Business 6 min read By Arthur Ellington
Most Employees Lack Clear Success Measures and Feel Uncared For
Employee engagement has fallen to a 15-year low, with most workers unsure what success looks like and nearly two-thirds feeling uncared for, according to research cited by Inc. The problem, the reporting suggests, lies less with remote work than with leadership.
Employee engagement has fallen to its lowest level in 15 years, and the problem appears to sit less with where people work than with how their employers lead them. Most employees say they do not know what success looks like in their roles, and nearly two-thirds do not feel cared for by the organisations they work for.
The findings point to a gap between how companies describe their expectations and how workers experience them. When staff cannot identify what good performance means, it becomes harder to feel invested in outcomes, and the sense of being valued by management tends to weaken alongside that clarity. The reporting argues that these are problems leaders can address directly, rather than structural features of hybrid or remote arrangements.
The same pressures are visible at large technology employers. ASML, the Dutch chipmaker whose extreme ultraviolet lithography machines are essential to producing the most advanced semiconductors, reported a fall in its engagement index to 73.5 per cent this year from 78 per cent in 2025. More than 38,000 of the company's roughly 44,000 employees took part in the survey. Chief executive Christophe Fouquet acknowledged in a memo to staff that the drop followed a «disruptive and emotional year» for the company.
ASML's response is to tie senior pay to the employee experience. The company will build a new Workplace Experience Index, drawn from six survey questions, into the long-term incentive plan for its senior leaders, including Fouquet and the Board of Management. The questions cover whether employees trust senior leadership to make the right decisions, whether they feel safe speaking up, whether they understand their roles, whether their teams operate effectively, and whether their direct manager cares about them. The memo does not say how much weight the index will carry in executive pay or when it will first apply. Linking executive compensation to employee sentiment is uncommon, though IBM and Aviva have previously included engagement in their executive pay targets, according to Business Insider.
The context for ASML's decision is a year of restructuring. In January, alongside record net profit of €9.6 billion for 2025, the company announced plans to cut about 1,700 positions, roughly 3.8 per cent of its workforce, mostly in management roles within its technology and IT organisations in the Netherlands and the United States. The stated aim was to strip out bureaucracy and free engineers to focus on innovation. The CNV union said it was «completely taken aback» by the plan. ASML later negotiated a social plan with four unions, agreed in principle in May and finalised in June. The deal bars compulsory layoffs until 1 May 2027 and relies on internal redeployment, which the company said could save several hundred jobs.
Much of the wider technology sector has moved in the opposite direction, embracing long hours and repeated rounds of job cuts. Some startups have adopted the so-called «996» schedule, borrowed from China's tech industry, which requires employees to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. U.S. employers announced about 1.2 million job cuts in 2025, the most since 2020 and roughly on a par with 2008, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Technology led the private sector with 154,445 announced cuts. Overall announced cuts eased in 2026, falling 39 per cent to 573,195 through September, but the technology sector's 165,925 cuts so far this year are up 54 per cent and account for 29 per cent of all job cuts, Challenger's September report found.
Martijn Hendriks, deputy scientific director of the Erasmus Happiness Economics Research Organization, who has studied employee engagement and CEO pay, argues that ASML faces a different calculation from many of its peers. Because its workforce is so specialised, he says, the company has more reason than most tech giants to prioritise employee satisfaction. «The reason ASML does this is because for them attracting talent and keeping talent is like crucial», Hendriks said. «They invest a lot in well-being because these people are so specialised that replacing them just costs a lot of money.»
The move also arrives as debate over chief executive pay intensifies. The 1,500 top-paid chief executives worldwide received an average 11 per cent real-terms rise in 2025, while the average worker saw 0.5 per cent, according to a study by the International Trade Union Confederation and Oxfam. Those chief executives earned an average of $8.4 million last year, up from an inflation-adjusted $5.5 million in 2019, Fortune reported. Whether ASML's approach becomes a wider template will depend on how the index is weighted and applied, details the company has yet to set out.
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