Back to Work: Why September Is a Good Time to Think About Engagement
The end of the school holidays has a particular feel to it, whether or not you have children of your own. Inboxes fill up, diaries fill again, and there is a shared sense of a fresh start. For many organisations, September functions as a second January.
That feeling isn’t just anecdotal. Research by Hengchen Dai, Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis, published in Management Science, identified what they called the fresh start effect: people are measurably more likely to pursue their goals immediately after a temporal landmark, whether that is a new year, a new month, a birthday or the start of a new term. These moments mark the passage of time in a way that allows people to set aside past imperfections and take a broader view of where they’re heading.
September is one of the strongest temporal landmarks in the working year. And employees are using it.
What the data tells us
Research published at the start of September 2026 by Robert Half, reported in Personnel Today, found that 53% of UK workers intend to look for a new job before the end of the year. Of those, 35% planned to begin searching straight away, while a further 18% were already actively looking.
That’s more than half the workforce at least considering a move, and almost a fifth are already in motion.
The more useful finding, though, is why.
The most common reason given was a desire for better work-life balance or a more manageable workload, cited by 38%. Next came limited opportunities for career advancement at 35%, followed by better benefits at 34%. Feeling underpaid came fourth, at 29%, with greater access to remote working close behind at 28%.
Pay matters, of course. But three of the four leading reasons have little to do with salary. They’re about workload, progression and how work feels day to day.
Those are engagement issues. They’re also precisely the things a well-designed employee survey is built to surface.
What keeps people where they are
The same research asked those who were not planning to move why they were staying. Nearly half, 49%, said they felt fulfilled in their current role. An identical proportion pointed to workplace flexibility.
Again, neither answer is about money.
If you want to understand why people stay, you find yourself in the same territory: whether the work feels meaningful, whether people have some control over how they do it, and whether the organisation treats them as capable adults.
Why September in particular
Beyond the psychology, September has some practical advantages as a moment to listen.
People are actually there. Response rates (and thus data integrity) suffer when a significant proportion of the organisation is on annual leave. September brings people back to their desks and back into a working rhythm, which makes a meaningful difference to participation.
It aligns with planning cycles. Most organisations begin shaping next year’s budgets and priorities in the autumn. Survey findings that land in October reach decision-makers while workforce plans, reward budgets and HR priorities are still being formed, giving them a real chance of influencing those decisions. Findings that arrive in February, by contrast, meet plans that are already approved and loaded. At best, they inform the following year’s cycle.
There is time to act before the year ends. A survey run in September or October leaves room for analysis, feedback sessions and the beginnings of action planning before the December slowdown. That matters, because the gap between hearing feedback and doing something visible about it is where trust is either built or lost.
People are already reflecting. The fresh start effect cuts both ways. Employees are thinking about what they want from work, which makes them more likely to engage thoughtfully with a survey and more likely to give considered answers rather than tick-box responses.
The cost of waiting
What drives commitment differs from one organisation to another, which is exactly why employers need effective channels for employee voice. The difficulty is that the window for listening isn’t indefinite. If half your workforce is weighing up whether to stay, the useful time to understand their reasons is now, rather than after they have handed in their notice. An exit interview tells you why someone left. A survey tells you why someone might.
One caution
As the CIPD notes, none of this works if the survey is treated as the end of the process rather than the start of it.
The most damaging thing an organisation can do is ask people what they think and then visibly do nothing. It confirms the suspicion that feedback is a formality, it makes the next survey harder to run, and it makes the responses you do get less honest.
So if you are considering a survey this autumn, the first question worth answering isn’t “what should we ask?” but “what are we prepared to do with the answers?”
Get that right, and September’s fresh start becomes something rather more useful than a feeling.
If you are thinking about running a survey this autumn and would like to talk through the options, we would be happy to hear from you – contact us today!
References
Dai, H., Milkman, K. L., & Riis, J. (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior. Management Science, 60(10), 2563–2582.
Paton, N. (2026). Half of workers intend to use autumn for job hunting. Personnel Today, 1 September 2026. Research conducted by Robert Half among 1,000 UK workers.