2025 National Business Trends Survey Report Now Available

The 2025 National Business Trends Survey is now available. This national survey is run each year by Cascade in partnership with the Employer Associations of America (EAA), collecting executives’ feedback and thoughts on the current and upcoming business year and trends. This year’s survey had 1,024 participating organizations from all 50 states.

This survey covers topics such as:

• Business Outlooks
• Business Investment Plans
• Staffing Plans
• Recruitment/Retention Challenges
• Job Creation Challenges
• Business Improvement Measures
• Pay Strategies
• Business Challenges
• And More!

The survey contains a national overall report, four regional reports, individual state reports, and individual industry reports, so you can view the trend data from multiple perspectives.

The Oregon data is reflective of the overall national report in most respects. There were 93 Oregon organizations responding to this year’s survey, 64% for-profit and 36% non-profit or public sector. Of those, 32% anticipate the economy will improve in the next 12 months (50.5% anticipate it will stay the same and 17.2% anticipate a decline). This is almost complete opposite of last year’s survey, where 16.2% anticipated improvement and 34.2% anticipated a decline.

Talent acquisition, talent retention, and ability to pay competitive wages/salaries have been identified as the top challenges for businesses (weighted scores of 71, 66, and 86 respectively), the same as last year. However, while they have remained the top challenges, the number of organizations that selected them is fewer, due to a larger spread of challenges being selected this year. Ability to pay for benefits costs saw an increase in concern (up 8 points), as well as Cybersecurity (up 16 points).

Talent acquisition and retention are always top of mind for executives. Moving into 2025, 47.3% of executives plan to hire regular staff, while 44.1% anticipate maintaining existing staff levels. Professional staff (non-managers) have been identified as the group most difficult to recruit (50.54%) and retain (38.71%). Pay increases, both for starting salaries (60.2%) and existing pay ranges (66.7%) are the top strategies for overcoming recruitment and retention challenges. However, both strategies, while still the top, have also seen declines from last year’s survey. With 82.8% of executives identifying Competitive Pay as the most important factor prospective employees are looking for (followed by good work/life balance at 70.9% and flexibility in work hours at 52.7%), fleshing out your organization’s compensation structure is more important than ever to remain competitive in the market.

To find out more about how organizations are planning for 2025, order the survey report here. This survey is available for free to all participants, and available for purchase to non-participants.

Thank you for your continued support, and we hope you find this data useful!