Employers have spent years putting work onto screens, and a new Gallup survey for Unily puts a number on how few employees find that setup works for them. Just 20% of U.S. workers have both strong Digital Enablement and strong Digital Culture, the two measures the study uses to define a good digital workplace experience.
Unily, which sells an employee app and intranet platform, released the 2026 State of the Digital Workplace report with Gallup on November 11. The findings come from a web survey of 2,305 U.S. workers aged 18 and older, conducted July 6 to 10, 2026, and drawn from the Gallup Panel. The maximum margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
How the study splits the digital workplace in two
The report scores employees on two pillars. Digital Enablement asks whether employees can find, use and rely on the tools and information their jobs require. Digital Culture asks whether those same systems help people feel connected, informed and able to grow.
Roughly half of employees (49%) have good Digital Enablement. Only 34% have good Digital Culture, and 36% have neither. The 20% with both strong scores is the group the report counts as having a good digital workplace experience, which it shortens to DWX.
For HR teams that own the intranet, the employee app or internal communications, the split matters because the two pillars sit with different owners in most companies. Enablement tends to be an IT and procurement question: licences, single sign-on, search. Culture is closer to HR and communications: whether the systems carry news, recognition and career information people trust.
Culture moved engagement more than tools did
The report’s most useful comparison sets the two pillars against each other. Employees with good Digital Culture but weak Digital Enablement are more than twice as likely to be engaged as those with the reverse, at 38% versus 17%. They are also less likely to report frequent burnout, at 21% versus 29%.
In our reading, that result gives HR a stronger claim on digital workplace budgets than it usually makes. A company can fix logins and search and still leave most of the engagement effect on the table if the systems do little to keep people informed and connected.
The outcomes attached to a good experience
Employees with good DWX are 3.1 times as likely to be engaged at work and 5.5 times as likely to strongly recommend their employer, according to the release. The raw figures behind those ratios:
- Engagement: 46% among employees with good DWX, against 15% among those with poor DWX.
- Burnout: 11% versus 38%.
- Willingness to recommend their employer: 44% versus 8%.
The methodology note carries a limit HR leaders should keep in front of any business case built on these numbers. The survey is cross-sectional, so the results describe associations and cannot establish that DWX causes better employee outcomes. One possible explanation runs the other way: engaged employees may rate their tools more kindly. The figures support a hypothesis to test inside a company, and they do not prove that a new intranet will lift engagement scores.
The engagement baseline is already low. Gallup’s own national measure, covered in our report on U.S. employee engagement falling to 29%, the lowest since 2011, gives HR a reason to look at every input it controls.
Where information lives drives tool switching
The study ties fragmented information to time lost moving between applications. Among employees who say workplace information lives in a single location, 33% frequently switch between tools to finish their work. That rises to 62% when information is spread across a few locations and 78% when it is spread across many.
The share also falls with company size. Good DWX drops from 22% of employees at organizations with fewer than 500 people to 15% at those with 10,000 or more. The release describes friction, information trust and communication overload all worsening as headcount and geographic spread grow.
Lokdeep Singh, CEO of Unily, said: “Organizations have invested heavily in digitizing work, but this research shows that access to more technology has not necessarily created a better experience of work.”
The AI readiness link
The report connects the digital workplace to AI adoption. Among AI users, 47% of those with good DWX trust the information AI provides somewhat or a great deal, compared with 26% of those with poor DWX. Separately, 72% of employees said they had not taken part in employer-provided AI training or learning activities in the previous six months.
Singh put the dependency directly: “If the underlying information is fragmented or untrusted, AI will magnify those weaknesses.”
Vendors are already pushing intranet content into AI assistants, as in Interact bringing 700 intranet capabilities to AI assistants. The Unily data suggests the trust problem travels with the content. An assistant that answers from an intranet employees already distrust inherits that distrust.
Policy is moving slowly at the small end of the market as well. Gusto’s 2026 State of Small Business report, a survey of 1,731 owners of U.S. businesses with 24 or fewer employees released on November 12, found that 25% of businesses with employees now have an AI policy, up from 15% last year.
What it means for the HR leader
The study gives HR three practical uses, provided the cross-sectional caveat stays attached.
Measure both pillars separately
Most engagement surveys ask one question about tools, if any. Adding separate items on whether employees can find what their jobs require and whether the systems keep them informed and connected lets HR see which pillar is weak in its own workforce before choosing a fix. A company strong on enablement and weak on culture needs a communications and content plan more than another platform.
Count where information lives
The tool-switching figures rise sharply as information spreads across locations. An audit of where policies, benefits details, org charts and company news actually sit, and how many systems an employee must open to find each, is cheap and gives a baseline to measure against.
Fix the content before the AI layer
With 72% reporting no employer-provided AI training in six months, and trust in AI output tracking the quality of the digital workplace, HR has a case for cleaning up the sources an assistant will read before switching one on. Our view on where that enablement money should go first is in AI Enablement Budgets Should Pay for Managers’ Time First.
How to evaluate a digital workplace pitch
Vendors will cite this report, and Unily sells into the market it describes. Ask any vendor for before-and-after data from its own customers on both pillars, measured with the same survey items, over at least two cycles. Ask how its product reduces the number of places information lives, and what happens to search and permissions when content is exposed to an AI assistant. A pitch that answers with association figures alone has not yet shown cause.
Source: Unily and Gallup, PR Newswire. Also drawn from Gusto.
