Engagement Is at a 5-Year Low. Here's What Canada's Best Employers Are Doing About It

Global employee engagement dropped to 20% in 2025, the lowest level Gallup has recorded since 2020. Disengagement now costs the global economy an estimated $10 trillion a year. Canada's 2026 Best Places to Work winners, 40 organizations recognized this year, didn't get there with a new perk or a bigger budget. They got there by building a listen-act-communicate cycle: they gather employee feedback on a regular rhythm, make visible changes based on it, and tell staff what changed as a result.

For dealerships, where turnover and disengagement show up directly in the numbers, F&I penetration, CSI scores, how long a new hire stays past 90 days, this is a useful model to study, not just an HR trend to file away.

The Follow-Through Is the Part That Builds Trust

More than half of Canadian employees, 52.8%, say their employer didn't survey them at all in the past year. That gap matters, because 79.6% of workers considering a job change say they'd leave for better pay, 57.5% for better benefits, and close to half point to poor leadership (50.7%) or a toxic environment (49.3%) as the reason they left their last job.

The organizations on this year's list treat the survey as the easy half of the work. The harder half — and the one that actually moves retention, is what happens after someone fills it out.

"Being a top employer starts with a formal employee listening strategy across the lifecycle, paired with visible action," says Laura Hansen-Kohls of McLean & Company. A survey that goes nowhere can cost more trust than not asking at all, because it tells employees their input doesn't lead to anything.

Cognition+, a three-time winner, runs semi-annual surveys and shares the results openly at all-staff meetings — with close to 90% participation and a 73 Net Promoter Score. OntarioMD shares executive meeting agendas with the whole staff and has no assigned offices, including for the CEO, so leadership isn't operating behind a closed door.

In a dealership, the equivalent isn't a company-wide survey platform. It's a GM who reads the exit interview notes, a service manager who actually changes the schedule after techs flag it, and a habit of telling the floor what changed and why.

Flexibility Preferences Shifted Fast, Even in Roles That Can't Go Remote

Between 2024 and 2026, the share of Canadian employees who prefer working fully in the office collapsed from 33.8% to 15.5%, while the share who want control over their own schedule nearly doubled, from 8.7% to 19%. Hybrid remains the most common preference, but the underlying trend is toward employee-controlled flexibility, not an employer-set policy in either direction.

Most dealership roles, sales, service, parts, can't go remote. That doesn't mean the flexibility trend doesn't apply. It shows up as control over which shifts, which days off, and how schedules get built, rather than where the work happens. The City of Abbotsford, one of this year's winners, pairs broad employee surveys with smaller focus groups to catch the detail a survey alone misses, and used that combination to expand both remote work and earned-day-off programs.

Burnout Comes From Structure, Not a Missing Wellness Perk

A wellness day or a meditation app doesn't fix burnout on its own, and the research on this year's winners is direct about why: the organizations actually reducing burnout are diagnosing the cause first, workload, unclear roles, management quality, rather than treating the symptom.

Hydro Tech invests in leadership development focused on communication and self-awareness, and hires for fit with the team before technical skill. The approach there is to address difficult feedback directly, in the moment, rather than let it sit until a review cycle. At the YMCA National Capital Region, newer managers are paired with experienced ones in regular sessions, backed by outside consultant support.

A service department running short-staffed for three months isn't a motivation problem. It's a scheduling and backfill problem that happens to show up as burnout. The fix is in the structure, not a lunch-and-learn about stress management.

Compensation Is Still the Weak Spot, Even at the Winning Organizations

Even among this year's award winners, compensation is the lowest-scoring satisfaction category overall, at 3.83 out of 5. The gap is widest for younger employees: 3.62/5 for workers aged 18–29, versus 3.92/5 for those over 50.

Pay transparency legislation is now active in British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario, with more provinces expected to follow. The employers ahead of this aren't treating disclosure as a compliance step. They're using it to check their own pay structures, clean up job leveling, and build criteria they can actually explain when someone asks why two people in the same role are paid differently.

For a dealership, that's the pay plan conversation that usually only happens when someone's about to walk. Amur Financial Group, a three-year winner, extended recognition programs to every department instead of just the top sales performers, a small structural change that signals the same thing pay transparency does: the criteria are consistent, not ad hoc.

What This Means Going Into Next Year

A few things worth building into a 2027 plan now:

• Ask with a plan to act. A survey that doesn't lead to a visible change is worse than no survey — it tells the team their input doesn't go anywhere.
• Pair the broad read with the specific one. A company-wide survey tells you something is wrong; a conversation with the service team tells you what. Both are needed.
• Diagnose before you prescribe. Burnout driven by understaffing isn't solved by a wellness perk. Find the structural cause first.
• Get ahead of pay transparency. Clean up pay structures and leveling before legislation or a departing employee forces the conversation.
• Build AI governance before scaling AI. The research flags this directly: HR functions adopting AI without a clear strategy or governance framework are creating risk, not efficiency.

Winners on this year's list expect the bar to keep rising — expanding pay transparency laws, faster AI adoption, and a workforce that's more informed about what good employers actually do. The gap between organizations that listen and act, and those that only survey, is only going to get more visible to the people deciding whether to stay.

Asking Is the Easy Part, If You Have the Right Tool

Most of this comes down to a habit, not a platform. But the habit is a lot easier to keep when surveying your team doesn't mean building a form from scratch every quarter and chasing down the results in a spreadsheet.

That's what Forms+ is for. Build a pulse survey or an exit interview once, send it to the right group, and see the results roll in without leaving HR4, so the follow-through this article talks about actually happens, instead of living on a to-do list.

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