Hello and welcome to this edition of Human Capital Watch. Today we're going to be talking about our most recent edition of our job satisfaction report, a report we've been working on with a survey since 1987. This edition 2025, we'll be talking about work worker satisfaction rebounding fairly sharply. So let's get started. And just to give you a little bit of housekeeping, we have as a benefit to members of the Conference Board received approval for this webcast from HRCI, Sherm and CPE for credit. So if you click the icon that is pictured to sign up sort of here on the on the right, you can apply for that credit and receive that credit. I'm joined today. Well, my name first. My name is Alan Schwein. I'm a principal researcher with the Human Capital Center at the Conference Board. I'm joined today by Mitchell Barnes, who is an economist with the Conference Board, and Matt Rosenbaum, who is a principal researcher as well at the Conference Board with the Human Capital Center. The work that we're going to be talking about today is based on a survey of US workers employed, US workers, of which we had 1734 responses, so quite a robust sample size. We ask a series of 27 questions around the distinct elements of workforce of worker satisfaction as well as an overall question around overall job satisfaction. We conducted the survey with the consumer confidence survey, which is a larger survey the Conference Board fields each month in January 2025 and we'll Mitchell will talk about that in a moment because that represents a change from previous years. Basically this is something that workers complete providing their feedback, their perceptions, their feelings, their their notions of whether they are satisfied and to what degree they are satisfied on A5 point scale against these elements, these 27 elements. And overall. We're going to be publishing this report in a couple of weeks or about you know, no more than a month let's say. So we apologize for not having the report ready to distribute today. But once it is available, it will be made ready and available to everyone who attends, attended this conference today for at least a period of several weeks. We're going to be covering 4 main things today. We're going to talk obviously about the current state of US job satisfaction. Based on those responses, we're going to be talking about the elements. And again when we talk about the elements, we mean the 27 sub components of you, if you will of job satisfaction. And we also have five other elements that really track to things like employee engagement and intent to stay. So if you add those up, over 30 elements of job satisfaction that crossover into sort of the engagement territory as well. So it's fair to say that this is both a job satisfaction survey and is primarily a job satisfaction survey, but it also crosses over into employee engagement. We're going to look too about, you know, how the results of the survey vary by demographics, by age, by gender, and even by elements such as, you know, whether a person intends to stay with their organization or leave. And then we've done some analysis as well to get beyond just the the surface level results using what Matt Rosenbaum is going to describe as a relative weights analysis to try to understand what the relative drivers are of or the the influencers are of overall job satisfaction. So really good stuff to come. Please, if you have questions, just put them in the chat box or the Q&A box as you as they occur to you. We'll keep our eye on the Q&A box and we'll try to answer your questions as they come in or as close to when they come in as possible. And we expect to have a few minutes at the end. There will also be a few polls. We're going to go to 1 now. And we'd really appreciate your answers to these questions because they relate to some of the information that we're going to be sharing in a moment. So among your own workforce, what is the trend in employee satisfaction or engagement currently? We realize that some some of you call your internal surveys different things. Some call them culture surveys, some call them engagement surveys, and some call them satisfaction surveys or otherwise. But whatever the survey is where you, you know, attempt to track worker sentiment, please answer ABCD or E and then we'll share those results as soon as we hit, you know, around 50% of of responses. We're only at about 1/4 now. So keep your answers coming. And so I'll share that in a moment. Any predictions here, Matt or Mitchell? I think we'll see improving slightly. That would be my guess, although given what's happened last few months and maybe added some tumult to those answers. Yeah, good point. I think we'll expand on what Matt just mentioned. Our survey was run in January, but it was sort of early to mid January before a lot of the executive orders and changes came from the new administration and also some of the economic things that have changed a little bit since the survey was taken. That's inevitable. It happens every year. But we'll talk about how we think some of those things and Mitchell especially in a moment, we'll talk about those things as well. So I'm going to share the results. Well, it's worsening slightly. I think Matt, you might have touched on maybe the reason why there has been tumultuous economic and political activity and the workforce may be responding to that. So over half that's that's a little surprising. Any thoughts, Mitchell? I mean, are you surprised by these results? You know, and I think we're going to walk through this here, you know, momentarily, but I think a lot is, is, you know, what is our most recent experience. And I think really reflecting over probably the first quarter since some of these changes have come up. And I think more so uncertainty, you know, both on I think the workers perspective, but also the businesses. So I think this this might be understandable given, you know, the last several several months that we've seen. Absolutely. OK. Well, I'm going to turn it over now to Mitchell, who's going to talk about our, our, our high level results. Mitchell. Yes, and thank you, Alan And I, I think, you know, this is a great starting place. Not only, you know, had Alan mentioned, you know, in this year's survey, you know, out in January, we found the highest satisfaction, you know, that we have seen across all of the years that we've been doing this survey. And, and I think, you know, what is really notable about this is that it's tied to economic factors, right? I mean, if we, you know, just look of, you know, where we have been climbing up from in the last 15 years or so, it is really just a, a picture of the Great Recession and, and really a long recovery out of that. So really since that time we saw about, you know, 5 percentage points jump in satisfaction in this year's survey. But really the over the last 14 or 15 years, we're averaging about 1.4 percentage points pretty continually. So I think we can dive into really some of the elements of this. But I think, you know, a starting place is that we really were seeing, especially through January, the continuation of a strong economy. And I think, you know, detaching that from kind of the satisfaction and overall sentiment story. And I think is, is something that we need to to hold together here. And so as we kind of look at some of these elements, you know, starting back with a resilient labor market, I think the economy overall really across probably later 2023 and and 2024 was more resilient than I think many expected. Certainly, if we look back, you know, several years ago at our own satisfaction survey, we actually saw, you know, a little bit of timidity around some of the job security elements that, that we look for. And I think that actually says that there was a kind of an economic, you know, uncertainty 2 years ago or so. And I think that really shows you how strong the continuation of this trend has been. Certainly we hadn't seen layoffs, you know, tick up substantially especially through January, but towards the end of 2024, you know, relatively strong labor market. So that job security element, you know, certainly favorable I think to this year's survey. What is also worth mentioning is that this is a sub population of as Alan mentioned, the Conference Board's overall consumer confidence survey. And what is, you know, really important to to hammer home here is that we exclude those that are not working from that survey population for our job satisfaction. So I think really some of the stories that were evolving over the last several months, again before the election really amplified those is, you know, maybe there's a white collar recession or new job seekers that are coming out of college or finding difficulty. I think one of the reasons that we might not be picking that up is because we are focused on kind of that core cohort of workers that, you know, have been relatively stable, have seen pretty good income growth over the last year or so as inflation has fallen away. Then there is really the the larger bucket here. And I know we're going to get into this of really investments businesses have made over the last several years. We'll get to really the story of some of the worker quits, some of the high turnover. But I think really, you know, we are starting to see perhaps companies reaping the rewards of some of those investments that they've put in place the last several years. And as I had mentioned, you know, one of the points that that we'll get to later in the conversation is the post pandemic job hopping. But one thing that I think is notable here is that we did see really a record amount of turnover across the workforce, those leaving jobs, this finding new jobs. And we do imagine that at least some portion of that is going to lift up satisfaction as people kind of find better matches over time. And one other elements that I really want to pin this to this is, you know, again, kind of going under the hood of our consumer confidence survey itself that is depicted in the yellow line. And then you can see that overall job satisfaction. I have not really adjusted these scales, but kind of kept it as is. But really what I, I want to highlight here is that again, kind of pinning our expectation from, you know, an evolution from the Great Recession, we really have seen kind of a broad consumer confidence of the labor market really persist and ratchet higher over time. And again our survey really didn't see you know all that much of a fall if any from really the the interim years of 2020-2021 and really the the covet downturn. But again if you were employed during that time, you know maybe you had greater flexibilities, your income was probably a little bit more consistent than some of those that might have seen furlough etcetera. So again, I think we are taking kind of that employed population and if you really see kind of the long term trends through January, I think broadly consumer confidence, the economy was holding up rather well. And to get into some of these elements. And I know Alan and Matt, please just jump in. But I, I want to really, at least, you know, pinpoint the review process promotion, really distinguishing those clear paths for people. You know, I think that is something that, you know, my eye is tuned in for just of, you know, kind of what workers are we kind of seeing sentiment shift for? But then there's a a whole group of these that are, you know, vacation, some of the flexibilities we mentioned, some of the wages, obviously we had seen, you know, pretty consistent satisfaction with those. But what sticks out to you of the the elements from from really the top? I think for me it is that performance reviews last promotion portion, just because that's typically an area that can be really people can be extremely dissatisfied with just, you know, depending on the results of that performance review process, for instance. So seeing the level of satisfaction jump there, I think it's it's very encouraging just because this is an area that you we in the Human Capital Center have been talking about for quite a while of the need to focus on retention. And it's something that coming out of our CSV outlook survey, for instance, attracting retaining talent is the number one human capital concern that CSV executive shared. So I think it's good news for the work that organizations are doing on that front, definitely. Alan, anything you want to add before we really dive into more of these elements? Yeah, I think I agree. You know, I think there was a lot of room for improvement in the performance review process. We've seen that for years. And I agree with Matt's comments. I just also put all of these are significant gains and it's, it's good to see too that interest in work jumped 4.3 points, work work like balance at 5.5 points. And I think, you know, Matt in a moment is going to be talking about why we think these and a few of a few other elements that you see on the on the on the slide here are, you know, maybe the biggest influencers of overall job satisfaction as well. Alan. OK, well, let's ask you what you think the top drivers of job satisfaction are among your employees today. No, we have flexible flexibility in item E here. Just while you're looking at this and answering this question and please just select the number one answer here, if you will. I'll just mention and Matt Mitchell jump into as well if you would like, but you didn't see flexibility in terms of being able to work remotely or work in a hybrid situation or maybe control the hours of work on previous slide. That doesn't necessarily mean that those were important or that they didn't also increase. In fact, to the extent that we can equate this year's survey to last year's survey, the satisfaction with those did increase. And I'll explain that last year and in previous the previous three years since we started to ask about job flexibility as an element of job satisfaction, we asked one question we and it was basically a question, are you satisfied with, you know, the flexible work options or job flexibility. This year we broke it into are you satisfied with job flexibility in terms of location and in terms of hours. So we couldn't really credibly link those two questions together and report them in that previous slide. But we did see an increase in what what looks to be an increase in satisfaction there and the important factors and overall job satisfaction I am not seeing, OK, we're about 44%. So any any comments on that matter Mitchell, before I share the results? No, I think we'll talk a little bit about this in the report, but the the flexibility of work is something that workers do strongly desire, but it seems to be coming more stabilized just based on data we're seeing from like a reimagined workplace report which came out a few weeks ago. The level of hybrid remote on fully on site work seems to have roughly stabilized. So I think it may be something that workers are looking to other elements for where they derive the most satisfaction or what most strongly effects their satisfaction. Yeah. And I, and I think there's, you know, probably a good dynamic going on where you know, some of those that are, you know, very comfortable with maybe job security or, or wages, maybe they, you know, have kind of a different motivation in what they're looking for. So we definitely kind of see that and and try to parse that out as well. Yeah, excellent. Thank you both. I'm going to share this now and we see that compensation and benefits, I mean, that's, this makes sense, right? If you don't get compensation and benefits, right, I mean, if you're not competitive and what you pay worse and the benefits that you provide them, then these, this element or these elements will naturally become very salient and very important to workers. Career development has long been an element of job satisfaction that's been important. We save flexibility and work life balance here too is perhaps the second most important and then purpose and alignment with company values Great. Any comments on this results before we move on, Mitchell? You know, I would, I would just add that again, you know, some of this I think is, you know, it's a question of how this will shift, you know, in a new economic environment that we potentially face because compensation and benefits. I mean, I think you'd seen that be really a core driver of maybe some of the job switching motivation of the last several years. But again, as, as that and kind of improves versus inflation, does that really stick there? Do some of the flexibilities persist, you know, over the next couple months? We know the federal government and and some bigger names are are pushing for back to the office in a recent push. So we'll see how this this really evolves. OK, thanks. We're going to turn over to Matt Rosenbaum now to talk about some of the elements that, you know, our research suggests might be the key predictors, if you will, of overall job satisfaction. Matt. Yeah. Thank you, Alan. So as we're just talking about, I think compensation and what we consider maybe hard benefits, you know your your healthcare plan for instance are important to employees obviously. But I think what we have found consistently of the least the last couple of years in the survey is that once a kind of a minimum threshold is met, other factors tend to come into play as driving satisfaction or at least explaining the most variance and overall satisfaction. So as Alan described at the beginning, the analysis we're doing here is something called relative weights analysis, which basically is a way of looking at different factors and seeing how much each one contributes to the movement in overall independent variable or dependent variable, excuse me, based on the fact that sometimes they're heavily correlated with each other. So there are multiple aspects of jobs that may overlap with each other. And so how do we discern which specific one is affecting overall satisfaction is kind of the question that we have to deal with. So what we do is use relative weights analysis to kind of give us the breakdown of how much each individual factor is contributing to that overall variance in overall satisfaction. And what we found was that wages or other kind of vacation policies, for instance, are important, yes, but the actual, the most important, what produced the most variance that overall satisfaction is #1 interest in work #2 quality of leadership, then workplace culture, the workload that employees are dealing with, and then the relationship they have with their supervisor, basically how satisfied they are with their supervisor. And what I think is important to note here is just, again, as you've been saying, the wages, the hard benefits are important. But I think once you get past a certain point with that in terms of just how satisfied employees are, they're going to look to other elements largely related to organizational culture, employee experience to really distinguish what moves the needle for them when it comes to their level of satisfaction. One thing I think is important to note here is just that this analysis is not causal. So we can't say for sure that this causes the transition and or the change in overall satisfaction. It's more just within our model, this best explains how overall satisfaction moves. So these are kind of the the core factors that most predict the changes that are happening in overall satisfaction for the data that we found. And I think what's helpful here is to look at it in relation to not only what moves the needle for employees in terms of predict their overall satisfaction, but also how satisfied they are with each of those elements, which is what we did here in this chart. And basically, I know it's a little bit hard to read on your on your screen, but I think the overall point here is that there's the top right quadrant in the top or the bottom right quadrant. In the top right quadrant are areas where the element in question is above the median in terms of how significant it is to predicting the overall variance in overall satisfaction and also above the median in terms of how satisfied employees are. So basically these are areas or these are elements that move the needle, yes, but employees are already pretty satisfied with what they're receiving. Whereas the bottom right represents what we consider as a sweet spot as it were areas that move the needle for employees in terms of their effect on overall satisfaction. But are below the median in terms of the satisfaction employees have with each individual elements of things like the potential for future growth wages. It's just kind of like in the middle of there or recognition or acknowledgement that's non financial are areas where companies and organizations can potentially improve and get the most quote UN quote, bang for their buck in terms of improving employees overall satisfaction. Because these are important factors to employees, yes, but they're also not as satisfied with them as they they might be otherwise. So I think it's more than any other thing because this is obviously overall across industries, across different context. What's important is for organizations to take this kind of where are our weaks points and where are strong points into account when considering what they want to do to improve employee experience. Because it may be something like we're trying to focus on our healthcare plan, but that may not actually move the needle as much for their particular employees. That's something related to let's say organizational culture, for instance, or other employee experience related topics. So I think it's important to more so than the, it's going to differ for every context in every organization. But this approach of how do we identify the areas that are most important, I think is it's going to be important for organizations just especially given the potential for economic uncertainty in other areas where there may be things coming into play that are factors coming into play that are going to make it harder to keep employees satisfied, to keep engagement levels high. And that's where organizations are going to need to be able to focus. We also, as Alan mentioned earlier, looked at not just the 27 different elements of specific aspects of jobs themselves, such as vacation policy or performance review process. We also looked at 5 elements of basically well-being or any levels of engagement. So those five elements are things like sense of belonging, intent to stay, the level of effort that employees are putting into the work, their level of engagement. And what we found was that 38% of workers are either feel better or much better about their engagement levels than they did six months prior. So what we ask is not how are people feeling today per SE, we're asking how are they feeling in relation how they felt six months ago. So we're trying to get a sense of what is the trend is the, you know, is the trend moving positively or negatively. So most people say they're feeling about the same as they were six months ago. I think in general it's about 40 to 50% of people across those five questions. Each question they'll say I feel about the same. Then you usually have about 30 to 40% of folks saying they feel better or much better and only 10 to 15% roughly say they feel worse or much worse. So I think it's again going to that question of what is the trend overall, it's more of a, some people are feeling worse, yes, but more people are feeling better on average across pretty consistently across those questions. And 40% or more of workers are feeling better about their effort, their intent to stay and their sense of belonging. So seeing some good numbers there and even things like level of mental health, which is another question we asked about that is a little bit lower. 36% of folks are saying that they feel better, much better about their mental health than they did six months ago. But that is a improvement over what we found in 2023 and 2022. So I think yes, we would love to see people feeling much better across the board and even more significant numbers. But I think it's important to note that we are making a steady incremental progress there. Alan Mitchell, any thoughts on on the in level engagement or level of commitment that people are feeling towards their work right now? You know, I, I would just add that, you know, and I know we'll, we'll get to my part on on job switching in a bit. But at least, you know, again, kind of thinking about the worker types, you know, that might be underneath all of these numbers. You know, it really just occurs to me that a lot of that job switching engagements, finding what you want to do, certainly even among kind of newer generation of job seekers looking for really that alignments with company values. You know, I think all of those things suggest to me that, you know, that could be lifting some of this, you know, feeling more engaged or kind of on the improving path. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think, sorry, you know, I was just saying I agree. Matt Mitchell talked about this at the outset too. And you know, we had a comment from one of our attendees here that job stability is their number one interest and concern today. And you know, I bring that up because I think it's so these results are so contingent on what's going on when a person completes the survey in and around that time anyway. And if if unemployment goes up, if there are more layoffs, if the economy starts to, you know, turn a little more negative, then that will that will that will make that, that will change how people feel. And I say that too because it's so interesting, as you pointed out, Matt, that the majority, the great, the plurality at least feel better than they did six months ago. And as Mitchell mentioned, the outside and again just now, it's really because the economy probably large to a large degree because the economy has just been so resilient and the unemployment rate has remained historically low, even if workers aren't. It's not as easy for workers to switch jobs as it as it was maybe in 2023 or in early 2024. We didn't see the spike in dissatisfaction with job security. And I think in the future, when we when we see that if, if and when we see that element decrease, we'll we'll, we'll see that it, it corresponds with what's happening in the economy. And to our respondents point about job stability becoming their number one concern. Sorry. Catherine asks, is there any data you can provide whether voluntary attrition differs by age group over the last several years? We have a little bit about that Catherine, coming up. We can't answer that question directly from this survey, I don't think. But we can talk about, you know, Matt described it well, how our respondents are feeling in terms of whether they intend to stay or leave. And we do have some of that data by age categories over the previous six months as opposed to several years. Yeah. I think that the challenge there, Catherine, to your question is we ask people whether they have left their job or stayed at their job, but we don't ask about voluntary leaving. We do ask about intent to stay compared to six months ago. We also ask people, you know, we have a category in or have you left your job or stated your job question, which we'll talk about later in this presentation. We also have a question about do you intend to leave your job? And so we can dive into those results a little bit there. But we don't ask about a, you know, have you left voluntarily versus where you laid off or you know, had to leave for other reasons. So it's a bit harder to parse, unfortunately for from our data set, but to what Alan was talking about, I think one of the recurring themes that we have here is worker sentiment. Worker satisfaction is fragile. It's something that is heavily affected by what's going on in the larger world outside as it were, as well as within the organization. And I think it's important to one for organizations to continue investing in strategies, initiatives to to boost satisfaction. It seems like there's been some improvement regarding performance review processes, promotion policies, things of that nature. So it's important to keep that good work going rather than to rest on our laurels and say great, mission accomplished. I think that is unfortunately just never going to be the the way we can operate. It'll always be something that has to be actively worked at. I think it's also important to highlight what we've talked about a little bit already is just that the elements of work that seem to move the needle the most are not necessarily related to wages or hard benefits, but more of the experience of work, organizational culture, things of that nature. And one of the areas that we've seen work for well for a lot of organizations is establishing an internal talent marketplace that aligns well with that importance of the interest in work, the organizational culture, the opportunities for recognition and chance to learn new things. I think there is a lot of opportunity again depending on organizational context to satisfy some of those needs on the on from among the employees by establishing internal marketplace and and giving people opportunities to try out different projects, try out different roles within the organization as well as benefits for the organization. Not just from potentially a more engaged and more interested workforce, but also in terms of being able to match internal needs to people you already have in the building versus having to look externally. So. And I'll just, I'll just want to add in one thing around some of the uncertainty that, you know, maybe many of you are are dealing with as well, is that, you know, I think when we think about some of the changes that we've seen in some of the cultural elements over the last several years, I think when we look back in our data, you know, really compared to the pre pandemic time frame, I mean, we've really seen just a broad based rise across a lot of these these elements. And a lot of them have been, I think, very cultural. And I would just, you know, put an asterisk and again, of something that you know, seems to be shifting quite rapidly is some of the, you know, diversity and really bore broad inclusion, you know, mechanisms that I think a lot of people were invested in. I think really, again, I know you're going to speak to to men and women and some of the different cohorts. But I think really trying to find creative ways whether a marketplace or what have you of really trying to still kind of put your your hand in and make sure that you are investing appropriately. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is in central and also something that as we were talking about before, given the economic uncertainty, just given the tumult and different things that may be happening based on, you know, changes both just within the US, but also broader and more globally. I think it's important to weigh the effect that actions organization may take may have on worker satisfaction engagement because, you know, there may be an opportunity or need for tightening belts, for instance, amidst economic upheaval or uncertainty. But look at how is that going to affect our workers because you don't want to be in a situation where you're winning in the short term in terms of cutting costs or other other aspects, but then suffering in the medium to long term because, you know, people are less engaged in their work or haven't developed the way that they were hoping to. I think that's going to create problems down the road. So it's important to balance that current need and that the future as well. Alan, any other thoughts before I move on to the next section? I almost hesitate to bring it up, but there haven't been any web casts or, or presentations I've been on lately that we haven't raised the the opportunity or the specter of artificial intelligence. And I just want to point out, too, that this is also contributing, I think, to the sense of uncertainty right now. And you know, sure, it's political, sure it's economic, but the potential displacement of workers that, you know, to some degree we're already seeing is contributing to this. And it will be interesting to see how that plays out in our in our next survey. But also I think underscores your points, Mitchell, Matthew, we need to keep this going that even if there's a layoff, the employees who remain, they need to be satisfied and engaged if they're going to perform at the level that the organization wants. So backing off of any of the gains that Mitchell spoke about, that you spoke about would be a bad strategy, even as the pendulum may swing more. You know, I hate this term, but in favor of the of the employer and and away from the worker in terms of workforce power dynamics. It's important to keep these gains to to build on these games. Yeah. And we've been talking about gains kind of across the population. But now I'm going to turn it over to you, Alan, to talk about the difference in women and men in our survey and just how they responded to these various questions. Yeah, Thanks, Matt. And it's, you know, really interesting this year that after so many years, really seven years, we see that women have not only closed the gap, but actually slightly exceed men in satisfaction in 2025. This is interesting on a, on a number of levels, but it's also interesting because, and I'll show you in a moment, women were not as satisfied as men across most of the discrete elements of job satisfaction that we tested. Still, you know, you can see the sharp increase from 2023 again, 2023. We launched the survey in November. It was a 14 month gap between when we launched, when we released the survey again in 2025. So you don't see 2024 numbers there, but this was a 14 month gap instead of a 12 month gap. But you see the sharp increase for women in overall satisfaction. Again, it's interesting that when we look at the elements, only six of those 27 elements were women more satisfied than men. So it's difficult to really conclude that women are more satisfied at work than men in 2025 versus 2023 in the seven years prior to that. But it but it is something that we saw and we saw this increase around some of the elements of culture and interest in work that Matt and Mitchell talked about. Women were more satisfied in their educational training programs as well, where they weren't as satisfied. Again, amongst most of the elements of satisfaction were the ones that we historically associate with women being less satisfied than men. And those are things like wages and bonuses, promotion policies, pension and retirement plans as well. So thinking about the differences again, men were least were also least satisfied with their bonus plan and promotion policies like women and their education and training programs. They were less satisfied with their mental health policies even though than women, even though they were along with women, more satisfied than they were in the previous year. But in these categories, they still report being more satisfied than than women. So all that to say, there's probably still some more work to do in areas like pay equity in fairness around and transparency around promotions, maybe working on differences in pension and retirement plan. This could stem from women maybe leaving the workforce and returning to the workforce more than men may do. So things to look at. I guess my main point here over these two slides would not be to take. The the first slide, maybe I'll just go back for a moment as evidence that our work is done, the work to sort of make the work the, the workforce equitable between men and women has been ongoing for decades and you know, major gains have been made, but there is still some work to be done. It's also interesting Matt talked about the general, our general findings in those elements that maybe more predictive or more influential in determining overall job satisfaction for women and men. I mean, there's a lot of overlap here. It's again interest in work and quality of leadership, their workloads. So you saw those in the top five, their supervisor and the only real difference is work life balance popping into the top five compared to just our general sample overall. And that makes sense too. Women we know from our our work this year and last year and other organizations work continue to carry the majority of the burden outside of work in the home and so on. So that balance is, is potentially more important to women than men. Men flag interest of work as well, workload and quality of leadership in their top three. But the difference is they bring in recognition, which is a little surprising to me that recognition was a little bit more important for men than for women. It just may be that the top five for women crowded out recognition a little bit. And of course, you know, we can't say for sure. And as Matt pointed out, this differs between organizations, but it gives some, you know, more nuanced indication of where the differences may lie. You know, amongst the demographics we looked at also at at at age. So we had respondents anywhere from 18 to, you know, in their in their 70s respond to the to the survey. We grouped those by age cohorts, sort of younger, you know, mid, mid age workers and then older workers and found something. I think 2 is a little surprising, perhaps not enormously surprising seeing as some of the things that are happening in the workforce right now, or maybe seeing that younger workers are, are, are seeing greater difficulties in finding work. College graduates, unemployment rate is higher. In the past it has been lower, I believe. Let Mitchell talk to that in a moment. He's he's our economist, but we're, you know, we're certainly seeing a trend here that has persisted over a few years now, which is that the least satisfied group of workers is that 18 to 24 category. But what might be most surprising is that in a year where we saw such, you know, significant increases in overall job satisfaction, that the 18 to 24 year old group actually fell a little bit in overall job, job satisfaction this year. It increased amongst most of the specific elements of job satisfaction. So it's not a bad story, not a negative story overall. I mean, things like mental health increased significantly for the 18 to 24 year olds. And we've, we've heard a lot in the media about, you know, the mental health crisis amongst youngsters, younger workers and and so on. So we know that at least feelings of mental health compared to the past six months were a little stronger. Feelings of whether they wanted to stay with their employer increased actually 10 point percentage points than this period last year. So again, last year we asked how they were feeling versus 6 months ago. This year we asked how they were feeling versus 6 months ago. And that element rose 10 percentage points, which is is fairly significant. We saw big increases with the 55 plus so much more satisfied this year than they were last year and in previous years. Again, we we can account for that spike to some degree, but we aren't, you know, 100% clear on why that occurred. And for the 25 and 50 year olds, we saw a fairly significant jump as well. Matt and Mitchell, any thoughts on this or the previous slide? Yeah. I, I know where we have some some last points to get in. But I, I do want to say kind of two quick things here is that when we think about kind of job opportunities kind of the the, you know, let's say depletion of kind of the excess vacancies that we saw kind of come down over 2024. I think a lot of that does fall on kind of this youngest cohort. One of our, you know, commenters had had asked about attrition, you know, really across age dynamics. And you have to think that you're really just traditionally and, and it's no different in this period that really those job opportunities that, you know, potential for switching, I think falls most heavily on on kind of that cohort. The one other thing I just want to add on on a demographic piece is that we're, you know, continuing to see, you know, the great stat 10,000 baby boomers retiring a day. You know, this is going to start depleting really the overall labor force growth across the US that has implications for wages, that has implications just for labor shortages potentially needing AI rather than that being a nicety. So I think really that satisfaction number for older workers who might be benefiting from some of these flexibilities and different arrangements that have really arisen the last several years, I think it's really a trend that we should watch going forward. Yeah. Matt, any any comments? I think the, the biggest concern I have is again with that 1824 cohort, just given what we've seen. I know the Atlantic for instance, published an article recently about wondering why college graduates are having such a hard time finding work. And also, you know, for folks who are not graduating from college, but are in that, that cohort as well as you know, it's a just a lower satisfaction than what you'd hope to see given the gains we're seeing in all the other age groups. So to your point, Mitchell, I think the the specter of AI is potentially something that looms large here just because I know some organizations at least may be looking to reduce the reliance on junior employees to fill those roles and and potentially using AI to kind of cover that gap. It may not get to the point or it may not be at the point yet of laying off people per SE. But maybe in terms of slowed hiring, I know I've talked to a couple of executives at least who are saying we're just not backfilling as much as we were before because we're using AI to kind of cover that different. So that is a trend. I'm particularly interested to see how that shapes up moving forward. Yeah, good point, Matt. And that the next day, I think, or a couple of days within the Atlantic article, I read something in the national Canadian newspaper along the same lines. At the unemployment rate for new college graduates now 11.5% and around 6.5 for the general population. And then the Wall Street Journal published an article about how in demand were young workers with trade skills who were doing physical work and the types of starting salaries some of them were were being offered. So yes, but all three raised again, the specter of artificial intelligence. So it's definitely something to watch. So I mentioned this before. I won't spend too much time. We're we're we're, we're in good shape on time. But I, I, I just want to, you know, maybe under score some of these things that are, are 18 to 24 year olds talk about. They did feel significantly better against four out of the five components which I mentioned. I mentioned two of them actually, they feel a greater sense of belonging, which I didn't mention, but they feel less engagement. So that might coincide with their overall satisfaction being lower. They do point to performance reviews as we saw before vacation policy and pension as their greatest satisfaction gains. So some good news there as well. The the ages when we look at them and when you read the report, you'll see that we aren't focused only on 18 to 24 year olds. We think the most interesting story from our data is in that group we had 101 responses. So we can't really say that our 101 responses out of 1734 are representative of 18 to 24 year olds across the country. We probably need a few 100 more to to make that claim. But but, but it is a reasonable sample and we had much larger samples across the other age groups. But you can see here a fair bit of consistency. The interest again is the, the what stands out here is that interest and work was not amongst the top five in the 18 to 24 year old cohorts. They had other concerns, especially organizational culture, which was far and away the greatest predictor of overall job satisfaction. And then you see the other 5 here. And if you work across here, I won't read them to you, but you can see a lot of consistency. But you can see a fair bit of difference here too. And and some of this really reflects the, you know, long held notions of how people move through their careers. They move through their careers as they move through life stages and at some points in in one's life, there is a greater emphasis on developing and moving ahead in your career. As you get older, it might be more of a focus on having better leaders and a stronger culture. You may in your mid career too emphasize a reasonable workload because you have young children may be caring for older adults. So if you read through these, and I encourage you to do that, whether when you get the slides or when you see the report, it is interesting to see the consistencies, but also the differences between the age cohorts. If there are any comments, Matt and Mitchell, go ahead. Otherwise, I'll move on to our final poll. I think the main thing that stood out to me was just for the 55 plus workers, the, the workload topping the list. I think that makes sense. But there's also the potential for future growth is number 4 for that 55 to 64 cohort. So I know we've done some work about baby boomer workers and, and how they feel about their, their utilization at work and what they're looking for and kind of the twilight of their careers. And one of the things that did stand out was the desire to be treated as workers who can contribute. And so maybe you are getting overlooked by some of their organizations or some of their supervisors, But the desire to contribute Despite that and the need for organizations to better account for the fact that, yes, these workers may be getting a little bit older, but they still have a lot that they're hoping to bring to the workforce and can bring to the workforce if the organization can maybe break some of those stereotypes or biases against older workers. And I think this, that was what's out to me with that potential future growth be #4 for that group. Yeah. And and I totally agree with that. Again, kind of a very big story to wash in my mind. But you know, the one I would actually point to is, is job security pops up on this list for both of these, these younger 2 sets of workers. And really again, thinking about kind of where this falls and kind of a, a growing kind of confidence story of how the labor market has evolved in the last year, I think that really stands out. Yeah. Good points, good points. Thank you. And I know Mitchell, you've got a final segment for us on what we what we learned about job matching and we're going to get to that. But before we do, please quickly answer this question and we'll share it with you. What is the most common reason employees site for leaving your organization? And then as I mentioned, Mitchell's going to talk about job switching, intend to leave, intend to stay with some of what we found there. I'll ask you both again. Any sort of predictions here? What do you what do you think we're going to see? Well, I think what's tough is, you know, again, this is across the board. So I actually think maybe compensation rewards might be kind of a a baseline common reason for people to leave even if it is not the most impactful among the reasons that we evaluated. But I think limited growth opportunities or manager or leader set dissatisfaction would be the two I would pick here. Very much so. And you know, we'll, we'll kind of highlight this a little bit of kind of the motivation of of some, you know, potential job switchers that we have in our data, you know, but I really see limited growth opportunities, you know, some of the leadership satisfaction, you know, burnout and workload. I think there is, you know, some way in which all of this, you know, kind of tells a very familiar story. And if you're usually satisfied with kind of one set of these, you're probably not too far off the other ones. I think compensation, again, I think you had mentioned this, you know, and maybe in that hierarchy of needs, kind of that foundation without which I think that really is going to be the main driver. Yeah. OK. I'm going to share these. We have limited growth opportunities. You know, I was about to say, I'm not just saying that that I wondered about this one because we have seen in our research some indication of this, right. We've seen where organizations are are considered less capable in terms of upskilling their employees for, you know, shifting demands of work. AI again, being the big one. And that might also connect to what you were talking about, Mitchell, with the job security, especially among the youth. If I'm worried about my job security, I'm going to be worried about how my organization is, is developing. A growth isn't just development. Of course, it's also promotions, but I think that's interesting. And then manager and leader dissatisfaction as well. Comments on this? That makes sense to me, I guess, and this this, this strikes out. You know, I as I kind of transition to to the job switchers, you know, the one I would talk about Alan is actually that burnout being so low. You know, I think there's something that is, is in sorry about that. Something that is interesting to me is that, you know, if we look back over really the economic changes we've seen since the pandemic, productivity at least until kind of this first quarter data was released, productivity across the economy has has been really above pre pandemic levels. I think one question is, are we starting to see maybe some of the investments in AI pay off? Another one to me is why are we not seeing a little bit more of a load of burnout maybe strung out in some of our answers. But when we look to some of the job matching story and I just want to close with, I know I've said this on on repeat for the entire hour, but I wanted to get to this slide right here. And as a rate during every month, how many people separate from jobs and how many people are hired. So you typically see these jolts hiring rates or separations rate individually. If you smash those together, you get kind of what's called a gross turnover rate. So you can see that really tracking this, you know, over the last 20 years, it is not just kind of that immediate, you know, peak that we hit in March and April 2020, really over a full kind of a year and a half after that, we actually saw a turnover up and above kind of in a surplus way what we would typically see in economy. So I think this really does at least kind of to me look like somewhat of a fundamental story of how many of those workers are now sitting in new jobs, You know, are they more satisfied? And I can tell you that from our data, they certainly are. We actually see that about 10% of our survey population change jobs in the last 12 months. And so we have here kind of a broken out of those that intend to stay and have stayed in a job, those that have recently changed jobs in the last 12 months. And then we also have kind of 1/3 answer choice in there for those that are actually planning to leave in the next 6 months. So kind of gives us a full breakout of kind of what is driving really some of some of the motivations and some of again, as, as Matt had gone through some of the, the real like weighted factors of, of what is really driving these decisions. And what we find is, you know, behind those that are really staying with their organizations, they're really most influenced by interest in the work, the leadership quality that they see. And and it is really that interesting work that I think is driving I think the plan to leave. If you were to look at really just that group specifically, they are really looking for some of the culture and growth opportunities. What's very interesting, I think we see this kind of throughout our survey results is that compensation, sure, it is kind of up there on the board, but it certainly does not seem like kind of that driving motivating factor for those that you know, might look to leave their roles. And then just finally, those that recently changed jobs, they were more satisfied in this year's survey across all three of these groups. And so this actually reverses a little bit of an anomaly we found last year because there was a little bit of of turmoil with the unemployment rate rising up until the actual month that we surveyed last year. We actually found that this year we actually under the hood had quite an improvement in job security. So I think really if you restretched this back over the last several years, we find pretty consistently that those that have switched jobs since the COVID pandemic have at least a little bit higher marginally overall satisfaction. And I think that is kind of most profound when you actually look at some of these cultural and organizational factors that I think we've been really hammering on. No, I think the, it, it does point to the potentially the experience of work improving as people have found jobs that may be aligned more with what they're looking for or better situations for them and in their current context. And again, just to kind of close out here, I think the the challenge is the looming economic uncertainty, just how much has changed since January of this year and how that is going to affect the satisfaction number. So yes, we are seeing, for instance, like we've talked about, overall satisfaction is up compared to previous years, especially, you know, there's the overall satisfaction is higher among women than men for the first time in seven years, even if the satisfaction for specific elements of jobs is lower for most, most elements for women than for men. But the the name of the game here, to me at least, is what has happened in the last six months and what will happen in the next 6 months, just to see kind of looking ahead to what we might see in 2026. Job satisfaction and and we've seen confidence come down over the last several months. It doesn't necessarily mean we've seen economic data, you know, follow Intel, but certainly still in front of us. But I think really the question is how do businesses respond? Do they continue some of these investments in their focus on retention, talent acquisition and how do they really see and handle some of the upcoming uncertainty and and potential effects? Yeah. So we are at times. So thank you so much to everyone for joining us today. We really appreciate your questions and you know I get the chance to talk to you about the numbers that we're seeing in terms of job satisfaction. 2025I encourage you all to join some of our upcoming webcast, specifically the how to navigate the Reimagine Workplace one on June 17th. They've got a lot of really interesting data. They'll be a bit more into like rates of hybrid versus remote versus on site work, for instance, levels of employee engagement. And their survey was out in I believe March and April this year. So it's a little bit more recent than ours and we'll provide some good context to kind of further just what has happened in the intervening months since January 2025. S With that, thank you all for joining and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you.