No one’s quitting. No one’s talking about employee experience. That’s not a coincidence

Ask yourself, honestly, whether the relative quiet of the last two years has cost you something. I suspect it has, and that it hasn’t shown up anywhere anyone has been looking, writes April Marcot.

A few years ago, we were navigating unprecedented times. There were emergency leadership meetings, hastily assembled working groups, and a great deal of talk about how we were all in this together.

Oh no, I’m not talking about the pandemic.

I’m talking about the Great Resignation. In the year to February 2022, 9.5 per cent of employed Australians changed employers, and 9.6 per cent the year after, the highest rate in a decade. For a lot of organisations, it was frightening.

We responded with culture, wellbeing, flexibility, learning and development, and flashy parental leave. Employee resource groups, engagement and pulse surveys, employee experience teams, and diversity and inclusion leads. Some of it was excellent. Some of it was branded water bottles. I was in those meetings, and we launched things we were proud of and our teams valued.

Fast-forward to 2026, and we’ve moved on to job-hugging. In the year to February 2026, 7.2 per cent of employed Australians changed employers. That doesn’t sound dramatic until you compare it with the first year of the pandemic, when most of us couldn’t leave the house and the rate was 7.5 per cent. Around 300,000 fewer people are changing jobs each year than in 2022.

So, nobody is quitting, and have you noticed how quiet it’s gone on employee experience?

More than politics

Most people blame politics. The Trump administration moved against diversity programs, some very large companies followed, and every publication I read asked whether Australia would be next.

That covers one line on a much longer list. Purpose and social impact went quiet too, along with the volunteering days, giving programs and town halls about why any of it mattered.

Nobody signed an executive order about any of that.

Look at what has survived in Australia. The positive duty to prevent sexual harassment, WGEA’s gender pay gap reporting and psychosocial hazard regulations are all still here. What the law requires has stayed. What was designed to win people over has mostly gone. If politics were driving this, I’d expect the reverse. What changed was leverage, and we stopped needing it.

Meanwhile, 76 per cent of Australian workers still support their organisation taking action on diversity and inclusion, and only 5 per cent oppose it. Our people didn’t change their minds. Our market changed its mind for us.

Staying put, checked out

It’s tempting to decide none of this matters if nobody is leaving. Almost every business case for employee experience rests on retention: keep your best people, cut turnover costs, protect the employer brand. Once people can’t leave, the problem looks solved. Retention is up, turnover is down, and the dashboard is green.

That framing has done real damage. It taught a generation of leaders that employee experience is a recruitment tool, funded when the market is tight and quietly shelved when it isn’t. I see it as a performance input, and it behaves like one whether or not anyone resigns.

Staying and committing are different things. Australians aren’t only staying; they feel they can’t go. Job market optimism in Australia and New Zealand fell 12 points in Gallup’s latest global report, the sharpest drop in the world. By mid-2026, SEEK was recording more applications per job ad than ever.

Day to day, it’s almost undetectable. Someone notices an error and lets it go. Someone has an idea in a meeting and decides it’s not worth raising. A manager stops having development conversations because there’s nothing to offer at the end. Senior leaders get a little less open about the numbers. None of it is dramatic. Together it makes a slightly worse version of the same business.

Perceptyx has tracked what drives employee engagement for over a decade. For nine years running, belonging and feeling valued came first and second. In 2025, they were overtaken by confidence in senior leadership and how well the organisation handles change. People have stopped wondering whether they can thrive at work. They’re wondering whether the business will survive, and whether they’ll survive with it.

Diversity Council Australia regularly asks workers about their own teams. In inclusive teams, 62 per cent are always willing to work extra hard to help the team succeed. In non-inclusive teams, it’s 24 per cent.

That’s discretionary effort, and AI is where losing it bites hardest. Every leadership conversation is about AI now, and priorities have shifted with it. But an AI rollout only works if people tell you honestly where the tool gets it wrong, explain how their job really works rather than what the process map says, and are willing to change how they’ve always done things. You won’t get any of that from people keeping their heads down.

In my experience, people come along when they’re told clearly what AI will and won’t be used for, see that followed through, and feel they have a say. So, we’ve spent two years dismantling the thing that decides whether the biggest investment most businesses will make this decade pays off.

The market will turn. When it does, I expect we’ll rediscover employee experience, rehire the roles we cut, run the engagement survey, act surprised at the results, and rebuild the same visible layer. I’d rather we didn’t.

What leaders need to do now

The first thing is to find the stuck people. Plot intent to stay against engagement. The group who plan to stay but aren’t engaged is the part of your retention that isn’t real. Most businesses have both numbers and have never put them side by side.

Then put effort next to turnover. Choose three signs of discretionary effort, such as ideas raised, issues reported and internal moves, and review them each quarter as seriously as your turnover rate.

Invest in managers before programs. Gallup found manager engagement fell globally from 27 per cent to 22 per cent in a single year. Confidence in leadership and how change is handled comes from managers and executives, not an employee experience team. Give managers something real to offer when a promotion isn’t available, like stretch work, an internal move or new skills.

Be honest with people about how the business is going. Explain your decisions and show them what you did with what they told you.

Bring people into AI rather than rolling it out over them. Involve the people doing the work in redesigning it, and publicly thank whoever tells you where the tool is failing.

Finally, audit what you cut. Some of it was kitchen snacks. Some of it was holding the building up. Work out which before the market turns and you rebuild the lot.

And ask yourself honestly whether the quiet of the last two years has cost you something. I suspect it has, and that it hasn’t shown up anywhere anyone has been looking.

Your people haven’t changed their minds about any of this. Go and ask them.

April Marcot is a fractional chief people officer and HR consultant.

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