State of Organizational Health: Insights Every Organizational Leader Needs to Know

Discover the trends shaping workplace culture, employee engagement, L&D, and leadership effectiveness—and what they mean for your strategy.

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Dale Carnegie’s inaugural global State of Organizational Health Report is designed to provide a portrait of the perceptions and experiences of employees at all levels and age groups. The report highlights both progress as well as tensions across several key workplace topics.

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Organizational Health Study Highlights

Communication is key to healthy and high-performing organizations.

22% of organizations now model highly effective communication—but gaps persist between leaders and teams.

Empathy connects organizational culture to building trust and connection.

Only 17% of workplaces are viewed as deeply empathetic and leaders are 3x more likely to perceive empathy than employees.

Employee engagement and retention both showed stability.

The share of deeply engaged employees grew to 23%, while more employees also signaled an intent to stay at their organizations.

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Challenges Shaping the Workplace

Despite improvements, 2025 results reveal persistent misalignments between organizational strategy and employee experience.

Confidence is high among leaders but significantly lower among employees.
Hybrid and remote work experiences improved while on-site employees show no change in satisfaction, engagement or innovation.
Mid-level managers are stuck between communicating strategy and operational execution.
Leaders struggle to put empathy and effective communication into practice.

Key Takeaways

Strategic Approach to Building Workplace Culture & Sustaining Organizational Performance

Building a strong organizational culture that is rooted in high performance requires combining multiple skills, systems, and putting them into action consistently. Doing so will allow your organization to build the conditions to enable culture, create the drivers to maintain momentum and the measurement to ensure future success.

Creating the conditions that enable culture with foundational inputs. These are levers that organizations can most directly influence to shape culture:

Communication
Empathy
Psychological Safety

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Building drivers of sustainable organizational performance with sustaining dynamics. These are the connecting elements at tie culture inputs to performance outcomes:

Culture of Innovation
Technology Integration
Work-Life Balance
Satisfaction with Immediate Manager

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Measuring key indicators of organizational health will ensure consistent future performance – allowing organizations to anticipate challenge and target investment to produce high-performing teams.

Employee Engagement
Retention Intent
Job Satisfaction

See the Date Behind the Key Indicators of Organizational Health >

Explore global data across 4 regions with analysis on 11 critical workplace topics

North America | Latin America
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa | Asia Pacific

Communication

Empathy

Psychological Safety

Learning Culture

Innovation Culture

Technology / AI Integration

Work-Life Balance

Satisfaction with Leader

Job Satisfaction

Retention Intent

Employee Engagement

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Written by:
Robert Coleman, Ph.D.

Director of Research and Thought Leadership

Robert is responsible for ongoing research into current issues facing leaders, employees, and organizations worldwide. With over 25 years of experience, Robert brings a research-driven approach to help organizations and practitioners identify and address significant areas of impact for workplace improvement.

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