While over 41% of Romanian employees managed to maintain a reasonable level of balance at work in 2025, one in four fell into a zone of psychological risk and burnout, according to the Romanian Employee Wellbeing Index conducted by RoCoach and Novel Research.
Only 30% of employees reported a genuinely high level of wellbeing, characterized by healthy relationships, autonomy, clarity, and a sense of fairness in the workplace.
Men reported higher levels of workplace satisfaction, with 72.1% indicating a good or very good state of well-being. Employees aged 18 – 29 were the most satisfied group.
The sectors with the highest levels of workplace satisfaction were retail and sales (76.4%), banking services and healthcare (73.8% each), followed by the NGO sector (66.6%). At the opposite end of the spectrum, employees working in IT&C and public administration recorded the lowest levels of satisfaction.
Overall, the Romanian Employee Wellbeing Index recorded a score of 70.3 out of 100 in 2025, indicating moderate safety alongside increased vulnerability to organizational shocks such as leadership changes, operational pressure, or economic instability.
The report shows that employees do not perceive wellbeing as a benefit or bonus, but rather as the result of how the organization they work for is structured and led. Differences in well-being are neither random nor purely individual, but follow clear structural patterns related to hierarchical position, tenure, sector, and both formal and informal organizational rules.
At the same time, the report highlights that as employees’ tenure within an organization increases, their well-being tends to decline from an ”excellent” to a ”good” level, accompanied by a rise in manageable yet persistent tensions.
”Most employees do their jobs, but organizational systems force them to compensate through personal effort for what is missing from work design: clarity, fairness, autonomy, and healthy relationships with management,” said Mihai Stănescu, founder of RoCoach, Romania’s first coaching company and developer of the Organizational Transition Quotient.
According to the Romanian Employee Wellbeing Index, the main sources of burnout in 2025 were high workloads (23.3%), constant deadline pressure (19.6%), lack of work-life balance (16.4%), and the absence of feedback (9.1%). At the same time, across almost all segments analysed, the direct manager emerged as a decisive factor influencing employee wellbeing (19.3%).
“Employees are not talking about benefits, but about fairness, respect, managers who listen, and the freedom to organise their work without micromanagement. The language used is often emotional and sometimes harsh, showing that these issues are experienced as moral problems, not just procedural dysfunctions,” added Marian Marcu, Managing Partner at Novel Research.
The Employee Wellbeing Index is built around five core dimensions of organizational life: clarity, autonomy, recognition, fairness, and human relationships. Each dimension is standardised on a 0 – 100 scale, with the final score reflecting overall workplace wellbeing. The index has strong psychometric validation, confirming that the dimensions coherently measure a unified construct of organizational wellbeing.
(Photo source: Fizkes | Dreamstime.com)
Leave a Reply