‘Great employee experience in 2025 hinges on making work less chaotic,’ says Qualtrics

Employee engagement is at an all time high, but attrition rates remain high; employers cannot rest on their laurels.

That’s according to new research from Qualtrics, which surveyed 35,000 people in 23 countries worldwide.

Interestingly, while engagement is up five points since 2021, and three points since 2023, intent to stay is declining.

This trend was most noteworthy among younger employees, who “contrary to popular belief” were the most engaged, motivated, and optimistic. However, they lagged behind other generations on their desire to stay at their company.

This pleasantly surprised the experience management giant’s’ Workplace Behavioral Scientist Dr Cecelia Herbert.

Speaking exclusively to UNLEASH about the Qualtrics 2025 Employee Experience Trends Report, Dr Hebert shares: “This speaks volumes, as employee’s commitment to their work continues to grow, while their timelines retract.”

She continues: “With the amount of change and uncertainty employees are facing, it’s no surprise that these timelines are getting shorter.”

The data shows that for the past three years, employees have adapted to change faster than organizations, but that has now switched.

One in three employees now feel under pressure to be more productive, and 38% say this is because of the pace of change at work.

Contributing to these attrition challenges that Qualtrics identified is that fact that “the honeymoon phase” has disappeared – this was evident in the 2024 report, and is now confirmed for 2025 with 56% of new employees planning to leave in the next three years, versus 34% of tenured workers.

The reason for that is poor candidate experiences – and this means “employees can be negatively impacted before they have even worked their first day”, states Dr Herbert.

HR, you need to get the basics right with engagement

All of these stats beg the question, what can organizations and HR teams do to not just keep engagement up, but to avoid high attrition rates in this challenging labor market?

For Qualtrics, the key is getting the basics right.

Dr Herbert explains: “Work has somehow become even more chaotic since the pandemic as employers pursue short-term wins and try to adapt ways of working for modern realities.

“Yet for a number of years now the best employee experiences are about how work gets done – reducing the complexity of work is the most impactful pathway to sustainable productivity and positive people outcomes.”

There is an “urgent need for organizations to make it easier for people to do a great job”, especially among unprecedented levels of change.

For Dr Herbert, “great employee experience in 2025 hinges on making work less chaotic”.

“With so many organizations looking to boost productivity and efficiency, creating simplicity is often overlooked in favor of introducing new solutions that just compound these issues,” she adds.

The report also talked about taking a human-centered approach to change, and really partnering with employees to ensure you are setting them for success in their roles.

All of this helps to build trust between employees and leaders – workers know that the organization has their back.

Dr Herbert shares: “Trust is the glue that holds an organization together, yet while employees may rate their leaders as being quite competent and believe they act with integrity, only around half (56%) of employees feel their bosses will choose employee wellbeing over short-term business gains.”

There is more work for organizations and leaders to do around trust – for Qualtrics, the key is open and honest communications, making sure those work processes enable people to be productive, and leaning into benevolence so people feel valued and important at work.

A final piece of the engagement puzzle is AI.

Qualtrics’ data found that rather than being scared of AI, employees are on board.

49% of workers are optimistic about AI at work, and 45% are using AI daily or weekly. They see its potential to improve the quality of work (47%), to enable the to do work in less time (42%), to engage in new tasks (38%) and to increase the amount of work produced (27%).

The issue is that they are doing this without training or guidelines – “this poses a huge risk on so many levels”, notes Dr Herbert.

“Organizations must make AI implementation, training and enablement a key strategic priority, as its impact is exponential”, she adds.

HR needs to be co-leading AI and tech projects without organizations – “while HR leaders may not be experts in technology, they are experts in people and culture – and this is what will make or break the success of these business-critical changes,” concludes Dr Herbert.