July 24, 2026
Your Employee Experience News Roundup: Botsitting, Situationships, and Gallup’s Job-Lock Data
This week’s employee experience news roundup suggests plenty of people are staying put, but not out of loyalty. Gallup finds nearly a quarter of US workers are stuck in jobs they would rather leave, purely to keep their health insurance. A separate survey gives the mood a name: the ‘workplace situationship’.
Elsewhere, employees are losing 6.4 hours a week fixing poor AI output, and a judge has declined to block Meta from laying off the employees suing the company, though the substantive case remains open.
Also, a new EX Lore episode explains why psychological safety cannot simply be declared from the top.
Watch the key highlights:
Workers Spend 6.4 Hours Botsitting, and It Is Turning Into ‘Botshitting’
Employees waste an average of 6.4 hours every week fixing poor AI outputs. Glean, which conducted the research, calls this ‘botsitting’.
The knock-on effect is worse. Some 69% of workers now admit to ‘botshitting’: delivering AI-generated work they do not fully understand, have not evaluated, and cannot defend if questioned.
Key takeaway: The cost is an experience one, not just an efficiency one. When employees’ roles become mostly AI supervision, they lose the parts of work that made it worth turning up for.
Read CXM’s insight on botsitting, with contributions from a psychologist and EX strategist.
A Quarter of US Workers Are Staying in Their Job Just for the Health Insurance
Nearly one in four US employees (24%) say they are staying in a job they would rather leave, simply to keep their health insurance. Gallup calls this ‘job lock’, and its research shows the problem has grown eight percentage points since 2021.
Those most affected are people with long-term physical and mental health conditions, women, and those in the lower-middle-income bracket. The findings sit alongside growing evidence that people are clinging to their jobs out of fear rather than commitment, in a trend known as ‘job hugging’.
Key takeaway: All of this gets missed when retention alone is treated as the goal. Tracking turnover in isolation will not surface a disengaged, demotivated employee who is only staying because of high medical costs.
Read CXM’s full analysis on job-locked US workers (and how it might impact UK workers too)
Situationships Have Left the Dating App and Arrived at Work
Employee-employer relationships are starting to feel more casual than committed, and the ‘workplace situationship’ now has the data to back it up.
A new survey of 1,000 US workers, conducted by Zety, found 59% do not see a clear, long-term future with their employer. Nearly two-thirds do not think their employer is committed to keeping them either.
Financial stability (60%), comfort (47%), benefits (40%), and flexibility (35%) are the top reasons for staying despite a lack of dedication to the job. Zety sums it up as a ‘marriage of convenience’ that persists while the economy remains unstable.
Key takeaway: Retention figures can look healthy while disengagement builds underneath them. Commitment is the thing to measure.
Judge Won’t Block Meta Layoffs but Leaves Door Open
District Judge William Orrick declined to block Meta from laying off the 26 employees suing it over AI-assisted job cuts. The layoffs, which were due to begin on 22 July, can proceed while a longer-lasting preliminary injunction remains pending.
Losing an emergency application is not losing a case. The substantive claims are unresolved, and the judge has kept the door open specifically on the question of how AI was used.
Read the latest developments here and the full case background here
Expert Spotlight: PM Andy Burnham Puts Cost of Living Back on the UK Agenda. Will Employers Follow Suit?
Britain has a “cost of living government” now. The Prime Minister said so himself, to his own cabinet, in his first week.
The measures so far are modest, but what they signal is priority. A government has decided this is the issue it wants to be judged on and, in a piece for CXM, Ryan Briggs of FinWELL Training urges employers to do the same.
Read Ryan Briggs’ thoughts on what employers get wrong about workplace financial wellbeing
New EX Lore Podcast Episode: The Five Foundations of Psychological Safety
“You can’t just declare psychological safety, nor can you have a psychologically safe organisation, because it’s something that’s created team by team.”
In the latest episode of EX Lore, guest Helen Sanderson sets out what leaders get wrong about psychological safety. Sanderson, author of Psychological Safety in Practice (out in October), also walks through the five foundations to build from, and how to embed these across the full employee lifecycle.
Watch the full episode on CXM or on Spotify.
Employee Experience News from Tech Vendors
Workday Makes Sana-Powered Learning Generally Available
Workday has launched the full release of Workday Learning, its AI-native training platform built on technology from Sana, the company it acquired for $1.1bn. The tool pairs Workday’s existing workforce and skills data with Sana’s AI engine, generating training that adapts to each employee’s role and capability gaps rather than relying on static course libraries. Workday frames this as a direct response to a familiar learning and development (L&D) problem: generic training that employees ignore, leaving completion rates as a poor proxy for actual skill growth.
This is the first dedicated, AI-native learning product to come out of the Sana acquisition, following broader conversational and self-service agent tools. It marks skills development as Workday’s next area of AI differentiation.
Culture Amp Data Shows HR’s AI Confidence Is Slipping
Culture Amp’s second annual AI-in-HR survey, covering 264 HR professionals across North America, APAC and EMEA, found enthusiasm for AI cooling even as usage grows. The share of HR professionals who believe AI will meaningfully improve how work gets done fell nine points year-on-year, to 77%. Just under a quarter feel ready to deploy autonomous AI systems, and the minority who have moved into agentic use report far stronger results than peers still at the task-assistance stage.
That complicates the industry’s ‘AI adoption is accelerating’ narrative. The gap between confident vendor messaging and cautious practitioner sentiment looks set to become a recurring tension in EX tech coverage this year, particularly where evidence suggests AI still struggles with nuanced people judgement (see Perceptyx’s PYX-Voice benchmark).
Get in Touch
That’s it for this week’s (18–24 July) employee experience news. I’ll be back next Friday, and if you have EX stories to share, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at [email protected].
Becky Norman is the Employee Experience Editor for CXM. With 14 years in digital publishing, she champions the organisations and practitioners creating exceptional experiences for their people, and driving measurable impact on customer success as a result. Prior to this role, Becky spent eight years as editor of B2B publications HRZone and TrainingZone, covering the most pressing issues facing HR, people, and learning leaders. In 2020, she co-created Culture Pioneers, a global campaign recognising the organisations shaping workplace culture to drive both business performance and employee experience.
