The 2026 Best Places to Work program found that employees rate their supervisors highest of all measured workplace factors (8.31 out of 10), while compensation is the dominant concern at 45% of all open-ended concern responses. Satisfaction scores held nearly flat year over year across all six core metrics, with no single measure moving by more than 0.09 points. Workforce tenure improved and post-graduate respondents grew from 17% to 22% of the total pool.
So here is the thing about running an awards program for a living: you collect a lot of data. Year after year, survey after survey, pattern after pattern. And every time we drop a new round of results, I find myself both nodding along and genuinely surprised by at least one or two findings.
The 2026 Best Places to Work program just wrapped up, and we now have a robust pool of validated employee responses across our participating organizations. We ran the same standardized 1-to-10 question instrument we used in 2025, which means the year-over-year comparison is a clean apples-to-apples read. So let us get into what changed, what held steady, and what it all actually means.
2026 Key Findings at a Glance
| Metric | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average Organizational Score (0–100) | 72.00 | 71.74 | ▼ 0.26 |
| Overall Satisfaction with Employer (0–10) | 7.87 | 7.85 | ▼ 0.02 |
| Overall Satisfaction with Role (0–10) | 8.16 | 8.10 | ▼ 0.06 |
| Likelihood to Recommend Employer (0–10) | 7.92 | 7.87 | ▼ 0.05 |
| Likelihood to Recommend Products/Services (0–10) | 7.98 | 7.98 | ▶ No change |
| Likelihood to Recommend Supervisor (0–10) | 8.38 | 8.31 | ▼ 0.07 |
Top Positive Theme: Team and Colleagues (34% of positive mentions)
Top Concern Theme: Compensation and Pay (45% of concern mentions)
Tenure Shift: New hires (2 years or less) dropped from 51% to 47% of respondents
Education Shift: Post-graduate degree holders grew from 17% to 22% of respondents
The Scores Are Holding Up Remarkably Well
OK, so the first thing any good data analyst does is look for dramatic swings. And frankly, this year there are not any. Every single core satisfaction metric from 2025 to 2026 moved by less than 0.10 points on a 10-point scale. That is, in the context of large-scale survey research, basically statistical noise.
Coming from a Six Sigma background, I can tell you that this kind of stability is actually meaningful. It suggests that the organizations participating in this program are, by and large, maintaining their culture in a deliberate way rather than just riding favorable conditions. Consistency like this does not happen by accident.
"Companies that sustain engagement scores tend to have systematic, manager-level practices rather than top-down initiatives." — Dr. Jim Harter, Chief Scientist, Workplace Management & Well-Being, Gallup
The highest-rated metric, in both years, was supervisor endorsement. Employees gave their managers an 8.31 out of 10 in 2026, down slightly from 8.38 in 2025. That still sits comfortably at the top of the leaderboard. As a matter of fact, this pattern keeps repeating itself year after year: front-line management quality is the single most predictive factor in overall workplace satisfaction. It is not the CEO. It is not the benefits package. It is the person running the Tuesday morning team meeting.
What Workers Actually Love About Their Jobs
Now here is where the open-ended data gets interesting. The qualitative responses are, in my opinion, always the richest part of any employee satisfaction benchmark exercise. And when you run this year's positive responses through a thematic analysis, one category absolutely dominates.
Team and colleagues. By a wide margin.
| Positive Theme | Share of Mentions |
|---|---|
| Team & Colleagues | 34% |
| Culture & Environment | 19% |
| Leadership | 11% |
| Growth & Learning | 11% |
| Flexibility & Work-Life Balance | 9% |
| Compensation & Benefits | 6% |
| Mission & Purpose | 4% |
This is, basically, consistent with decades of organizational psychology and workforce engagement research. According to SHRM's ongoing employee engagement studies, interpersonal relationships at work are among the top three factors influencing retention decisions, alongside compensation and career development opportunity. People do not stay because of ping-pong tables or free snacks. They stay because they have found their people.
Here is a fairly typical example from the 2026 open-ended feedback: "The comradery between all the departments and we all align to assist the customer." Another respondent put it simply: "I'm treated like an actual person and not just a number or tool."
For anyone in HR or talent acquisition reading this: that is your most important retention lever. Not your perks menu. Your team culture and the day-to-day relationships within it.
The Concern That Will Not Go Away: Compensation
Of all themes surfaced in open-ended concern responses, compensation and pay accounted for just over 45% of mentions. That is nearly half of all concerns landing on a single topic.
| Concern Theme | Share of Mentions | Strategic Implication |
|---|---|---|
| Compensation & Pay | 45% | Salary benchmarking and total comp transparency |
| Management Issues | 10% | Manager training and upward feedback loops |
| Growth & Promotion | 9% | Clear career ladders and promotion criteria |
| Resources & Tools | 6% | Tech investment and staffing adequacy |
| Communication | 6% | Internal comms strategy and transparency |
| Workload & Stress | 3% | Workload balancing and burnout prevention |
| Work-Life Balance | 3% | Flexible scheduling and PTO utilization |
Now, I have seen this pattern before, and I want to offer some important context. When compensation is the dominant concern but culture and team scores remain high, that is actually a somewhat hopeful signal for organizational health. It means employees are not fundamentally unhappy with where they work. They just feel like they are not being paid fairly for the contribution they are making. Those are very different problems from a talent retention strategy standpoint, and the second one is considerably more addressable.
According to research published by the Society for Human Resource Management, uncompetitive compensation is cited as the primary reason for voluntary turnover by more than 60% of departing employees, yet fewer than half of HR leaders conduct formal pay equity audits annually. That gap is a significant organizational risk that shows up clearly in our data.
If you are an HR leader at one of our participating organizations and your scores are strong but you are quietly losing mid-career people, start with a compensation audit. Seriously.
The Workforce Is Getting More Experienced and More Educated
Here is the demographic shift that I think deserves more attention than it typically gets. The share of employees with 2 years or less of tenure dropped from 51% to 47% of respondents year over year. That is a meaningful retention signal.
| Demographic | 2025 | 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tenure 2 years or less | 51% | 47% | ▼ 4 pts |
| Tenure 16 or more years | 5% | 7% | ▲ 2 pts |
| Tenure 6 to 10 years | 14% | 15% | ▲ 1 pt |
| Post-graduate degree holders | 17% | 22% | ▲ 5 pts |
| Junior-level employees | 27% | 24% | ▼ 3 pts |
| Senior-level employees | 18% | 24% | ▲ 6 pts |
Organizations that participate in a formal workplace recognition program are, apparently, doing a better job of holding onto people. Whether that is a cause or an effect of being a genuinely great employer is something of a chicken-and-egg question. But the directional trend is consistent.
The job level data reinforces the same story: junior-level employees dropped from 27% to 24% of respondents, while senior-level employees grew from 18% to 24%. These two cohorts are now equal in representation for the first time in our data. Combined with the tenure trends, the picture is fairly consistent: participating organizations are moving people up and keeping them around longer than they were a year ago.
Frequently Asked Questions About the 2026 Data
What do employees value most in the workplace in 2026?
Team cohesion and interpersonal relationships are the top-cited positive factor, appearing in roughly 34% of all positive open-ended responses. Culture and environment are second. Compensation, notably, does not appear in the top three positives, despite dominating the concerns list.
What is the single biggest employee concern in 2026?
Compensation and pay, by a significant margin. It accounts for 45% of all concern theme mentions, more than four times the next-largest concern category (management issues at roughly 10%). This pattern has been consistent across multiple program years.
Are employee satisfaction scores improving or declining?
They are essentially flat, which in context is a positive signal. All six core metrics declined by less than 0.10 points year over year. The most stable metric was likelihood to recommend employer products or services, which held at exactly 7.98 both years.
Is workforce tenure improving at Best Places to Work organizations?
Yes. The share of respondents with 2 years or less of tenure dropped from 51% in 2025 to 47% in 2026. Long-tenured employees (16 or more years) grew from 5% to 7%. This suggests participating organizations are getting meaningfully better at retention.
What is the average organizational score for Best Places to Work participants?
The 2026 average organizational score is 71.74 on a 0-to-100 scale, with a bimodal distribution: roughly 30% of respondents scored their organization between 90 and 100, while approximately 22% scored below 60.
What This Means for Organizations Pursuing Recognition
I spent a good chunk of my career working with marketing and communications teams before starting Business Intelligence Group. And one thing I learned, across newspapers and tech companies and agencies and everything in between, is that the organizations that take measurement seriously actually get better. Not because measurement is magic. Because measurement forces honest conversation.
The Best Places to Work program, administered annually by Business Intelligence Group, collects standardized employee sentiment data across participating organizations using a consistent survey instrument. The benchmark numbers are not just a way to compete. They are a way to understand where your organizational health is strong and where it is quietly at risk.
The 2026 data tells a pretty coherent story. Employees love their teams. They respect their managers. They believe in their companies' products. And they want to be paid fairly for all of it. That is, frankly, not a complicated list of demands. The organizations that treat that list seriously, not just during awards season, are the ones that will thrive in a genuinely competitive talent market.
If your organization is doing work worth recognizing, we want to hear about it. The nominations process is straightforward, and the benchmark data you receive is genuinely actionable. Come see what your employees are actually saying.