Belonging at Work: What the Engagement Data Shows

Several organizations we've worked with this year have seen belonging scores decline over the past few quarters, and the initial hasty reaction is often to ask which groups are most affected. The more useful question is what employees across the organization experience when they raise a concern, disagree with a decision, or share something about their lives at work. Pride Month is an appropriate moment to look at that question directly, because the conditions that let an LGBTQ+ employee bring their full self to work are the same conditions that let anyone feel comfortable at work: a team where speaking up carries no penalty, a manager who treats people as individuals, and an environment where difference is treated as ordinary rather than a problem to manage.

How Many LGBTQ+ People Are Part of the U.S. Workforce?

Before we explore the Perceptyx data, it’s helpful to get a sense of how many workers this analysis could impact. For various reasons, the federal government has never fully counted LGBTQ+ workers. The Department of Labor's main labor force surveys do not ask about sexual orientation or gender identity, so national figures come from estimates and a small set of newer surveys rather than from a standard workforce count (Congressional Research Service). The Williams Institute at UCLA estimates that about 13.9 million U.S. adults, or 5.5%, identify as LGBT, and that roughly 2.1 million adults, about 0.8%, identify as transgender. When the Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey began asking about sexual orientation and gender identity in 2021, it became the first large federal survey to count LGBTQ+ adults directly rather than only same-sex households. Identification runs highest among younger workers, which means representation in the workforce will continue to grow as newer cohorts enter it.

LGBTQ+ employees work in every sector. The Williams Institute estimates that more than one in ten LGBTQ+ workers are employed in the public sector, part of a public workforce of roughly 23.5 million, with the rest spread across private and nonprofit employers. Because no single federal labor survey tracks this population consistently, most employers do not know how many of their own people identify as LGBTQ+, and most employee listening programs, Perceptyx panels included, do not collect that identity data. Even so, a belonging strategy built on broad psychological safety can reach more people than one built on counting specific groups.

What Does the Psychological Safety Data Show?

In our 2025 Perceptyx workforce panel research conducted throughout 2025, representing thousands of employees across North America and Europe, psychological safety is most closely tied to belonging.* On the items that measure whether people feel safe raising concerns, favorability clusters in the mid to high sixties:

• 69.3% of employees feel confident a concern will be taken seriously when they raise it (n=3,606)
• 67.6% feel safe speaking up when they disagree with a team decision (n=2,478)
• 67.2% say team members can raise problems or tough issues without fear of blame (n=2,478)
• 63.5% say their team can challenge the status quo without fear of retribution (n=3,606)
• 63.3% say speaking up about problems rarely leads to negative consequences (n=3,606)

Roughly a third of employees do not feel safe raising a concern, disagreeing, or admitting a mistake at work. Whether a given employee falls in that third tends to depend more on their team and manager than on their identity.

A related cluster shows the same pattern in how teams handle difference and uncertainty. Favorability reaches 72.1% on being able to admit not knowing something without feeling judged (n=2,478), 68.6% on teammates staying open to feedback that challenges their perspective (n=2,478), and 64.9% on differing opinions being welcomed in cross-functional work (n=2,478). Among remote and hybrid employees, 66.9% trust that distributed colleagues have equal influence in team discussions (n=1,042). Each of these measures whether an employee can participate as themselves and have their input weighed fairly.

How Does Leadership Shape Whether People Feel Safe to Speak Up?

Manager behavior matters a great deal in terms of whether employees feel included. In the panel data, 68.8% of employees say their manager does a good job managing people (n=3,060), 68.2% say their manager inspires their best work (n=3,060), and 66.5% would recommend their frontline manager to others (n=3,060). Those numbers track closely with the psychological safety scores, which is what a driver analysis would predict: teams led well tend to be teams where people speak up.

The more pressing concern is openness at the leadership level. Only 58.0% of employees say leaders in their organization model openness by admitting when they are wrong (n=3,606), the lowest score in the leadership cluster. This item ran on our workforce panel; for organizations that want to track it, Perceptyx's benchmarked survey library includes related psychological safety items on how teams handle and learn from mistakes. Employees extend more candor to each other than they see modeled from the top. Senior leaders need to be ready to admit a misjudgment in a team meeting, ask for input before a decision rather than after, and treat a raised concern as useful rather than as a challenge to authority. Actions like these can demonstrate to employees that speaking up is welcome.

Where Do Belonging Gaps Show Up?

When belonging scores drop, one’s first instinct may be to look for marginalized or smaller groups scoring lowest. In our consulting work with organizations across several industries this year, that is not consistently where the gaps appear. Using a hot-spot analysis to flag outliers by age band, sex, race, ethnicity, and, where available, language, smaller and marginalized groups rarely score significantly below the organization level. The differences that do hold up tend to track with job role, tenure, and location, alongside strong correlations between psychological safety and leadership quality.

For example, a frontline role with little schedule control, a new hire still learning the norms, or a site with a weaker local manager will show a belonging gap regardless of who works there. Returning to the workforce panel data, employees report high personal flexibility, with 73.7% saying their manager respects boundaries between work and personal time (n=3,060) and 71.9% reporting enough flexibility to meet personal or family responsibilities (n=3,060). Yet favorability falls to 49.3% on whether all employees, regardless of job position, have the same level of schedule flexibility (this item carries a small sample of 134 and should be read as directional). People may feel supported themselves even while doubting that the same support reaches everyone equally.

What Does Inclusion Look Like in Everyday Work?

Everyday interactions shape whether people feel included more than formal programs do. Three patterns are worth watching:

• In-group small talk that consistently excludes. Conversations in the office, on virtual meetings, and organizational chat channels that assume everyone shares the same family structure, hobbies, or reference points leave out anyone who cannot relate.
• Pressure to disclose. Team-building exercises that expect people to share photos or details about a partner, or norms that treat personal disclosure as a sign of being a team player, exact a significant (and unevenly distributed) privacy cost.
• Expression and identity at work. Whether employees feel free to add pronouns to an email signature, choose how they dress within reason, or decline to share aspects of their personal life represents a daily test of whether an environment is genuinely open.

Managers who build belonging ask about what a person cares about, an upcoming trip or a race they are training for, rather than defaulting to assumptions about home life. They also delegate work with awareness of where a direct report is being asked to go and what that might mean for their safety or comfort, and treat expression as the employee's choice rather than a team requirement.

How Should Organizations Handle Data on Small Groups?

Reporting on small or underrepresented groups requires a high degree of care. Combining small groups to meet a minimum sample size, or singling out a tiny population in a results readout, can feel devaluing to the people in that group even when the intent is inclusion. The safer practice is to set clear minimum-sample thresholds, frame any small-group finding with its limitations stated plainly, and lead the analysis with the broad drivers, psychological safety, leadership, and fairness that apply across the whole workforce.

What Should HR Leaders Take From This?

Our data shows that the basics of belonging, feeling safe to speak up and having a manager who treats people as individuals, are present for roughly two-thirds of employees and absent for the rest. The gaps follow more closely with role, tenure, and location than with identity. For HR leaders dealing with belonging issues this year, the work ahead involves strengthening psychological safety and leadership behavior at the team level and then tracking the change against a stable benchmark over successive cycles.

To see how organizations are turning belonging signals into action across the employee experience, read the Perceptyx State of Employee Listening report and explore our DEIB solutions. To talk through how continuous listening and psychological safety measurement could work in your organization, schedule a demo.

*This is an aggregated view across many 2025 Perceptyx workforce panels, so the findings are directional rather than representative of any single population. For tracking belonging over time, the Perceptyx benchmark is the more stable source, since it holds methodology constant across cycles.