Introduction by Barna Group

Work occupies more of adult life than almost anything else people do. Yet how it actually feels day to day—what brings satisfaction, what wears a person down, where people turn when things get hard—is easy to overlook. To better understand what workers experience day to day—the joys and the strains—Barna Group and VOCA Center have partnered for the second year to produce the Life@Work report.

Last year’s report found a workforce largely energized by relationships and purpose: most workers reported regular joy on the job, and pointed to people, meaning and impact—not money—as what made work worth doing. This year’s findings show a workplace shaped less by grand ambition and more by fundamentals: relationships that make a job worth showing up for, a paycheck that offers some measure of security, and workloads that outpace the time available to manage them. They also point to a generational divide in how mental health shows up as a workplace challenge and a marked shift in where people turn for support—friends, family and, notably, faith, more than formal workplace resources.

At the end of this briefing, we take a closer look at how this year’s findings compare to Life@Work 2025. For VOCA Center, whose mission is helping Christians connect God’s wisdom and presence to their working lives, the findings raise a pointed question: With self-reliance still the workplace default and rising interest in faith as a means for navigating workplace challenges, what kind of support do employees actually have access to and what kind are they still missing?

Key Findings