What employees actually want from work, and why it's not pay

If someone asked you what your employees care about most, you'd probably say salary. It's a reasonable guess. Pay is concrete, comparable, and easy to talk about. But a major European workforce study suggests you'd be wrong, and the gap between what employers assume and what employees actually value is quietly costing businesses more than they realise.

The European Working Conditions Survey, conducted by Eurofound across more than 36,000 workers in the EU, asked people to rate what matters most to them in a job. The results are striking. A safe working environment for mental and physical health came out on top, rated as "very important" by 71% of respondents. A trusting working environment came second, at 69%. Good pay and benefits came third, at 66%.

Trust beats pay. By a meaningful margin. And that finding deserves more attention than it typically gets in conversations about how to run a good team.

What workers are actually telling us

The full picture from the survey makes the point even more clearly. After safety and trust, the factors workers ranked as very important were good working hours (65%), meaningful work (64%), and job security (64%). Pay is significant. Nobody is saying it doesn't matter. But it sits within a cluster of values, not above them.

This holds across sectors and age groups. It is not a generational quirk or a niche preference. Workers across Europe are consistently saying that the conditions under which they do their work, the quality of the environment and the reliability of the relationship with their employer, matter as much as, or more than, the number on their payslip.

For anyone managing a team, especially in a small or medium-sized business, this reframes the question. It is not only how much you pay people that shapes how they feel about their work. It is whether they feel that the basics are handled fairly and honestly.

The fairness gap most businesses don't see coming

The same survey found that roughly 30% of women and 24% of men in Europe report what researchers call an effort-reward imbalance. In plain terms: they feel they give more than they get back. Not necessarily because they think they are underpaid in absolute terms, but because the exchange feels uneven. The effort they put in is not being fully seen or acknowledged.

That is a significant share of the workforce carrying a quiet frustration that has nothing to do with the salary line. It points to something that pay rises alone cannot fix: the feeling that your contribution is accurately recorded, recognised, and treated as it deserves. This kind of imbalance rarely announces itself loudly. It accumulates gradually, and many employers don't notice until the damage is already done.

When uncertainty becomes anxiety

There is another dimension to this that often gets overlooked: predictability.

The Eurofound data shows that 15% of European workers cannot predict their own earnings with any accuracy over the next three months. For anyone working variable hours in shift-based teams, retail, hospitality, healthcare, or logistics, this reflects a real and uncomfortable reality. When your hours are unclear, your income is unclear. And when your income is unclear, your sense of financial stability is unclear.

This matters for trust in a direct way. If an employee cannot be confident that their hours are being tracked accurately and completely, they cannot be confident that they will be paid correctly. That uncertainty is not abstract. It touches something very practical in people's lives, and it shapes how they relate to the organisation they work for.

For HR administrators and managers, this is worth sitting with for a moment. The administrative processes around time — how hours are logged, how they're checked, how discrepancies are resolved — are not just operational details. They are one of the most tangible ways a business communicates to its employees whether they are trusted and whether they will be treated fairly.

Why the routine stuff matters most

One more finding worth noting: the share of workers performing monotonous or repetitive tasks has risen from 39% in 1995 to 48% in 2024. When the work itself is routine, the conditions of work carry more weight. Whether breaks are taken as they should be. Whether hours are counted correctly. Whether someone's time is genuinely respected. For a large portion of your workforce, getting these basics right is not just the floor. It is a significant part of what makes the job feel acceptable, or not.

A question worth asking

Trust and fairness are not soft extras. They are central to how employees experience their working lives. The businesses that understand this ask not just "are we paying fairly?" but "do our employees have any reason to doubt that they are being treated fairly?" The second question is harder to answer, because it requires looking at the less visible parts of how you run your team.

Does every employee in your business know their hours are seen, logged, and accurately accounted for? If you're not completely sure of the answer, there's a reasonable chance they aren't either.

Find out more

If any of this felt familiar, it is worth taking a closer look at whether your time tracking process gives employees the transparency they need to feel fairly treated. TimeMoto Cloud gives SMEs a single, structured system for recording hours, managing absences, and keeping records that are accurate and visible to everyone who needs them. Try it free for 30 days and see what a difference a clear, honest overview makes.

Source: Eurofound (2026), Living and Working in Europe 2025, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg. Based on the European Working Conditions Survey, covering 36,000+ workers across the EU. Eurofound is a tripartite EU Agency and an independent source of research on living and working conditions in Europe.