The Benchmark
What holds, and what does not. The State of Workforce Habits
Plenty of research explains how habits form. Almost none measures what happens to them when the pressure arrives. So we are measuring it, across industries, and publishing what we find.
Why It Exists
Nobody was measuring the part that matters. So we started.
Habit research studies calm conditions
Most of what we know about habits comes from stable settings and voluntary participants. Almost none of it describes a team in the middle of a reorg, a bad quarter or a launch.
Engagement surveys measure feeling, not behavior
Organizations already know how their people feel. What nobody can tell them is which behaviors survive when the conditions change, and which quietly stop.
The cost is real, and currently invisible
Abandoned habits never show up as a line item. They surface later as attrition, stalled initiatives and training that never transferred, long after anyone could act on it.
Most leaders already know this is happening. What nobody has been able to give them is the data on what to do about it. That is what we are building.
The Method
You should not take a speaker's word for it. So here is the work.
Conducted with The Center for Generational Kinetics. Instrument design and fielding by the research team, led by a PhD principal investigator.
Thousands of respondents across fourteen industries, screened for full time employment and drawn from a national panel.
Which behaviors hold and which stop when conditions change, and what predicts the difference. Measured through self report and scenario items.
Year one findings publish soon, then annually. Subscribers and partners see the numbers before the press does.
Classified until the reveal
Yes, the numbers exist. No, they are not going on a website before the people who commissioned them see them.Published in full, so you can use them rather than take our word for them.
What It Answers
Five questions every leader has asked and nobody could answer. Now we can.
Which habits survive a hard quarter, and which quietly stop?
Not which ones people say they value. Which ones are still happening ninety days after conditions changed.
What predicts whether a habit holds?
Whether it is visible to others, whether it is negotiable, how it was built, and who else on the team is doing it.
Where exactly does the drop-off happen?
Not the vague sense that things slipped. The point in the pressure curve where behavior changes, and what is happening around it.
Does this differ by industry, role or tenure?
A nurse, a field sales rep and a software engineer do not break in the same place. The benchmark reports by segment.
What does the failure actually cost?
The link between abandoned behavior and the outcomes leaders already track, so this stops being a soft conversation.
Your people are already answering these questions every day, whether anyone is measuring or not. The benchmark just writes the answers down.
Founding Partner
Independent research still has to be paid for. Here is who paid.
Founding Partner since January 2026 · Year one roster closed
knuble is a people management platform with its own customers and its own roadmap. It funded this study because it is asking the same question from the other side of the desk: what actually changes how people behave once the pressure arrives. Funding buys the fieldwork. It does not buy the findings.
Findings and segment cuts ahead of publication, plus attribution on the published report.
Partners do not set the questions or approve the findings. That is what keeps the numbers worth quoting in your own boardroom.
17 16 slots for year two. One is already spoken for.
Every study you have ever been quoted was paid for by somebody. We would rather just tell you who.
Get the Findings First
The Missing HabitTM
Weekly Field NotesOne habitWhat it costs
When the benchmark publishes, this list gets the numbers before the press does. Between now and then, one habit an issue and what it is costing the organizations that stopped doing it.
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The Benchmark Reveal
Reading the findings changes what you know. The room changes what they do.
The Benchmark Reveal puts the numbers in front of your people, in their industry, and ends with each of them holding one Non-Negotiable Habit. The data is free. The hour that makes your room act on it is the part you book.
Ask about a date and you get CHRISTOPH. Not an assistant, not a form.