thrive at work/Employee capacity research & benchmarks
Research · Benchmarks
Employee capacity research.
Capacity is a new measure, so the evidence for it needs stating plainly — including its limits. This is what our validation study covers, what it shows, and what we are not yet claiming.
What the research answers
What causes employee burnout, and how do you prevent it? →
How do you reduce employee turnover and improve retention? →
How do you build a high-performance culture without burning people out? →
The study.
Our validation study ran in 2025–26, with a combined sample of 10,000+ employees. It tested three things: whether the eight domains are separable, whether capacity and engagement move independently, and whether the combined Index tracks outcomes organizations already measure.
The instrument is a single harmonized statement set, run identically across every market, role and level. That matters for interpretation: comparability between groups is a design property, not a post-hoc adjustment.
Domain construction, statement design and psychometric testing: the methodology.
Key findings.
Each comparison below is the bottom decile of the Thrive Index against the top decile, within the same study.
Benchmarks.
Because the statement set is universal, every score can be read against a sector benchmark rather than only against the organization’s own history — which is what makes a first measurement interpretable instead of merely a baseline.
Benchmarks are maintained across 12 sectors and 27 industries. They are not published openly: sector-level figures are shared under NDA with organizations evaluating the platform, because releasing them would let individual customers be inferred in smaller sectors.
Sector comparisons are covered in a first conversation with the research team: get in touch.
What this does not prove.
We would rather state the limits than have them found. Three matter.
It is cross-sectional. Every figure compares different organizations at one point in time, not the same organization before and after. High-capacity organizations look materially different; that is not evidence that raising a score produces the difference.
It measures strain, not clinical burnout. The overwhelm and energy items capture the depletion that precedes burnout. Burnout is a clinical construct and the instrument does not diagnose it.
Self-report is self-report. Statement design mitigates it — behavioral phrasing, bounded recent windows, universal items — but does not eliminate it. Work pairing responses with physiological markers is at development stage and internal.
In progress.
Two lines of work would address the main limits. Longitudinal measurement — the same organizations across repeated cycles — is what would establish direction rather than association. Physiological validation, pairing Capacity Index responses with blood, wearable and recovery markers, would reduce reliance on self-report.
Both are underway and neither is complete. We will publish them when they are, and not before.
Every published figure with its comparison basis: the evidence base.
Method & sources.
All figures on this page come from thrive at work’s own validation study (n=10,000+, 2025–26). Unless a figure states otherwise, the comparison is bottom decile versus top decile of the Thrive Index.
Findings are associations measured within a single cross-sectional study. They are not causal claims, and the instrument does not diagnose clinical conditions.
- Thrive Index validation study. thrive at work, n=10,000+, 2025–26.
- Domain foundations. 140+ peer-reviewed papers underpinning the eight domains — see the methodology.
- Physiological validation. Development-stage work pairing Capacity Index responses with blood, wearable and recovery markers. Internal.
Common questions
How large is the Thrive validation study?
Are the benchmarks published?
Does the research prove that raising capacity improves performance?
Compare your organization against the benchmark.
A 30-minute call with the research team covers your sector benchmarks and what a first measurement would surface.