Engagement Trends from the Global Development Workforce

Coming into 2025, after a year of international elections and ongoing geopolitical and humanitarian crises, international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are seeing their demands, their workforce and their priorities evolve.

Considering staff engagement, and taking an evidence-based approach to the employee experience, is crucial to making organizations adaptable and future-fit.

In October, we partnered with Humentum to understand the current trends from INGO engagement surveys – across the topics of:

• Staff engagement
• Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)
• Culture
• Leadership

We analysed data from 24 INGOs, with between 40 and 16,280 staff members each.

This dataset gives us 3 key outputs:

1. Benchmarking across the survey questions: Where are INGOs generally doing well? Where does the sector have more work to do?
2. Variation between INGOs: Are there metrics where some organizations are ahead of the pack, or some need more support?
3. Correlation with engagement: Which metrics are most important for ensuring an engaged workforce?

Throughout the analysis, it is no surprise that Leadership came through time and time again.

Leadership sets the tone for an organization and its culture – for better or for worse. And feeling connected to and confident in your organization’s leadership will increase your engagement with that organization – you’re much more likely to recommend it as a good place to work.

Key stats:

• 86% of staff trust and respect the leadership group in their organization (Variation = 9%)
• 85% feel they understand the organization’s priorities and where the organization is going (Variation = 37%)
• 68% are confident that the leadership group is able to make the organization successful (Variation = 44%)

The vast majority of staff in our sample trust and respect their leaders.

Despite this, there is high variation in whether staff feel they understand their organization’s direction, and in whether they feel that leaders are able to make their organization successful.

On these two metrics, some INGOs have a very positive result, and others are much less positive.

This contrast could be explained by external factors outside of the organization’s control, e.g., political or funding factors, or even structural barriers.

But for some organizations, it might be explained by communication issues or a lack of clarity about the future.

Do staff across your organization have confidence in your leaders and their vision?

If not, it would be worthwhile to invest time thinking about what might be causing this, and what could be changed.

The high variation on these metrics is reassuring – it means that some organizations are getting this right, and the answers are out there.

A clear organizational direction is just one of the factors that helps to create an engaged workforce.

Download our full white paper to see the key trends for Leadership and the other topics included in our analysis.