to uncertainty, not evidence that something is wrong with you. That distinction matters more than it sounds. It is the same reason trying harder is usually the wrong answer to job search burnout — effort was never the missing ingredient.
The oldest version of this problem
There is a very old story about a large group of people who walked out of slavery and straight into a desert. Everything they knew was behind them. Nothing ahead of them was settled — not the route, not the water, not how long any of it would take.
What they were given was not a speech about how much they mattered. It was a pillar of cloud that went ahead of them through the day, and a pillar of fire that did the same at night. Something visible. Out in front. Close enough to follow.
The detail that stays with me is that it was never taken away. Not on the good days, not on the bad ones. Whatever hour they looked up, it was there, showing them which way to go.
Thousands of years later, twenty million survey responses arrived at something very close to the same conclusion, entirely by accident. When people cannot see where things are heading, telling them they are valued does not reach them. Show them the way forward, and keep showing them, and they can walk a long time on very little.
Where this leaves you on Monday
None of this makes a hard job easy. It does not restore a company that is genuinely falling apart, and it does not pay anyone’s rent.
But it does mean something if you are the one lying awake. What you are missing is probably not gratitude. It is a horizon — some sense of where this is all going. That is a reasonable thing to need, and wanting it does not make you difficult or ungrateful.
And if other people report to you, the research points somewhere uncomfortable and cheap. The most generous thing you can offer right now is not praise. It is the truth about what is coming, said plainly, and said again tomorrow.
Belonging has not gone anywhere. It is waiting on the other side of knowing where the ground is.
Worth Arguing About
When a workplace gets shaky, is honest bad news actually better for morale than reassurance — or do most people say they want the truth and then wish they had not heard it? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Share This
- “Belonging was the #1 thing that predicted workplace engagement for nine straight years. In 2025 it fell to the bottom. Not because people stopped wanting it — because you can’t enjoy the team when you’re not sure the company will exist.”
- “Turns out ’employee engagement drivers’ don’t measure what people want. They measure what moves the needle. Belonging still matters. It just can’t compete with not knowing if you’ll have a job.”
- “The most generous thing a manager can say right now isn’t thank you. It’s: here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t, and I’ll tell you the day that changes.”
Common Questions About Employee Engagement Drivers
What are employee engagement drivers?
Employee engagement drivers are the workplace factors that most strongly predict how engaged employees are. They are calculated statistically rather than collected as preferences — researchers look at which factors move in step with engagement scores, not at what employees say they want most. This is why a driver falling in the rankings does not mean employees stopped caring about it.
Did belonging really drop to the bottom of employee engagement drivers?
According to Perceptyx, which analysed more than 20 million employee survey responses collected since 2016, belonging and feeling valued were the consistent top two engagement drivers from 2016 through 2024 and fell to the bottom positions in 2025. Perceptyx describes this as the biggest shift it has recorded. The finding comes from that company’s own research rather than from multiple independent studies.
What replaced belonging as the top employee engagement driver?
Change management effectiveness and confidence in senior leadership moved into the top positions, according to Perceptyx. In plain terms, employees’ engagement became most closely tied to whether they believed leadership knew what it was doing and would be honest about what came next, rather than to whether they felt they belonged.
Does this mean employees no longer care about belonging at work?
No. An engagement driver measures what predicts engagement, not what people value. Belonging dropping in the rankings indicates that under conditions of uncertainty, feeling included stopped being the factor that moved engagement scores — because more basic concerns about job security and organisational stability took priority. Belonging remains something employees want; it simply stopped being the first thing they need.
What can a manager do when a workplace feels unstable?
Share what is known and openly admit what is not yet known, repeat updates regularly rather than relying on one announcement, and give employees a rough sense of direction even when details are unsettled. These cost nothing and directly address the uncertainty that recent engagement research identifies as the dominant factor. Praise and perks do not substitute for clear, repeated, honest information.
