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Top 5 Employee Experience Trends Shaping Work in 2025

The 2025 Employee Experience Trends Report surveyed 35,000 employees across 22 countries and 30 industries. It reveals five key trends shaping work: simplifying chaotic processes, engaging young employees, improving entry/exit experiences, prioritizing long-term trust over short-term gains, and closing the AI maturity gap as employee adoption outpaces organizations.

This article was written by Antonio Pangallo and published by Qualtrics – 2025 Employee Experience Trends Report.

What’s the current state of play?

The past few years have been chaotic — so much so that organizations are devoting more and more time and effort to business agility and resilience, hybrid work models, enhancing productivity, and activating artificial intelligence (AI) at scale to help navigate uncertainty.

But while leaders are focused on the future, and everything other than work itself, employees have been forced to adapt and find their own solutions, often using outdated systems and processes with little to no support.

As well as addressing technological and operational challenges, organizations must also rethink the experiences they deliver: where job applications, onboarding and exiting used to be priorities for organizations, these foundational experiences have become somewhat lost and deprioritized among constant change and focus shifts.

We’ve forgotten that first impressions and final impressions are hugely significant for employee perceptions of a business.

We also found trust to be a recurring theme this year: are business decisions driven by people, or profit? Will senior leaders be less benevolent and prioritize profit over people, or more benevolent, having employees’ backs and taking a financial hit to help them if they’re struggling? Benevolence matters to employees.

There is, however, some cause for celebration; we discovered that despite comments about their work ethic and commitment, employees under 25 are more enthusiastic, actively engaged, and proud of their organizations than any other age group.

The challenge here is: how can we continue to create the kinds of experiences that motivate, engage, and retain this segment of the workforce?

Finally, AI. Widespread surge in adoption has meant that for the vast majority, AI is now part of the everyday. But while it’s a powerful tool, organizational maturity and enablement lag behind.

Overall, our findings yet again demonstrate one unassailable fact: the human workforce remains the true backbone of every organization.

Let’s dig into the main findings of the report, and see how technology can help.

Trend 1: 2025’s best employers will make work less chaotic

Between the pressures of the every day and the demand for higher productivity, employees have been forced to adapt to change and uncertainty time, and time again over the past few years.

But while employees have gone above and beyond to meet ever-increasing expectations, organizational systems and processes have lagged behind, leading to a situation where work feels harder and more complex than ever for employees.

For more than a third of employees, there’s unrelenting pressure to increase productivity, despite the inefficiencies of current systems and processes.

38% of employees are feeling pressure from their employers to increase productivity

When we dug into what’s causing these issues, employees said they’re due to:

Pace of change (38%)
Strategic efforts (36%)
Economic conditions (34%)

Therefore, to keep employees engaged and well within themselves, the priorities (and top drivers for success) in 2025 are:

Simplifying processes to enable employees to meet customer needs
Improving how work gets done
Developing new ways to serve customers

People adapt faster than systems do, that much is clear — but it’s vital that leaders join their employees on this journey to eliminate poor experiences and streamline work.

Continue reading the article here: The 5 employee experience trends redefining work in 2025