The Hires Who Stay But Check Out: What They’re Costing You
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
Running a digital agency means your team’s culture is your biggest competitive advantage, but you don't have layers of HR to monitor it. You rely on the pulse of the team. But how do you spot the subtle shifts in morale before they turn into a resignation letter from a senior hire? How do you effectively influence and activate your team when you don't have a massive enterprise budget?
Ethan McCarty (Founder & CEO, Integral) and Kate St. Cyr (Director of Client Experience & Operations, Integral) specialize in workplace culture, employee activation, and the trends shaping how people work today. Because they run an agency themselves, they understand the realities of building a strong, resilient team without formal corporate infrastructure.
To ground the conversation, Ethan and Kate will share fresh insights from the 2026 Integral Index, a recent study of over 2,000 U.S. employees conducted with The Harris Poll. While the data tracks larger organizations (100+ employees), they will act as your translators. They’ll cut through the corporate jargon to show exactly which of these big-company trends map directly to your shop, which levers you can pull to keep your team engaged, and what you can safely ignore.
Bonus for your client work: If your agency advises clients at that 100+ employee mark, understanding these broader workforce trends will give you highly credible, data-backed insights to bring into your next scoping conversation or strategy session.
Bring a specific team dynamic or situation you're navigating right now. The second half of the session is dedicated entirely to open Q&A.
FREE FOR MEMBERS!
$49 FOR NONMEMBERS
Meet Ethan & Kate
Ethan McCarty
Ethan is the Founder & CEO, Integral | Employee Experience Leader, Strategist, Researcher & Educator.
He founded Integral in 2018 on a simple but radical conviction: that an organization's employees are its first public. Not its last priority — it's first. Everything else follows from how well leaders understand, respect, and invest in the people doing the work.
That conviction was forged across two decades inside two of the world's most demanding organizations. At IBM, Ethan spent 13 years building some of the company's earliest infrastructure for employee communications and digital engagement, ultimately serving as Global Director of Enterprise Social Strategy and Editor in Chief of IBM's global intranet, reaching 385,000 employees worldwide. At Bloomberg LP, he served as Global Head of Employee and Innovation Communications, leading a team responsible for activating, informing, and enabling a global workforce of 18,000+.
He founded Integral to do this work at scale and to prove that employee experience drives business results. The Integral Index, an annual workforce study conducted in partnership with The Harris Poll and now in its sixth year, provides the quantitative foundation proving how you treat employees predicts how they behave, with measurable, statistically significant precision.
Kate St. Cyr
Kate is an operations leader who builds the infrastructure that lets people and ideas do their best work. As Director of Client Experience & Operations at Integral, she oversees systems, people, finance, marketing, and executive operations, functioning as the agency's operational core.
Kate began her career as a professional ballerina, where she developed the discipline, precision, and resilience that have defined her approach to building organizations ever since. She went on to earn her MBA and spent over a decade in operations roles across agencies and professional services firms, becoming known for moving fast, telling the truth, and turning complexity into systems that scale.
She is co-chair of the COO/CFO cohort at PR Council and a five-year member of the Bureau of Digital, where she works alongside agency leaders on the future of operations, talent, and growth.
