Work Institute researchers and leaders in discussion
About Work Institute

We give executives the workforce truth they can't get internally.

For 25 years we've asked employees what organizations can't. Nearly one million conversations later, we've built the clearest picture of why people stay, leave, and disengage — and we help leaders act on it.

Why we exist

Organizations don't have a data problem. They have a truth problem.

Most companies already run surveys. They have dashboards, engagement scores, and exit forms sitting in an HR system. What they don't have is a straight answer to the questions that matter: why are our people leaving, why are they disengaged, and what would have kept them?

Employees rarely tell their own employer the real reason. They tell a neutral third party. That is the gap we were built to close. We hold independent, structured conversations with your people, analyze them against nearly a million others, and turn them into a plan your leadership team can act on. We don't hand over a report and leave. We stay through the decisions, the action planning, and the follow-through.

Three in four departures were preventable. Knowing which three is the whole job.
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years of workforce research
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employee interviews a year
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interviews conducted and benchmarked
What we believe in

Four convictions shape how we work.

01

Retention is a lagging indicator.

By the time turnover shows up in a report, the decision to leave was made months earlier. We work upstream of the number.

02

The conditions that cause it are measurable.

Engagement cannot be forced with a program. It is produced by conditions inside the organization, the job, the team, and the manager. Those conditions can be assessed before they show up in your exit data.

03

Not all cost is waste.

Compensation, hiring, and development are necessary investments. Waste is what happens when workplace conditions undermine them. We help leaders tell the difference and intervene before the loss compounds.

04

We resolve. We don't just diagnose.

Data without action changes nothing. We help organizations understand what they have learned, decide what matters most, and turn insight into action.

Analyst reviewing workforce research findings
How that helps you

Research is the method. Your decision is the point.

Everything we've learned across a million interviews only matters if it changes what you do on Monday. Here's where to go depending on what you're facing.

Leadership

The people behind the data.

Researchers, analysts, and practitioners who spend their days listening to employees — and their evenings arguing about what it means.

Danny Nelms Headshot
Danny Nelms
President & CEO · Author, Employer Engagement
William headshot
William Mahan
Marketing Director
Jennifer Miller
Jennifer Miller
VP Research & Client Success
As cited in
Forbes The Wall Street Journal Bloomberg Harvard Business Review

Twenty-five years of listening, in one sentence:

People rarely leave for the reason on the form.

See how we get to the real one — or bring us the problem you're staring at right now.