Six months ago, we started something we had been thinking about for a while.
Together with HR Hub and Lumea D&I, we launched Emotions at Work (Emoții la muncă), an initiative built around a simple idea: emotions deserve a place in conversations about how organizations work, alongside business results, performance and strategy.
We started with three objectives.
First, we wanted to open a conversation in the Romanian business community about emotional culture. We talk a lot about organizational culture, leadership, engagement and wellbeing, but emotions are still not always part of these conversations. And yet, they are present in everything that happens at work: how we communicate, how we collaborate, how we make decisions and how we relate to one another.
Second, we wanted to put emotions on the strategic agenda, alongside business figures and performance indicators. Not as something nice to have, or as a separate HR initiative, but as something worth understanding and paying attention to when we think about how organizations function and perform.
And third, we wanted to contribute, through research and practical guidance, to creating healthier workplaces in Romania.
We felt that to do this, we first needed to understand what was actually happening. Not rely on assumptions about what people need, or on what organizations believe their employees experience, but ask people directly.
How do they feel at work today? What would they like to feel more often? And where are the biggest gaps between the two?
We also wanted this to be more than a ranking of employers or a collection of opinions about who has a good or bad workplace. We wanted to create a shared starting point for a more informed conversation, one that could eventually lead to practical changes.
That’s why we began with a national study, asking people about their emotional experiences at work. And some of the findings were quite revealing.
What did we look at, and how?
We used the emotional states instrument from GENOS to explore how people experience work emotionally.
The survey looked at ten states that are particularly relevant to the workplace. Some relate to how we feel emotionally, such as happiness and anxiety. Others describe affective experiences, such as stress and exhaustion, social experiences such as feeling appreciated or treated unfairly, cognitive experiences such as feeling informed or disorganized, and work-related experiences such as feeling empowered and productive.
We asked people about how frequently they experience these states and how they would ideally like to experience them.
This distinction matters.
We weren’t trying to measure whether someone is happy or unhappy as a personality trait. We wanted to understand the frequency of certain experiences in the context of work, and how far the current reality is from what people consider desirable.
The national study brought together 1,103 respondents from different professional backgrounds and organizational roles.
The result is a snapshot of how people experience work in Romania. And some of the things we found are quite interesting.
First, a little clarity: emotional culture and emotional climate are not the same thing
Before getting into the findings, it is worth explaining two concepts that sit at the heart of this initiative.
Emotional culture refers to the unwritten rules around emotions in a group or organization. It is about which emotions are expected, encouraged, rewarded or considered acceptable at work.
In other words, what emotions are welcome here?
Can people express frustration when something isn’t working? Is it acceptable to ask for help? Is showing uncertainty seen as an opportunity to learn or as a sign of weakness? Do we make room for appreciation, curiosity and enthusiasm, or are people expected to remain professional, composed and emotionally neutral at all times?
Emotional climate, on the other hand, is the emotional atmosphere people experience in a team or organization at a particular moment.
It is the feeling in the room. The tension or trust, the energy or exhaustion, the openness or caution that people experience in their everyday interactions.
The two are closely connected. Culture shapes climate, while climate, repeated over time, reinforces culture.
For example, when honesty and care are encouraged, people are more likely to experience trust. When mistakes are consistently punished, people become more cautious, tension increases and, eventually, that tension can become part of the organization’s unwritten rules.
One describes the norms. The other describes what it feels like to live with them.
And both matter.
What did we discover?
There are many interesting findings in the study, but two stood out for us.
- People feel productive, but not necessarily happy
One of the most striking findings was the gap between feeling productive and feeling happy at work.
71% of respondents said they frequently feel productive. That’s encouraging. It tells us that people are getting things done and feel capable of delivering on their responsibilities.
But only 38% said they frequently feel happy at work.
And when asked how they would ideally like to feel, 92% said they would like to experience happiness frequently.
Think about that gap for a moment.
We have a large proportion of people who feel productive, but considerably fewer who feel happy. And the difference between the current reality and what people would like to experience is substantial.
This doesn’t mean that work should be an endless source of happiness, or that every difficult day is a sign of a dysfunctional workplace.
But it does raise an important question: Are we paying enough attention to what people have to overcome in order to perform?
Because being productive and feeling good about the way we work are not mutually exclusive.
We can deliver results and still feel that the workload is manageable, that our contribution matters, that we have enough information and that we are treated fairly.
Perhaps the goal isn’t to make everyone happy at work. Perhaps it is to stop making good work harder than it needs to be.
- Recognition is still not where people need it to be
The second finding is about appreciation.
Only 50% of respondents said they frequently feel appreciated at work. Yet 91% would ideally like to feel appreciated frequently.
That’s a significant difference.
And when we look at organizational roles, another interesting pattern emerges. The proportion of people who frequently feel appreciated increases with seniority: 42% among employees, 49% among coordinators and 67% among directors.
In other words, the further down the organizational hierarchy we go, the less frequently people feel appreciated.
Recognition is not a new topic. We have been talking about it for years. Most organizations understand that people need to feel seen and that appreciation contributes to motivation and engagement.
And yet, the numbers suggest that there is still a considerable gap between what people need and what they experience.
Maybe we need to rethink what recognition looks like in everyday work.
It doesn’t always have to involve financial rewards, formal programs or elaborate gestures. Sometimes it is about acknowledging someone’s contribution, giving meaningful feedback, noticing the effort behind a result or simply saying thank you.
Of course, recognition needs to be genuine. People can tell the difference between a well-designed initiative and feeling genuinely valued by the people they work with.
The question is not whether organizations have recognition programs. It is whether people actually feel appreciated.
Some of this might sound familiar. So why does it matter?
We could look at these findings and say that we already knew most of this.
We know that people want to feel appreciated. We know that too much stress and uncertainty are difficult to manage. We know that communication matters and that people need clarity and autonomy.
But there is a difference between knowing something in theory and seeing the size of the gap between what people experience and what they actually need.
For example, 56% of respondents frequently feel stressed at work, while only 6% would ideally want to experience stress frequently. Similarly, 47% frequently feel exhausted, compared with an ideal of just 4%.
These numbers don’t mean that all stress is harmful. A certain amount of challenge and pressure can be a natural part of demanding work. The survey measures how frequently people experience stress, not its intensity or whether it is energizing or draining.
What it does tell us is that most people would prefer considerably less of it.
And perhaps this is where we should pause.
If we know that people need recognition, clarity, autonomy and a manageable workload, but the gap between their current experience and their desired experience remains so large, maybe it is time to look again at what we are doing.
Are our existing initiatives reaching the people who need them? Are our managers equipped to create the conditions for people to do good work? Are we addressing the way work is organized, or are we mostly asking individuals to become more resilient and better at coping?
The answers might not be comfortable, but they are worth exploring.
Moving beyond “We’ve tried that, and it didn’t work”
One thing we were particularly conscious of when starting this initiative was that we didn’t want it to stop at a report full of interesting statistics.
We have all seen research that identifies a problem, gets people talking for a while and then becomes another document sitting somewhere on a shared drive.
We wanted to take a different approach.
So, after collecting the data, we brought together people from more than 20 companies to explore what these findings could mean in practice.
The idea was to move from identifying problems to co-creating solutions.
Not solutions designed in isolation and handed over to organizations, but ideas developed together with people who understand the realities of different workplaces. People who know what is feasible, what has already been tried, what gets in the way and what might actually make a difference.
We wanted to challenge the familiar response: “We’ve tried that before, and it didn’t work.”
Sometimes an idea doesn’t work because it isn’t the right solution. Sometimes it isn’t implemented consistently. Sometimes the context is different. And sometimes we simply haven’t involved the people who are expected to make it work.
By bringing companies together, we created space to exchange experiences, question assumptions and develop a collection of practices that organizations can actually implement.
The focus was not on finding one universal solution. Different organizations have different realities, resources and challenges. It was about identifying useful actions that can be adapted to those realities, including ideas that don’t require a large budget to get started.
Because improving emotional culture doesn’t always begin with a major organizational transformation. It can begin with a different conversation, a clearer expectation, a more thoughtful decision or a manager taking the time to acknowledge someone’s contribution.
What matters is that we move from intention to action.
What happens next?
Six months after starting Emotions at Work, we feel that we have made an important first step.
We have opened a conversation, gathered data from 1,103 people and brought together more than 20 companies to work on practical responses.
But the real value of this initiative will not be measured by the number of people who read the report or the number of organizations that participate in a workshop.
It will be measured by what changes afterwards.
Starting November 16, the national report and the practical guide for organizations will be available at www.culturaemotionala.ro.
We hope they will be useful to leaders, HR professionals, managers and anyone interested in creating healthier and more sustainable workplaces.
And we hope they will encourage more conversations about something that is often present in our working lives but not always explicitly discussed: how we feel, why we feel that way and what we can do about it.
Because emotions don’t stay at home when we come to work.
They influence how we think, how we communicate, how we make decisions and how willing we are to take initiative and collaborate with others.
We don’t need workplaces where everyone is happy all the time. We need workplaces where people can do meaningful work without having to constantly overcome avoidable obstacles.
And perhaps the best place to start is by asking a simple question:
How do people feel at work today, and what could we change to make that experience better tomorrow?
That’s the conversation we started six months ago. And we hope you’ll be part of it.
