According to the researchers, in 2026 the real challenge for companies is no longer employee retention, but maintaining people’s vitality as roles and responsibilities increase.
While more than 41% of Romanian employees managed to maintain a reasonable level of work-life balance, one in four were in a psychological risk or burnout zone. At the same time, only 30% reported a truly high level of wellbeing, defined by healthy relationships, autonomy, clarity, and perceived fairness in the workplace.
The index recorded a score of 70.3 points out of 100 in 2025, pointing to moderate security combined with heightened vulnerability to organisational shocks such as leadership changes, operational pressure, or economic instability, placing Romania in a “moderate safety” zone.
In 2025, men reported higher levels of job satisfaction, with 72.1% indicating a good or very good state of wellbeing. The most satisfied age group was 18–29.
The sectors with the highest levels of employee satisfaction were trade and sales (76.4%), banking and healthcare (73.8% each), and NGOs (66.6%). At the opposite end, employees in IT&C and public administration recorded the lowest levels of satisfaction.
The report shows that wellbeing is not perceived by employees as a benefit or bonus, but as the outcome of how the company is organized and managed.
Differences in wellbeing are not random or purely individual, but follow clear structural lines related to hierarchical position, tenure, sector, and formal and informal organizational rules. As tenure increases, employee wellbeing tends to decline from “excellent” to “good”, accompanied by a rise in manageable but persistent tensions. Organizations often succeed in turning initial enthusiasm into stability, but struggle to maintain energy and meaning over the long term.
“Our data show that 2025 was not about an exhausted Romania, but about a Romania that functions at a high emotional cost. Most employees get their work done, but organizational systems force them to compensate through personal effort for what is missing from job design: clarity, fairness, autonomy, and healthy relationships with management. In 2026, the real challenge for companies is no longer retention, but maintaining people’s vitality as they grow in roles and responsibility. An employee who stays but loses energy no longer creates value,” said Mihai Stanescu, founder of RoCoach and developer of the Organizational Transition Quotient (ORQ).
According to the index, the main sources of burnout in 2025 were high workload (23.3%), constant deadline pressure (19.6%), lack of work-life balance (16.4%), and absence of feedback (9.1%). Across almost all segments analyzed, the direct manager emerged as a key determinant of employee wellbeing (19.3%).
“Beyond the numbers, the index shows how work is experienced in Romania in 2025: as a system of pressure, adaptation, and compromise that people manage daily with far more effort than is visible on the surface. The Romanian Employee Wellbeing Index measures the real quality of the relationship between employees and their organizations: how fair the rules are, how clear expectations are, how much autonomy exists, and how much support people receive when things become difficult. We clearly see a process of organizational wear and tear. Employees are not talking about benefits, but about fairness, respect, managers who listen, and the freedom to organize their work without micromanagement. The language is often emotional and sometimes harsh, showing that these issues are experienced as moral problems, not just procedural dysfunctions,” said Marian Marcu, managing partner at Novel Research.
The Employee Wellbeing Index 2025 is a synthetic tool developed by RoCoach and Novel Research to measure the real quality of Romanian employees’ work experience. It is built on five core dimensions of organizational life: clarity, autonomy, recognition, fairness, and human relationships. Each dimension is standardized on a 0–100 scale, with the final score reflecting overall workplace wellbeing. The index has strong psychometric validation (Cronbach’s Alpha = 0.891), confirming that the dimensions coherently measure a unified construct of organizational wellbeing. Data were collected in November–December 2025 using the CAWI method, on a sample of 1,000 urban employees.