Hot Off The Press! Emtrain’s Workplace Culture Report

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So not chat. Hi, everyone. We are delighted to be here.

Dr. Leann Pereira is with me here from Emtrain, our organizational psychologist and VP in our people science area doing all the amazing data work. I am Laraine McKinnon, talent and culture strategist, and we’re thrilled to see folks joining us for this session and thrilled to be going through our hot off the press just dropped workplace culture report. This is our opportunity here to take a look at all of the data that we’re collecting from Emtrain learners through the last year and this year and see what has changed.

So, Leann, I know people are still sort of dropping in and joining, but please go ahead and say hello. Hi, everybody. Glad to have you join us.

Laraine, so happy to do this with you again this year. This is a couple of years running, so we’ve got some miles under our belts here. Absolutely, yes.

And it’s so interesting because every year has really changed, like the workplace is changing super fast. We are seeing trends almost like whiplash from the trends, like we’re going in this direction on COVID and empathy, and now we’re going in this direction on business, concerns about the economy, and now we’re kind of in this, oh, now we’ve got this huge AI transformation. So I feel like every year that we do this, we are talking about something almost completely different from the prior year.

And I guess that’s what’s interesting about both being in trend and looking towards the future, understanding how people are experiencing their workplace. You know, that’s really interesting. It’s really hard to build a real good understanding of what’s coming next with the whiplash, so it’s keeping all the leaders on their feet, right, on their toes.

I’m sure. I mean, it’s really hard to manage. You know, one day you’re told to do these things, and the next day you’re told to do those things.

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And thanks, everyone, for joining us. We’ve got a good number of people who have dropped in. Leann and I are just chatting about how different this workplace culture report looks every year, and how many transformations our workplaces have gone through, what’s important and critical.

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We’re thinking, you know, we did our first one around COVID, and so empathy was really important, and trying to stay engaged, and then coming back into the workplace, business focus, economic concerns, and now here we are with AI transformation. And it is just wild to think of how much we’ve all had to pivot, and rethink, and grow, and adapt. And our data absolutely shows that.

So now that we’re at time, I will go ahead and do more formal introductions. Thanks for joining us. Please do share where you’re coming in from.

We are always interested. We are interested in taking questions throughout as well, so please go ahead and be sure to drop in questions. Leann and I are happy to take those as we go.

My name is Laraine McKinnon. I’m talent and culture strategist here at Emtrain. I am joined by Dr. Leann Pereira, who is our VP of learning science and data here at Emtrain.

She was just saying this is our third or fourth version of getting to do this talk, and it is different every time, so we’re delighted to be here. Thanks for doing it with me, Leann. Oh, yeah, sure thing, and I just want to double tap on that.

Remember when there was a quiet quitting thing going on, and employers were scrambling, and boy, has even that changed too, right? The war for talent, too. Now people are concerned about their jobs because of AI, like the whiplash of change. Yeah, all right, so we will jump in here.

We are issuing our 2026 workplace culture report. That’s because we are looking at trends and understanding what’s to come, trying to help you all as leaders internalize and mobilize around the themes that we’re seeing in the workplace. We have 48 million employee sentiment responses that are gathered within our Emtrain training.

Thank you to all of our clients who are here. It is you and your employees who are helping us to understand the shape of workplace culture. We are measuring changes in attitudes from year to year, and they have certainly changed over the past five.

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It helps us understand the state of workplace culture today in 2025, but also it informs our expectations and those strategies that we need to have in place for 2026, because it is right around the corner. All right, so first of all, how did we get all this information? Our flagship course is Preventing Workplace Harassment. As many of us know, it is a mandatory training, and what we do is we pulse our sentiments within that training, so we get nearly 100 percent completion from a large range of clients globally, and so we’re going to present that data back to you, and this is what it looks like in the course.

Yep, that’s great. Our key themes, our TLDR, Too Long, Didn’t Read, these are our four key themes. Number one, a lot of political polarization and an empathy recession.

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Super interesting. After COVID, we were all in empathy and growing empathy, and now we see that really has receded. Number two, what we see as an innovation roadblock, the erosion of psychological safety.

Again, something that we have been building in the workplace over the last several years. Now, we’re seeing that good work eroding. On the positive note, on the third finding, we have found improved accountability, so organizations went back to basics around their compliance requirements and skills and are doing very well, and then the fourth finding, leadership overload, probably because of all these changes in the workplace and a skill gap in addressing some of what’s happening in the workplace.

So we will go into each of these key themes a little bit deeper. We’ve got then three actions that we would recommend that you all start to implement in the workplace. We are, again, happy to take questions throughout, so please go ahead and just pop in the question if you’d like us to clarify.

We’ll go relatively fast given the time, but the report is available online, and we’ve got a series of much more in-depth blog posts that are available as well if you’d like to dig into one of these things. Okay, I’m up first with political polarization and the empathy recession, and this is a stark one, I think, especially for those of us in Gen X, where, you know, we were often told to leave politics at the door, don’t talk politics at work, sometimes even don’t talk politics in social settings, and that is just not the case anymore. People, employees are bringing those politics into the workplace.

Oftentimes you’re on social media with colleagues, and so you might see what they’re posting on social media, and that is impacting and damaging team relationships. We also see a decline in, like, the interpersonal sensitivity. People are less likely to be empathetic.

They’re sort of protecting themselves at work. They might not be speaking up as much. They might not be, like, bringing their full self to work any longer.

Might be staying with people who are within, like, a similar group where they feel safe as opposed to being more broadly connected, and we know, you know, empathy is a business-critical competency, and we’re just seeing less and less of it as people are less likely to, you know, create that environment that’s respectful and inclusive. You know, we can see in the data here, you know, people I work with make hurtful or offensive jokes. We’re really seeing an increase in that type of discourse, which is not only upsetting but really the opposite of empathy, so people are feeling unwelcome in the workplace, and of course that key finding is around conflict between co-workers because of different social and political views, and that was our largest drop in healthy response that we saw year over year, so this is a key finding.

We really need to get back sort of that positive discourse that we’ve had in the workplace over the last several years before this erodes further, and we’ll talk about some of our strategies for that a little later. All right, so there is an erosion of psychological safety. It blocks innovation.

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It blocks even empowerment, so let’s go through it. Empowerment declined sharply, so when folks aren’t speaking up, you don’t get the collaborative behaviors, right? There’s no conversation. When there is conversation, they’re not the difficult ones, right? There’s fewer discussions.

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Maybe people are backing away from conflict, backing away from productive conflict, I want to say, so you don’t get that friction to work things out, not hanging in there with us. That’s a shame, and employee voice and feedback drops, so if something’s going wrong, you’re probably not hearing about it the way you would have in the past, and that creates a lot, that creates risk for organizations, anything from employee relations risk to business compliance risk, data security risk, all types of things, so that’s a shame. Yes, indeed.

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When we look at our most positive findings, they’re around improved accountability, and we recognize just how many changes there have been in terms of regulatory requirements. You know, we do online training, so we’ve got cybersecurity, data privacy, and we are constantly updating those trainings for new rules and regulations around the world, and so we know that this has been a burden to organizations to make sure that they have implemented all the processes and educated their employees around all of these, you know, do’s and don’ts. We have seen very positive results across our clients, which is wonderful, not only that employees are confident that, you know, managers are paying attention and accountable on business gifts, that we’re not going to succumb to pressure and put us at risk for bribery.

If somebody does something wrong in the digital world, people are going to let them know. People are not going to ignore misconduct just because it’s helping the business do well, like people are going to speak up and say something. So across the board, and there are many more examples, these are just the highest positives that we saw in terms of healthy response over the last year, but sort of across every area of compliance, we saw a real improvement in employee sentiment, and that is great because leaders are running transformations, thinking about AI, trying to make more efficient processes, and so having fewer of these types of incidents means that they’ve got much more time to focus on the core business.

Overall, it was a 25% reduction in unhealthy behaviors and accountability. Again, positive improvements across all areas of business, and the one thing that was a negative, but also is really quite heartening, is that employees said, and we could be doing more. They said that, you know, leaders at my organization have implemented the structures necessary to keep the organization safe, like they’re thinking, well, you know, it’s a little bit of negative sentiment there, we could actually be doing more.

So it kind of shows an appetite from employees, like, yeah, we’ve had to follow all these rules and regulations, we think they’re working, we think we could actually do a little more. That is great for busy leaders who need to be focusing on the core business. Someone asks here, could the improved accountability also be another sign that the priority is on business results rather than culture needs? I think that is absolutely directionally correct.

So, you know, we’ve told you to go back to basics, and you have as employees, but we also are looking at each individual kind of line of compliance, and we’re seeing it across the board. So it is also employees being willing to go through those procedures, those processes, change their passwords, right, some of the things that might otherwise be frustrating, and they’re really willing to do it, and recognize the benefit of following those rules and rights. All right, so number four, Leann.

Yeah, so again, back to the theme of leadership overload and skill gap. You know, this is interesting, it’s a little bit mixed, and it’s even harder to see the problem and not be able to fix it than be blissfully ignorant of what’s going on. So what’s going on is managers are aware and sensitive to social dynamics, right? We had years where we were focusing in on empathy, interpersonal reactions, relationships, and so on and so forth.

But given the dramatic change in expectations, I think there’s a feeling that the rug has been swipped out from underneath them, and now they’re faced with all of these, you know, this kind of cloistering, people are polarized, there’s more conflict, and they, and folks don’t really know what to do, because it’s complex. It’s not just one type of problem, right? It’s several types of problems, and so it’s not surprising that they can’t keep, folks are feeling like they can’t keep up. For sure, I think managers have a super challenge right now, and in fact, we have a question here.

How should HR leaders connect the dots between these culture findings and business outcomes? And, you know, this is kind of a ripe area, this pressure on managers right now is a ripe area for influencing business outcomes, and also it’s part of the culture and the skills map. You have cycled, so you have cross-functional collaboration is not likely to be as effective or smooth, so it’s going to affect delivery times, and whether or not you’re going to even meet your business targets, right? So if your team can’t align, can’t agree, what are you going to get? So expect more, so we’re expecting to see more of that. Yeah, for sure.

When we get into recommended actions, and we are really pleased to take more questions and elaborate a little bit more on this one during this as well, our three recommended actions are investing in that leadership development, and this is, you know, directly related to business outcomes, monitoring and managing organizational risk, which also is directly related to the business outcomes, because when you don’t monitor or manage organizational risk, you know, people have to pay attention to the problems, and you’ve got the risk of fines or other penalties, work stoppage, et cetera, that can certainly, you know, damage the bottom line, and then strengthening psychological safety for innovation is our third recommended action, and that’s really about leapfrogging the competition, because I think a lot of executives right now feel like they could be behind, and they will remain behind their competitors if they don’t figure out how to get that psychological safety back on teams, because, as we’ll talk about in a minute, they’re missing out on a lot of information when there isn’t psychological safety in the workplace. All right, so I create a system of leadership to adapt in a Bonnie world, so I want, there’s a Bonnie is brittle, anxious, non-linear, and incomprehensible. It’s a WTF of, you know, what is actually going on, and we used to talk about BUCA.

BUCA focused more on what was going on outside. Bonnie is really about how people are experiencing it, you know, the anxious, not knowing what to do. Focus on leadership is critical to maneuver through here, so what you want to do is make sure that leaders understand that leadership is not a single arrival, not a single point in time.

Training is not a single point of time. Leadership is not a single person, right? It’s really a group of people working together, and it’s not a single approach, so it’s a constant adjustment to what’s coming down the pike. It’s constant learning.

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Two, it is an eco, the numbers are a little wacky, sorry about that. It’s an ecosystem that evolves, so again, this is responsivity of what’s going on outside of the borders of your organization, within the borders of your organization. You’re looking at a network of people that are bringing things back in and integrating it into the business processes, and then if you have that going on, you’re going to get that virtuous cycle of compounding returns, but it really starts with understanding that this is an ongoing process, and that your leaders really have to continually be refining, developing, and adapting, and learning is a huge part of that, and it’s not that the leaders don’t know what’s going on, it’s that nobody can possibly be prepared for all of this all at once, so.

Yeah, for sure. You know, we saw in our leader data, in fact, that leaders, managers are doing a much better job of understanding their own behaviors, where they might be causing discomfort for others and really revising their own behaviors. What they’re having a terrible time with is resolving conflict of others, so while their skill has increased in understanding, you know, what causes conflict or what makes people uncomfortable, they are missing the skill of helping to resolve it, which is critical towards, of course, the collaboration that Leann had talked about, and so it shows that leaders are doing a great job of learning, and that there’s capacity for that learning on this other side, and we just may need more targeted, you know, help like we had talked about in the last session.

Janine mentioned our conflict resolution course, which I absolutely love. It is one of our greatest examples of managers just slowing things down, and asking questions, and helping an employee come to their own sort of realization about conflict. It’s a clear skill that leaders are going to need just to get their teams to operate sort of in a normal phase, and then, you know, the next piece of it is the adaptability, right? Organizations are being asked to do things faster than they have before, to come up with and adapt to new processes, to integrate AI, to try these new tools, like you know, leaders are really going to need to understand how to do that themselves.

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They’re being asked to do so much more than they have, and so, you know, maybe, Leann, some comments about, you know, leaders in those new mindsets. Yeah, oh yeah, are you saying that? Yeah, absolutely, but it really, it’s the ever, it’s the students, the grasshopper mindset, it’s the, you know, continuing to evolve continuously with others, with others, not a single point, it’s not somebody alone, it’s a bunch of people together. Bring the people, bring the team along with you as you grow, right? So, in terms of monitoring and managing operational risk, as many of you who are Emtrain clients know, we have summary dashboards available to you that are going to let you start to monitor organizational risk.

For example, if you are having employees go through code of conduct, data privacy, vibrant corruption, or any of the courses that feed into this sort of reporting and whistleblowing, we will start to highlight for you where we see that you might have some concerns or some things that we might warn about. It’s an opportunity for us to say, hey, there’s something here that we’re seeing in our data that could lead to a problem in the future. You want to, you know, take a look.

We have lots of add-ons that allow our clients to go and see exactly what’s happening by team, department, location, etc., which really helps you to identify where there’s an issue and around what topic. These can be super quick wins for folks in HR or compliance because you find those biggest pockets of risk and you can, you know, go and do the intervention just in that group or just in that department, as opposed to trying to do, you know, across-the-board, top-down changes. There’s, you know, ability for you to monitor these things over time and see how they’re improving.

So, you know, monitoring and managing organizational risk. Organizations are doing much better around organizational risk, but you can’t have it totally on autopilot, and so while we want leaders to feel good about the work that has happened in the organization around that accountability, we also want to make sure that they’re keeping being on track. Yeah, and I just want to say it’s really a searchlight project, right? At the high level, things seem great, but when you want to focus in where there could be potential problems, this is somewhat an extreme view, and it’s not necessarily the most common one, but it will tell you both trends and specifics, and we have our clients look at this when they hear about complaints, and to really get sort of an articulation and background what really is going on so that they’re more equipped to face issues with some data.

Absolutely. All right, our third recommendation. Yeah, so do strengthen psychological safety for innovation just for a ton of things, but let’s focus on the business driver of innovation as we’re all in the age of AI.

So, conflict resolution and facilitation. Identify those early signs of tension. Use positive language, which means don’t necessarily call out the bad and criticize only, but do provide some forward moving, some direction and guidance of where you would like folks to go, and maintain your focus on the business outcomes.

Empathy and emotional validation. So, again, really stressful at work. Let them know that you know that, right? It’ll help reduce resentment and resistance.

You’ll want to build trust. That goes a very long way, and then bias awareness and inclusive dialogue. Train managers to recognize how bias can shape perceptions of conflict.

Let’s not be one-sided, in-group, out-group, and intentionally create spaces for all voices. So, take that time to ask around before coming to a decision. Absolutely.

Those listening skills, those facilitation skills, they’re all part of getting as much information as you can out of people who know your processes and are able to help them transform. So, I know that was quick. Again, we help clients by helping to do employee training.

That’s around some of the major compliance areas, and also that skill building. We have the sentiment analytics that will help you see what’s happening in your workplace, and in some cases, see concerning trends that you can get ahead of with quick interventions and quick wins. And then, of course, the leadership intelligence, helping an individual leader to understand what’s happening in their area, their overall department, and helping them make those refinements that will ensure that their team is best collaborating, sharing good ideas, and really adapting towards this new environment that we have.

So, that is our Workplace Culture Report for 2025. Again, available as a download from our website. Blog posts going deep dives into each of these areas, and Leann and I are both available.

You can find us through your client success team member or through our sales team if you’d like to have a further conversation. Thank you, Lorraine. It was very nice to do this with you again.

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Likewise. Super interested to see what our findings are next year because things are changing fast, yeah, hopefully. Thank you, everyone.

All right. Hi, folks. Thank you so much to Laraine and Leann.

That was fantastic. Be sure to go download the Workplace Culture Report. It’s on Emtrain’s website.

I will be sending out an email following this conference that will link over to the Culture Report. Now we are up for a 20-minute break before our CHRO panel with Tracy Cote and Kelley Steven-Waiss. So, take a break, walk around, get a snack, and we will see you over there at 1130.

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Thank you so much. So long.