Southern Central Stats: What Workplace Data Says, Regionally

Every year, TriNet surveys employers and employees across the country to understand what’s actually happening inside businesses. Not what the headlines say, but what the people running teams and working in them are genuinely experiencing. This year, we went deeper. For the first time, the 2025 State of Work report includes regional breakdowns across seven distinct markets in the United States. We’re releasing them one at a time, and this installment turns to the Southern Central region: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

The 2025 State of Work: Southern Central draws from a survey of 92 employers and 57 employees across the four states. It covers five themes: how people feel about their hours and work/life balance, empowerment and skills development, the significance of benefits, the demand for 24/7 HR, and AI in HR.

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In the Southern Central region, employers are more confident than employees on nearly every measure that matters for retention — engagement, growth clarity, and how many people are actually job hunting. Closing that confidence gap starts with knowing where it exists. We’re here to help you see it clearly.

In each area, we compare what employers believe against what employees actually report. What emerges is a workforce that looks stable on the surface, with employers and employees largely agreeing on pay as the top reason people leave. But underneath that surface agreement, employers consistently read their own workforce as more secure than it is.

That’s the finding worth sitting with: employers in the Southern Central region are more optimistic than their employees on almost every dimension of retention. 91.4% of employers say their workforce is moderately or extremely engaged, employees aren’t far behind at 84.2%. Employers are also more confident their people have room to grow (74.0% vs. 61.4%) and a clear sense of their growth path (64.1% vs. 56.2%). None of these gaps are dramatic on their own. Stacked together, they paint a picture of leaders who consistently round up.

The job search numbers raise the stakes. 38.2% of Southern Central employers believe fewer than 10% of their workforce is actively looking for a new job. Employees tell a different story: 26.4% say they’re looking to change jobs within the year, and 12.3% say they’re planning a move within three months. Employers aren’t wildly off base here compared to other regions in the study, but they’re still underestimating real, near-term flight risk.

What makes the Southern Central data worth reading carefully is that the pay story isn’t the surprising part. Employers (44.6%) and employees (35.1%) both name better pay as the top reason people leave, and the two groups land close together on flexible hours and work-from-home preferences too. The surprise is everywhere else: in how confident employers are that their people are engaged, growing, and staying — confidence that employee responses don’t fully back up. The same pattern shows up in AI adoption. 71.6% of employers use AI at work weekly or more, compared to 45.6% of employees, and employers consistently rate AI assistance as more acceptable for HR tasks than employees report actually using it. The gap isn’t access. It’s trust.

The report isn’t a verdict on how Southern Central employers are doing. Most of the businesses reflected in this data are doing a lot of things well, and the region shows real alignment on benefits priorities and what work/life balance should look like. What it offers is visibility — a clearer picture of where confidence might be outrunning reality, and where the opportunity sits for employers who want to close that gap before it shows up in turnover.

TriNet works with businesses across the Southern Central region to help them see that gap clearly, through HR support backed by real people, benefits best practice guidance grounded in what employees actually value, and expertise that understands what it means to operate in this market.

The 2025 State of Work: Southern Central is available now. Download it free and see where the data lands for your business.

This is part of a series of seven regional reports. We’ve already released the Southeast, California, and New York and New Jersey reports. Over the coming months we’ll be sharing findings from the Greater West, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Great Lakes and New England. Each one tells a different story. We’ll be publishing a post like this one each time a new report drops.

→  Download the 2025 State of Work: Southern Central 

→  Talk to a TriNet HR expert about what the data means for your business