The Quiet Erosion of Hope at Work

After what has been a tumultuous few years in the corporate world, many conversations about the employee experience have naturally illuminated where things are broken. Words that have risen to surface include: burnout, disengagement, Quiet Quitting, and The Great Pile-On. The vocabulary of a workforce at its limit.

But a different question is worth asking: what about hope? Are people experiencing any joy in their day-to-day work lives? Not as aspirational ideals, but as measurable, everyday realities that shape how people show up, how long they stay, and how much of themselves they bring to their work.

New research from Wiley Workplace Intelligence surveyed more than 1,600 employees and found a nuanced picture of workplace sentiment. There is more good news than many leaders expect, yet the challenges are more specific than "employees are disengaged."

Understanding the difference matters enormously for what organizations do next.

The Good News Is Real

76% of employees say they regularly experience joy in their work. In an era of widespread organizational disruption, that number deserves a moment.

The motivation data is even stronger. Nine in ten employees say they feel motivated to do their best work, and 93% understand how their role contributes to organizational success. These are not the hallmarks of a workforce that has given up. Purpose is strong. Connection is real. 85% say they feel connected to the people they work with.

This is meaningful context for a story of strain on a fundamentally resilient workforce.

The Motivation-Capacity Gap

Here is where the data gets complicated. Among employees who feel their sense of joy has decreased, 50% also report feeling less connected to others at work. Joy and belonging are not separate; they reinforce each other, and they can erode together.

The strain shows up most clearly in capacity and clarity. Only 63% of employees say they have enough time to do their work well. Just 68% say they have the resources they need. These are not small gaps. When nearly four in ten employees lack the time to do their jobs well, motivation does not disappear, but hope begins to wear thin.

This is what the research points to as the central challenge facing organizations right now: a motivation-capacity gap. Employees want to succeed. They understand their purpose. But the conditions for succeeding are not keeping pace with the commitment they bring.

Colleagues as a Source of Joy

One of the most striking findings in the research concerns where workplace joy actually comes from.

When employees were asked who or what most influences their sense of joy at work, 39% pointed to their team. 19% said they shape their own joy. Only 6% credited senior leadership.

Employees are more than six times as likely to say their team drives their joy as they are to name senior leadership. This is not criticism of leaders. It is a clarification of how joy works in organizations. Joy is local. It lives in daily interactions, in moments of collaboration, in the small but consistent experience of feeling seen by the people you work alongside.

The implication is clear: efforts to build joy at scale, through announcements, campaigns, or top-down culture initiatives, may miss where joy lives. The team level is where it is won or lost.

The Manager in the Middle

No group in this research carries a more complicated burden than managers.

Managers are, by design, the people responsible for sustaining hope and motivation in others. They translate strategy into meaning. They hold teams together during uncertainty. They are, in the most practical sense, the carriers of organizational culture. And they are struggling.

46% of people managers report severe stress, compared with 27% of employees without direct reports. Managers are nearly twice as likely to experience severe stress as their individual contributor colleagues.

The effect ripples outward. Managers are not intentionally withholding support from their teams; they are working with less of it themselves.

This matters for hope and joy across the entire organization because what managers experience directly shapes what employees experience. When managers are stretched, clarity erodes. When managers are under-resourced, recognition suffers. When managers are stressed, the buffer between organizational pressure and employee experience grows thinner.

Understanding a Role Is Not the Same as Thriving in It

One final finding deserves attention, because it points to an opportunity that organizations often underestimate.

93% of employees understand how their role contributes to organizational success, yet only 75% say their role plays to their strengths. That 18-point gap between understanding and fit is where a significant amount of human potential goes unrealized.

Knowing what your job requires is not the same as feeling like you are the right person for it. When roles align with strengths, motivation, and joy rise. When they do not, even employees who understand and believe in their work can find themselves grinding rather than growing.

The gap between clarity and fit helps explain why some employees with high role understanding still report lower joy. They know what they are supposed to do; they just do not feel like it brings out their best.

What Organizations Can Do

The research points to a specific set of leverage points, not feel-good principles, but structural interventions.

Protect capacity, not just commitment. Motivation is high. The bottleneck is time and resources. Organizations that want to strengthen hope and joy should ask harder questions about workload, support structures, and whether employees have what they genuinely need to succeed, not just survive.

Reinforce clarity at every level. Direction does not flow automatically through organizations. It must be actively reinforced, translated, and communicated at each layer. It is the result of assuming that once a message is sent, it has been received.

Support managers as a primary intervention. The fastest path to strengthening hope and joy across an organization runs directly through its people managers. That means treating manager wellbeing as a strategic priority, not an afterthought. When managers have more time, clearer direction, and adequate resources, those conditions tend to extend to the people they lead.

Invest at the team level. Joy lives closest to coworkers, not leadership. Programs and practices that strengthen team relationships, psychological safety, and everyday recognition are investments in the actual source of workplace joy.

Narrow the role-fit gap. Understanding a role is a starting point. Helping people thrive in roles that fit their strengths is a different and more valuable goal. This is an area where intentional development conversations and role design can make a measurable difference.

The Bottom Line

This research does not describe a workforce that has lost hope. It describes a workforce that still has significant reserves of motivation, purpose, and connection, but that is operating under structural constraints that make it harder to sustain them over time.

The opportunity for organizations is significant, precisely because the foundation is still there. Employees want to succeed. They feel connected to their work and their colleagues. They have not given up on hope or joy. What they need are the conditions that make those things more than aspirational.

That is well within reach. And the data makes clear exactly where to start.

Wiley’s suite of professional solutions provides a structure and common language to help empower entire organizations with the skills needed to get to the next level. From building better teams with The Five Behaviors^®, and improving understanding to create engaged, collaborative, and adaptive cultures with Everything DiSC^® on Catalyst™, helping you make confident hiring decisions with PXT Select^®, or unlocking the power of leadership at every level with The Leadership Challenge^®, Wiley has innovative solutions that help make the workplace a better place.

Wiley Workplace Intelligence conducts in-depth research on key workplace issues by gathering insights from individual contributors, managers, and leaders. Wiley Workplace Intelligence then analyzes these findings to provide actionable solutions that are shared in our blog.