On average, only 59% of Europe’s workforce agrees with the statement: “Taking everything into account, I would say this is a great place to work,” according to the 2025 European Workforce Study report.
That figure does vary significantly from nation to nation, however. Countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden rank at the top with 75%, 73% and 68% satisfaction, respectively. While Poland, Greece and Italy see satisfaction rates of just 47%, 44% and 43%.
The level of satisfaction of employees appears to correlate directly with productivity when measuring the GDP per hour worked of each country.
And while productivity already has a huge impact on a company and its profits, there could be a great knock-on effect for a business.
Euronews Business spoke to Laurent Millan, solution consulting manager for Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) at NTT, to discuss why the two sides are so closely linked.
Unhappy staff are bad for business
“If you capture a customer, it costs some money. But if a customer can switch rapidly away from your brands to another because they have a poor experience with you, then that’s a waste of money,” Millan told Euronews.
Good customer service is intrinsically linked to well-trained and experienced staff.
“The biggest challenge for companies, for like two to three years now, is to have their employees have the right level of experience so they stay because it’s a lot of money to onboard new employees,” he added.
Across Europe, LinkedIn data suggests there is a general trend for increased workforce mobility. Those entering the workforce now will have twice as many jobs in their career as those who joined the workforce 15 years ago.
A high turnover of staff is not only costly, but it also leads to reduced productivity, as it often takes a new employee several weeks or months to get up to speed in a role. The knock-on effects of this downstream on inefficiency or reduced productivity could be enough to lose a consumer.
“That’s a lot of disruption when employees leave companies, for customers,” Millan added.
“CX drives loyalty for customers. So it’s very interesting in terms of growth because that’s a way that you can leverage to differentiate, to capture new customers”.
Agentic AI to improve customer and employee experience
Millan suggested simple things, such as ensuring seamless work-from-home capabilities and high-quality IT tools, can improve the employee experience.
Good work tools to allow for flexible working are vital for employee retention, as hybrid workers are least likely to look to leave their current role. In the European Workforce Study report, 50% of hybrid workers said they were “Happy, where I am”, whereas only 44% of onsite workers and 37% of remote workers selected this option.
Millan particularly highlighted agentic AI as a vital tool, as he believes it will create “a new dimension for CX and for EX.”
“We think that agentic AI is not like a standalone thing that you do. Agentic AI should bring autonomy, so it’s about building autonomous capabilities,” Millan explained, adding that “it should bring reasoning capabilities, it should be bringing context. This is also where you create value.”
Millan was confident that agentic AI would bring a degree of flexibility necessary for the modern era.
“I’ve seen so many bots, agents, call it whatever you want, that have been developed very nicely but then cannot evolve. But businesses always have new requests, always have new stuff that they want to implement so it should be flexible.”