HR teams have invested for a decade in surveys, recognition platforms, manager training, and perks built around engagement. The curve has flattened across the Perceptyx benchmark and our State of Employee Listening research, and the headline number from our latest 3,901-person panel sits at 75.5% favorable on overall engagement, roughly where the broader market has hovered for several years.
The remaining quarter of the workforce reports they are not fully engaged. In a tight labor market with rising customer expectations and visible margin pressure, that quarter is where the cost shows up: voluntary turnover, slower execution on transformation, and a customer experience that drifts toward disengaged frontline behavior.
Most engagement playbooks treat the cause as structural, focusing on pay, benefits, career paths, or manager skill. New research from Perceptyx and The Second City Works points to a different variable that can produce positive change: the moment-to-moment behaviors employees use with each other every day, specifically the practiced behaviors of improvisational theater applied to the workplace.
Our research draws from a panel of 3,901 employed adults across North America and Europe, covering multiple industries and job levels. The instrument measured 15 behavioral items across five improv principles, alongside standard Perceptyx engagement, retention, and well-being measures.
About one-third of respondents (32.1%, n≈1,364) reported experiencing all five principles regularly at work. The remaining 67.9% reported a partial experience or none. "Yes, and" serves as shorthand for the underlying orientation: listening to what was just offered and building on it rather than blocking it. The principles describe observable behaviors any team can practice, regardless of the personalities on it.
Employee Net Promoter Score measures the share of employees who would recommend their employer minus the share who would not. It correlates with retention, customer satisfaction, and brand reputation in the labor market, which is why HR leaders watch it closely. An eNPS above +50 is widely considered exceptional.
In our study, employees in the improv-principle group report an eNPS of +68.8 against -0.7 for the remainder, a gap of 69.5 points. Inside the improv-principle group, 72.4% are Promoters and only 3.6% are Detractors. Among the rest, 29.9% are Promoters and 30.6% are Detractors. An organization at -0.7 has the same number of advocates as critics, the textbook profile of a workforce in stasis. An organization at +68.8 clears the "exceptional" threshold by nearly 20 points, with most employees actively recommending the work to people outside it.
Three of the five principles carry the clearest behavioral signal in our data.
Ensemble is the most predictive principle for collaboration and belonging. Improv ensembles operate on the rule that nobody is the lead; every member is responsible for making the scene work. In the workplace, ensemble shows up as people building on each other's ideas, sharing credit, and treating teammates as creative equals. Across our full sample, 64.5% of employees report that people build on each other's ideas at work. Among the improv-principle group, teamwork and collaboration scores reach 95.8% favorable against 65.0% for the remainder (a 30.8-point gap), and 95.4% agree they really belong against 62.8% of everyone else (a 32.6-point gap).
Creative is psychological safety made behavioral. The item "curiosity and risk-taking are valued at my workplace" sits at 63.2% favorable across the full sample, which makes it one of the two lowest-scoring items in the entire study and a measurable expression of the psychological safety problem HR leaders have struggled to act on. Improv principles give psychological safety a behavioral grammar: specific, observable things people do (offering ideas without preface, accepting odd suggestions without judgment, exploring before evaluating) that either create it or destroy it. The Creative principle is what shifts that 63% baseline.
Laugh is the principle most likely to be dismissed as soft. The item "humor builds resilience during challenges" sits at 71.4% favorable overall, meaning nearly one in three employees does not experience humor as a resilience tool at work. Among the improv-principle group, 100% experience it that way. Humor here functions as a mechanism for processing difficulty without shutting down, which becomes one of the load-bearing findings in our companion piece on change resilience. The remaining two principles (Improvise and Legacy) show similar effect sizes across the behavioral set.
Engagement category scores reach 95.0% favorable in the improv-principle group against 65.1% for the remainder, a 29.9-point gap. Retention intent shows a 24.7-point gap (94.6% vs. 69.9%), which translates directly into recruiting pipeline strain, replacement costs, and continuity of customer relationships. Recognition and Reward scores show one of the largest gaps in the study at 37.8 points (95.5% vs. 57.7%), and the item "I feel valued" mirrors that gap exactly (96.3% vs. 58.5%).
Averaged across every employee experience measure in the study, the improv-principle group sits 36.5 points higher than the remainder (95.5% vs. 59.0%). The same pattern repeats across every dimension the study measured, which makes the gap a structural feature of the workplace rather than a one-question artifact.
The natural first read of "32.1% experience all five principles" is that the other two-thirds of the workforce is operating in a culture that needs fixing. A more useful read takes that 32% as the floor of what is achievable, with the upside addressable through deliberate practice. Ensemble, creative risk-taking, and the use of humor as a resilience tool can all be taught and reinforced at the team and manager level, which makes the behavioral gap a planning input rather than a permanent feature.
Measurement is the place to start, because the behavioral signal will not surface on averaged engagement scores. It lives underneath them, in the items that ask about belonging, risk-taking, building on ideas, and humor during difficulty. The State of Employee Listening 2026 research details the listening practices that surface these signals and translate them into action at the team and manager level.
Perceptyx provides the listening infrastructure that surfaces the patterns this research identifies, and The Second City Works provides the experience design and facilitation methodology that builds the behaviors at the team level.
A deeper look at the full research, including deeper findings across additional EX dimensions and segment-level differences, is coming later this year.
To see how Perceptyx connects employee listening to measurable behavior change, download the State of Employee Listening 2026 or schedule a 30-minute demo with our team.