Dive Brief:

• A vast majority (96%) of C-suite leaders expected AI to boost output, but 77% of employees reported that AI tools increased their workload, according to research released Tuesday from employee experience platform Culture Amp.
• The research found that key indicators of employee experience were trending downward, and as a result, teams were pushed to do more with less, the report said. Meanwhile, “many leaders assume investing in employee engagement is a luxury,” said Culture Amp.
• Culture Amp added that the perceived trade off between employee engagement and worker performance might be “leaving significant shareholder value on the table.” According to the report, business leaders tend to invest in employee engagement during periods of growth but pivot to hard performance metrics during downturns.

Dive Insight:

The research tracked 1,800 organizations globally over two years and identified two in five companies as being in a “Peak Performance” state, meaning these organizations paired high engagement with high performance confidence.

Culture Amp then tracked share price movement across a subset of companies and found “Peak Performance” firms saw a 25% increase in share price in just one year and a 36% increase total at the two-year mark. Organizations that had a dual focus on workplace culture and organizational performance delivered a 47% share price change advantage, the report said.

“As leaders globally face mounting pressure to demonstrate ROI on people investments, many have responded by treating culture and performance as an either-or decision," Caroline Rawlinson, CEO at Culture Amp, said in a statement. “This research provides hard evidence that this is a false dichotomy. Culture and high performance are intimately linked as culture underpins all elements of business performance where humans are involved.”

In teams pushed to do more with less, Culture Amp found that many leaders assumed that investing in employee engagement is a luxury.

However, Rawlinson said that culture is “the fundamental operating system that governs how decisions are made, which behaviors are reinforced, and ultimately how people perform." She added that the research makes a strong case for preserving and investing in culture. “It's how organizations build the conditions under which teams can consistently deliver their best work, and capture measurable financial returns,” Rawlinson said.

U.S. worker engagement has dropped significantly since its peak in 2020, according to data released by Gallup in January. Gallup’s research found that worker engagement dropped from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2024 and remained unchanged in 2025, meaning an estimated 8 million fewer workers were actively engaged over five years.

In the meantime, a January workplace poll from Adecco found that tangible job security had overtaken personal fulfillment as the top retention factor for workers. In the poll, employees said what they wanted was stable income, job certainty and “robust” employer support for agility, resilience and engagement.