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PwC’s Workforce Hopes and Fears Romania Survey 2025
PwC’s Workforce Hopes and Fears Romania Survey 2025

The leadership challenge is not only to deploy AI, but also to ensure workers feel prepared, motivated, and aligned to embrace it.

Our survey shows motivation is strongest when employees see a future for themselves and have access to learning; believe in management and its priorities; experience meaning, psychological safety, and positive emotions at work; and feel financially rewarded. With trust, clarity, and cultural support, today’s uncertainty can become tomorrow’s AI readiness.

AI has a significant potential to enhance both productivity and creativity, but many employees are not rushing to adopt it. This reluctance is determined mainly by fragmented implementation and the lack of training programmes tailored to the skill levels and responsibilities of different employee groups. Companies can start with practical, concrete AI use cases and give employees hands-on opportunities to experiment, particularly those in non managerial roles, where confidence and adoption rates tend to be lower.

Ruxandra Târlescu, Tax, Legal and People Services Leader PwC Romania

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Key findings

  • AI use among Romanian employees is one of the lowest of the 48 countries covered in the PwC Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025. Similarly, Romanian workers are among the least excited about the way AI could affect their work.
  • Romanian workers are more concerned about how their job will be impacted by changes in government regulation (50%) and geopolitical conflicts (43%) than technological change - including AI (39%) in the next three years.
  • The answers of Romanian employees point to better understanding and alignment with company goals, safer and more supporting working environment and higher confidence in experimenting and expressing opinions compared with the global sample.
  • Workers in Romania seem to be less satisfied about their work than the global average, but more inspired.
  • Only 35% of Romanian employees say they received a pay raise in the last year (compared with 43% globally) and about 60% say they experience various degrees of financial strain.

Romanian employees are understandably paying more attention to legislative changes and geopolitical conflicts than technological developments, especially as 2025 has introduced numerous legislative and fiscal shifts that negatively impact companies and, by extension, their workforce. But there's a silver lining: those embracing AI are uncovering its benefits and can drive broader adoption. The future hinges on new technologies, and employees must adapt to meet the growing demand for AI skills.

Oana Munteanu, Director, Workforce Services Leader PwC Romania

Six actions to be taken by leaders

Leaders need to acknowledge the limitations of their foresight and the scale of the technological forces at work. Openness won’t create security, but it can pave the way for shared understanding and solutions. These issues are particularly acute with respect to entry-level workers.

If workers are to make greater use of AI to improve productivity, creativity,
and quality, leaders will need to keep strengthening trust - both in people
and in the technology - by demonstrating reliability, showing care for
well-being, and fostering open dialogue. The data suggest a clear path:
sustain transparency and follow-through at the top, close the “care gap” at
the frontline, and ensure younger employees feel safe to speak up.

The implications for leaders in Romania: create a vivid picture of what the
company will look like a few years from now and describe how those
outcomes relate to employees’ day-to-day work and longer-term career
development.

Leaders should spell out which skills matter most in the future, connect them to
business strategy, and create visible, equitable upskilling pathways.
But just providing those pathways isn’t enough: without opportunities to
test and apply new capabilities on the job, and without consistent manager
support, employers risk losing much of the value of upskilling.

A skills-first approach can help allocate talent where you need it and
boost employee motivation. High-performing HR functions can play a significant role, and today’s leaders need to demand that they do. Consider psychological safety: its importance as a motivator suggests leaders should be doubling down on it at a time when technological disruption is creating uncertainty about the
future.

In addition to motivating workers with money and seeking to avoid
demotivation through insecurity, executives can link employees’ financial
goals to a drive for AI adoption and value creation. Beyond that, employers
can provide objective, trustworthy resources such as coaching, workshops,
webinars, and online tools—which previous PwC research shows workers
increasingly value.

Download the Romanian edition

(PDF of 14.55MB)

Explore the findings of the global edition of PwC's Hopes and Fears Survey 2025

About the survey

PwC Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025 is one of the most comprehensive
studies of the global workforce, with nearly 50,000 respondents from 48
countries and 28 industries. The Romanian data reflects the responses of 500
employees across the country, statistically representative in terms of
employment status, age, education, location, industry and profession.

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Oana Munteanu
Oana Munteanu

Director, Workforce Services Leader, PwC Romania

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Gabriela Batîr
Gabriela Batîr

Senior Manager, Workforce Consulting, PwC Romania

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