Your Team Looks Engaged. Here’s What That Score is Hiding.
Wednesday, August 12, 2026 • 12:00pm - 1:00pm ET
Engagement scores are lying to you.
Three-quarters of the American workforce reads as "engaged" by every standard measure. But a third of those supposedly engaged employees describe workplaces where they expect their colleagues to behave destructively, at triple the rate of everyone else, including the disengaged ones. The score doesn't see it.
Ethan McCarty (Founder & CEO, Integral) and Kate St. Cyr (Director of Ops, Integral) break down the 2026 Integral Index: a study of 2,006 full-time U.S. employees, conducted with The Harris Poll, and the three conditions actually driving what people say about their workplace. The study covers organizations of 100+ employees, so it's a direct read on your bigger clients. And if your own shop is in that range, it's a read on you too.
Q&A to follow, on what this means for your organization and the ones you work with.
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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.
