Illinois Might Have a Worker Morale Problem, But Low Satisfaction Scores Don’t Tell the Whole Story

In Illinois, employees aren’t happy. But there might be more to the story. In new nationwide employee satisfaction data from BambooHR, Illinois ranks in the bottom quartile. While workplace dissatisfaction is a widespread issue, the Prairie State’s score could be more of a reflection of its unique structural realities. There are deep geographic divides between urban and rural areas, immense cultural and immigrant diversity, wide income disparities, and a high concentration of large employers in sectors like pharma and finance that naturally moderate sentiment.

To unpack all of the factors, we spoke with Chicago-resident Irina Doytcheva, an Executive and Leadership Advisor, Coach, and Speaker. With years of experience in senior compensation and leadership roles at Illinois-based global companies like Walgreens and Astellas Pharma US, she now advises professionals on career growth and personal branding.

For Doytcheva, understanding the data means looking past the score and into the systems and people that produce it. “Bigger companies typically have lower scores,” she explains. “You’re taking the people who love it, the people who hate it, and everything in between, and the average will always land in the middle.”

• The 15-year itch: An eNPS score, on its own, can’t capture the intricate human realities that truly drive workplace satisfaction. The data serves as a starting point, and to get the full picture, you have to dig deeper into factors like employee tenure and recent changes in workplace policy. “People in their first few years and those with over 25 years of tenure are the happiest. The employees in the middle, with about 3 to 15 years, are the unhappiest. They see the management issues and constantly question if they belong, if they should move, or if they should stay.”

• Security vs. stretch: A focus on personal factors over market trends is even more pronounced in a climate of economic uncertainty. “There are two types of employees, and it comes down to personality. You have one group that is very hesitant and won’t move unless an opportunity is a hundred percent secure. Then you have the other type, who is always restless for the next challenge, asking what’s next after only three months in a role,” she notes.

Dissatisfaction at work is filtered through each individual’s psychology, she says. The choice to stay or leave a job can often come down to a deeply personal calculation of their innate personality, life stage, and tolerance for risk, often outweighing the influence of the external job market. “Eventually, many simply accept their situation and stay for the security of the benefits, but they are no longer engaged. That leads to lower scores, too,” she explains.

Ultimately, Doytcheva believes a primary driver of this dissatisfaction is a fundamental misalignment between an employee and their role. We’ve all heard the cliché that poor management quality is a top reason people leave jobs. For her, that’s just a symptom of a deeper systemic failure to create proper role fit from the beginning. “Disengagement can also stem from unrealistic goals,” she shares. “Executives will put pressure on an operations team to meet a sales target. But an operations team’s goal should be to efficiently support the sales team, not grow revenue. When a goal doesn’t match an employee’s function, they lose their sense of agency and disengage.”

• The system’s blind spot: The problem is often compounded by promoting people into positions they are not suited for. “Too often in HR, the focus is on the role, not the person. I know the system because I was part of it,” she says. “When I priced jobs, the process was about the role’s market value, not the individual, partly to prevent personal bias from influencing pay. But I learned that if you don’t consider the unique person filling that role, you are setting the organization up for failure.”

The disconnect between employee needs and organizational practice, Doytcheva notes, is also evident in the state-level support systems for laid-off workers, which often fail to address the core psychological barriers to re-entering the workforce. “When people are laid off, they meet with a state-appointed ‘coach’ who often has no real training, and the interaction becomes a superficial compliance exercise. The conversation is reduced to verifying if you applied to three jobs that week before they tell you to move on. That isn’t coaching, and the system needs to change.”