April 29, 2026
Profits Are Up. Employees Are Paying the Price.
The sales team is hitting targets, profits are up, and cashflow is healthy – all clear signs of a thriving organisation. And yet what it actually feels like to work in a successful business has changed, and not for the better.
In the largest global attempt to quantify that shift, Workhuman recently surveyed more than 6,000 workers across 10 countries. It found that while 72% say their organisation is financially thriving, 48% believe work was better for them in the past. The employee recognition provider has termed this the ‘profitability paradox’ in its Humans at Work Barometer report, published yesterday.
The Numbers Behind the Profitability Paradox
When organisations are profitable and productive, their people are absorbing the cost, the data suggests. Over half (51%) feel more pressure than they did last year, and 48% are mentally exhausted by the end of the working day. And while businesses are performing well financially, employees do not feel this translates into adequate pay – leading one in three to take a second job to make up the shortfall.
“Organisations are performing well. Their people are paying the price,” said Tom Libretto, President of Workhuman.”That’s not a sustainable equation, and the data tells us exactly where the fault lines are.”
Why Motivation and Engagement Are Telling Different Stories
Despite the mental and financial toll, Workhuman’s data shows motivation remains strong globally at 71%. At first glance, this may seem to contradict 2026 Gallup data, which finds global employee engagement has fallen for two consecutive years. But motivation to do good work is not the same as being engaged.
Together, the data tells a story of why engagement is slipping: people have the drive to do a good job, but the conditions to succeed are increasingly difficult, leading to a longer-term deterioration in emotional commitment to the organisation.
Is This Part of the Nostalgia Era?
At a societal level, as uncertainty persists, people are looking back fondly on the past. This is so much so that cultural critics are exploring whether the 2020s are becoming a ‘nostalgia era’, in which collective anxiety drives a cultural retreat into the familiar. Employers might assume the same dynamic is playing out at work: that the sense of deterioration is mostly felt among long-tenured employees reminiscing about more comfortable times – pre-pandemic, pre-2008 crash.
But the data tells a more structural story. While 60% of those with 20 or more years’ tenure believe work used to be better, 40% of employees with just one to three years at their current organisation say the same. Nostalgia alone cannot account for that. Something more recent and structural is driving this feeling of deterioration. And the data points directly to the conditions leaders are both creating and failing to recognise.
The Pace Problem and the Leadership Bubble
Only 42% of workers find the current pace of change manageable – but senior leaders are 15 to 20 percentage points more comfortable with it than non-executives.
This greater comfort with pace may partly reflect higher levels of engagement at the top. Gallup’s 2026 data found that ‘managers of managers’ report higher levels of work engagement and overall life satisfaction than middle managers and individual contributors. That said, leaders are not immune to emotional burden. The same data found they are more likely to experience negative emotions – sadness, anger, loneliness, and stress – in their daily working lives. Making high-stakes decisions at speed, often with limited information, is a near-daily reality for many leaders. Over time, they adjust to the pace, but the mental toll remains.
This comfort with pace has another consequence: it distorts perception. Axonify’s 2026 Frontline Operations Report found that 74% of leaders in frontline organisations say feedback is acted on in their workplace, yet only 41% of employees agree. While 87% of leaders believe important updates reach workers, just 56% of frontline staff say this is true. The further from the work, the rosier the picture.
The Workhuman data suggests the same dynamic is playing out around pace and pressure. Leaders who have adapted to intensity are poorly placed to recognise when that intensity has become unsustainable for the people around them.
The Invisible Workforce
There is another dimension beyond leaders misjudging how smoothly things are running. They are also failing to see – or celebrate – the good work that is happening. Some 41% of individual contributors feel their achievements go unnoticed, and over half have not received formal recognition in three months.
This visibility gap stems from a lack of infrastructure and values-aligned behaviour. Without the right technology to enable recognition at scale – and a top-down culture of appreciation – organisations lose access to critical intelligence about how their people are actually performing. Data pooled from performance ratings and engagement surveys only paints a partial picture. Insights into cross-functional collaboration, informal leadership, values in practice, and newly applied skills remain invisible to leadership teams that do not take recognition seriously.
What This Means for EX Leaders
For EX leaders, the profitability paradox highlights that the standard toolkit is not equipped to detect a deteriorating employee experience. Engagement surveys measure a point in time; performance ratings measure output against targets. Neither is designed to surface building pressure, daily mental exhaustion, or the good work that goes unseen across a workforce.
Organisations closing the gap are building better human signal infrastructure – systems that make contribution visible, not just measurable. In CX-intensive industries, where the frontline employee is the brand, a workforce absorbing unsustainable pressure while maintaining a service face is not a stable equation.
