What Ted Lasso gets right about work culture

Company confidence predicts success, but it's falling globally.

A yellow sign taped above a locker room door became one of the most recognizable symbols in modern pop culture. In Ted Lasso, the word “BELIEVE” is handwritten in block letters. It becomes shorthand for something bigger than optimism. It signals a shared conviction that a team can win.

In the workplace, belief plays a similar role.

Employees constantly form opinions about leadership, strategy, and their company’s future. Yet beneath all of that sits a deeper question: Do people actually believe the company will succeed?

The average employee response to that question is what we call company confidence. And according to our global benchmark data, it is on the decline.

External signals reinforce the trend we’re seeing. The Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index, tracking company confidence with a six-month outlook, dipped to record lows in 2025 (mid-40%). And recently, Revelio Labs’ Workforce Confidence Pulse showed a strong correlation between company confidence and broader market conditions. They, too, found company confidence had hit its lowest point since 2019.

Counting ours, there are three independent datasets and methodologies, all finding the same insight.

Employees’ confidence that their company will succeed has weakened.

That is why, when diving into the analysis of our January 2026 benchmarks release, we focused on this data story. Here’s what we found.

Fewer companies are asking the hard questions

Across Culture Amp benchmarks, usage of company confidence questions has fallen significantly over the past few years. Where roughly 71–79% of companies once asked these questions, today only 48–65% include them in their surveys.

This pattern was counterintuitive to us. When deciding what questions to include and exclude in their engagement surveys, organizations have to anticipate several factors. For one, they typically focus on topics they can take action against. HR leaders also account for stakeholder needs when designing their surveys.

Another pattern we’ve noted across the years is that leaders love including questions where they expect strong results. The flip side is also a common approach – companies remove questions when they expect employee discontent.

So when fewer companies ask about company confidence, we would expect global favorability to go up.

But our data shows that is simply not the case.

Belief in future company success is in decline globally

In Culture Amp’s engagement survey template, the company confidence factor is measured through three closely related items that reflect how employees evaluate a company’s strategy, competitiveness, and future trajectory.

The results reveal a mixed but concerning picture.

Belief in future success is pulling down the factor

The most telling shift appears in the item gauging employee belief that the company will succeed in three years’ time. Since 2021, employees’ responses to this question have declined steadily, falling from 81% favorability to 72% today.

When employees gauge future company success, they are likely synthesizing everything they see inside the organization. They’re considering everything from leadership decisions to market positioning to resource investments. And an 8% point decline in employee belief could also reflect a shift in how employees interpret the broader socioeconomic market in which their companies operate.

The market is volatile. Economic pressure, technological disruption, and rapid AI adoption are forcing companies to change direction faster than many workforces are used to. In parallel, employees are increasingly aware of looming layoffs, restructuring, and automation risks across industries. These signals can shape how people interpret their own company’s trajectory, even when internal performance remains strong.

In that context, declining belief may not mean employees think their company is failing, but that the future feels harder to read.

Resource allocation is the weakest signal, though more steady

The second item in the company confidence factor assesses how employees evaluate strategic execution. We found that confidence in how the company directs resources toward long-term goals has declined from 2021 through 2024 and now sits at just 60% favorability.

That leaves 40% of employees either unsure or disagreeing that their company is allocating resources effectively.

Resource allocation being the lowest-scoring question raised an interesting interpretation challenge for us. Resource allocation is one of the clearest demonstrations of how an organization executes on its strategy.

Whether or not an employee reads the strategy documents, they see where budgets go. They notice which projects receive attention and what leaders prioritize in meetings.

In many ways, resource allocation is strategy in action.

That said, in our rapidly shifting market, leaders are compelled to change direction and adapt constantly. And communicating with employees about every shift may not be possible, especially for larger organizations.

It makes sense that employees may take issue with this type of strategic reallocation. What feels like agility to leadership who are in-the-know can sometimes feel like volatility to employees. And the trade-offs leaders contend with on the way to a strategic resource pivot may be opaque to employees further down the hierarchy.

Resource allocation may be employees’ most tangible and real-time way of understanding where the company is headed.

People consistently believe their company is competitive in the market

Spanning regions and industries, about three of every four employees believe the products and services their company offers are competitive in the market. And this item has stayed almost entirely stable since 2021.

So, employee doubt in future company success may not stem from skepticism about the organization’s core offering.

In this kind of environment, product strength alone does not always guarantee confidence in the company’s future. Execution, strategy, and adaptability start to matter just as much, which brings us back to the central dynamic behind company confidence. Belief rarely rises or falls because of one signal. It emerges from how employees interpret the full picture.

Confidence behaves like an outcome

How the company confidence factor behaves became clearer when we examined it against external performance signals. We found that company confidence scores show a strong relationship with indicators like share price growth, successful funding rounds, Glassdoor ratings, retention rates, and distribution of performance ratings.

That raises an interesting question for leaders. If belief reflects how convincingly strategy translates into progress, what happens in organizations where strategy becomes harder to see, especially as companies grow?

Smaller companies hold a confidence advantage

One of the hypotheses we explored was whether organizational scale plays a role in declining confidence. As people scientists, we’ve seen what happens as companies grow: Strategy becomes more complex, communication layers increase, and leaders become further removed from daily work.

Any of those alone could weaken employees’ understanding of the company’s direction.

The data supports part of this theory. Across our dataset, smaller companies consistently show higher company confidence scores.

But the gap is smaller than expected. Interestingly, when we examined a related leadership question, “Leaders communicate a motivating vision,” the difference between the smallest and largest companies was roughly 10% points. The company confidence items also show higher scores in smaller companies, but the range is narrower.

That suggests leadership communication is important, but belief in company success is shaped by more than messaging alone.

When we analyzed the data by region to test for cultural differences or indicators, we found that the APAC and North America regions have higher company confidence.

Coming in lowest was Germany, with only 42% of employees there agreeing that they effectively direct resources toward company goals, compared to 60% of employees agreeing in APAC and North America.

Seeing differences by region and company size helps tell the story of what is happening with company confidence around the world, but we also wanted to know the “why.”

Naturally, our next question was about what factors drive company confidence scores up or down.

What actually drives company confidence

When we look at company confidence as an outcome, the strongest signals are deeply tied to leadership credibility and how strategy shows up in everyday work.

The top drivers of company confidence are:

1. I have confidence in the leaders at this company
2. Day-to-day decisions demonstrate that quality and improvement are top priorities
3. The company motivates me to go above and beyond in my role
4. I would recommend this company as a great place to work
5. Leaders have communicated a vision that motivates me

Taken together, these drivers suggest that confidence grows where leadership, execution, and motivation reinforce each other. Employees appear to build belief in the company’s future when leaders seem credible, when decisions reflect clear priorities, and when the work itself feels meaningful enough to inspire extra effort.

Company confidence grows when leadership credibility, strategic clarity, and energized employees reinforce each other.

Why company confidence matters more than many leaders realize

Based on our research over the years, we have come to the conclusion that company confidence sits at the intersection of strategy and culture. Employees are observant. They’re watching and evaluating how decisions are made. They track where resources go and interpret leadership signals. They’ll use whatever information they have, even if there is little to go on, to form a conclusion about whether the company is going somewhere worth believing in.

Knowing that employees are constantly interpreting varying signals about the future, company confidence may be one of the clearest indicators of how convincingly the strategy is landing inside the organization.

Start asking about company confidence again

Perhaps the most actionable takeaway from this analysis is simple. Companies would be wise to continue asking their employees what they think about resource allocation, strategy, and future trajectory. All the companies backing off from doing so lose sight of our top-watched indicator for actual business outcomes.

The best news is that measuring company confidence with Culture Amp is surprisingly simple. In fact, our Performance Culture Quadrant (PCQ) shows leaders how employee engagement and belief in company success (performance confidence) align and light the path to Peak Performance. We did extensive research leading up to its release and found insights you won’t want to miss.

If leaders want to know whether employees believe in the company’s future, there is a straightforward way to find out.

Ask.

Do your employees believe?

Unlock the path to Peak Performance

Connect engagement and performance confidence to diagnose your culture with the Performance Culture Quadrant™

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