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What Do Workers Want in 2026?

According to our recent Work Intelligence Lab’s Global Talent Barometer research, global employees feel settled in the jobs they hold currently, but are far less comfortable with what might be coming down the road.

In an effort to understand global worker sentiment, we interviewed 13,918 workers across 19 countries to ask how they felt about their well-being, job satisfaction, and confidence. The Talent Barometer research illustrates what employees need and value most and how employers can attract and retain top talent despite volatility and competition.

This research provided an aggregate 2026 employee satisfaction score of 67%, meaning it has remained stable across three years of reporting. Around the globe, wide gaps exist between the most satisfied and least satisfied workers. For instance, India’s workforce had a positive sentiment score of 77%, while workers in Japan were much more cautious (48%).

Understanding the Levers of Employee Sentiment

The Talent Barometer research calculates positive employee sentiment using three major indices:

  • Well-Being: Employees’ daily stress levels, alignment with organizational values, and work-life balance offers critical insight into how fulfilled, supported, and engaged they are in their work. Globally, the 2026 well-being score sits at 64%.
  • Job Satisfaction: Employees’ perceptions of their current job satisfaction, job security, confidence in their job-search prospects, and the trustworthiness of their manager points to how motivated and secure they feel in their roles. The 2026 global score for job satisfaction is 62%.
  • Confidence: Employees’ access to current career development opportunities, awareness of broader career pathways, confidence in their experience and skills, and comfort with the latest technology gives us clarity into how prepared they feel to grow within their organization. The 2026 global score for confidence is the highest of the three at 73%.

We have extrapolated what these numbers mean in terms of talent engagement and retention this year. We draw our conclusions from our January report on 2026 workforce trends.

Well-Being

Widespread burnout is a huge issue for organizations of all sizes. Six in 10 workers worldwide say they are burned out, and employers that take steps to mitigate the problem before it gets out of hand will realize a number of advantages – especially when it comes to the integration of AI.

Human workers are collapsing under the weight of leaders’ unrealistic expectations about AI’s impact on productivity. Today, it’s more typical for productivity to decrease as employees struggle to retrofit new systems into established processes, performance using these tools is subjective, and many workers yearn for AI managers so they can be evaluated impartially.

So, as you’re evaluating your company’s likely well-being score, consider if your current performance evaluation and compensation structures account for evolving job responsibilities.

Job Satisfaction

While nearly nine in ten workers (89%) are confident they have the skills to succeed in their current roles, 43% fear automation may replace their job within the next two years – an increase of five percent from 2025. This concern is fueling a shift toward “job hugging,” with 64% of workers planning to stay with their current employer for the near future.

But just because employees are “job hugging” doesn’t mean they are satisfied or engaged, and when employers get cocky and let things like job reinvention, they risk losing top talent as soon as the job market improves.

In our 2026 trends, we discussed the need for wholescale job redesign to appropriately staff projects with both human and machine talent. Job redesign includes breaking down traditional jobs into value-added parts, assigning those parts to human and AI partners, creating aligned job categories and roles, and rethinking promotion criteria. When you spell out exactly what a given employee is responsible for in this uncertain age of AI integration, it goes a long way toward providing job security and confidence.

When thinking through what your likely job satisfaction score might be, ask yourself if your job roles and associated processes and workflow make sense and feel intuitive to workers. Have you documented critical tasks associated with each job and noted areas where human employees can excel?

Confidence

Every company on the planet today has to translate knowledge of AI skills gaps into increased training participation. However, we’ve found that less than half of global workers received any skills training in the last six months, and that the decline was most pronounced among older generations – with Boomers reporting a 35% drop in technology confidence and Gen X’s tech confidence declining by 25%.

We believe that fully integrating the AI literacy skill into your organization and tracking employees’ comfort with and active use of each new technology will ensure they feel as confident as possible that they’re evolving alongside job requirements.

Provided you’ve already taken steps to understand what AI literacy means to your company specifically, consider what training infrastructure exists to bring along employees with limited exposure to and enthusiasm for AI-based technologies and keep them from falling further behind?

Instead of accepting another year of stable sentiment, let’s own progress in all of these areas so next year’s Talent Barometer research reflects gains in aggregate positive sentiment as well as well-being, job satisfaction, and confidence.