Late last year, over 450,000 employees across the Philippines answered a single, powerful question: “Is this a great place to work?”

The responses, gathered by global authority on workplace culture Great Place To Work, form one of the country’s most comprehensive snapshots of workplace sentiment, revealing a workforce in transition.

According to the organization, three forces are reshaping the employee experience today:

Technology and artificial intelligence (AI) are boosting efficiency but testing human connection.

A rising Gen Z workforce is redefining balance and leadership

A growing economic pressure is putting fairness, pay and job security under scrutiny.

How progress reshapes the workplace

Over the past years, more Filipino employees say they have the tools and resources they need to do their jobs well, reflecting real investment in infrastructure, technology and day-to-day operational support.

Eighty-two percent of Philippine businesses already follow a hybrid setup. In the country’s capital, Manila, co-working spaces have boomed with a 51 percent year-on-year growth. For early- and mid-career professionals (nearly two-thirds of the Great Place To Work dataset are under 35), flexible work is almost business as usual. These are workers who have never experienced a fully office-bound career. The Philippines is also an economy fueled by gigs and side hustles, with at least 1.5 million registered freelancers, making work from anywhere a real alternative.

Many of these opportunities also pose a set of difficulties. Alongside that rise in resources and flexibility, the numbers tell us that the quality of human relationships at work is deteriorating.

Employees who say people care for each other at their workplace dropped from 88 percent in 2023 to 83 percent in 2025. Fewer workers find their workplace enjoyable, down from 87 to 83 percent over the same period. Psychological and emotional health also fell from 82 to 78 percent. That four-to-five point slide across every relationship metric is a pattern moving in the wrong direction.

The Great Place To Work Philippines Best Workplaces study shows that the overall Trust Index score, a composite measure of how employees rate their workplace, declined from 86 percent in 2023 down to 82 percent in 2025. Fewer employees agree with the statement, “Taking everything into account, this is a great place to work,” down from 89 to 86 percent over the same period.

The data suggests that what employees respond to is management that shows interest in them as a person, whether the workplace is psychologically safe, and whether the rules apply to everyone equally.

What the best workplaces do differently

Two themes emerge from Great Place To Work’s research: leadership clarity and culture of innovation.

The first is leadership clarity at every level. Change works when leaders set clear expectations across every level of the organization.

Companies certified as a Great Place To Work, which only happens when an organization scores enough points from surveys given to their employees, the score for “management makes its expectations clear” is remarkably consistent. 90 percent among individual contributors and 93 percent among executives. It comes in contrast against non-certified organizations, with only 77 percent for individual contributors.

“When people know what success looks like and how it is measured, they stop wasting energy second-guessing the system and focus on work that adds value,” Charles Plumley, general manager of Great Place To Work Philippines, stated. “That clarity is itself a form of psychological safety.”

The research also found that an organization’s culture of innovation is the single strongest predictor of employees’ adaptability to change. In the certified companies that make it onto the Best Workplaces list, 93 percent of employees say they adapt to change quickly, while 96 percent of employees say they look forward to coming to work and going the extra mile. These figures reflect environments where experimentation is genuinely encouraged, and people feel comfortable speaking up.

This is maybe the most revealing finding. In standard organizations, employees look to management to coordinate and direct change, but at the “best workplaces,” change is owned collectively.

Great Place To Work is a global authority on workplace culture for over 30 years, having conducted surveys covering 100 million employees across 150 countries to measure the key behaviors that define great workplaces. They are the only recognition based entirely on what employees report about workplace experience — specifically, how they experience a high-trust workplace.

The organization annually unveils the Best Workplaces list that recognizes organizations with exceptional workplace culture and employee satisfaction. List rankings are based on employee feedback, which is analyzed by in-house culture experts to determine the extent to which this experience is shared by the full workforce.

The Best Workplaces in the Philippines 2026 will be announced on 19 March, recognizing the organizations where employees consistently report high-trust, high-performance cultures. These rankings are derived directly from employee survey data gathered across hundreds of companies, published in more than 60 countries and represent the companies where what leadership promises and what employees experience are actually the same thing.

The data points to one conclusion: Filipino workplaces have made real progress on the operational side with better tools, more flexibility and smarter technology. The next frontiers are leadership that communicates clearly; systems that are fair and consistent and cultures where people genuinely look out for each other.