A new survey is making headlines across the business press. Only 44% of employees globally feel they are thriving at work. In Japan, the number is even lower — just 31%. And only 8% of employees in Japan report being engaged at work. Eight percent. The global average is 20%, which is already nothing to celebrate. The reason being cited? AI anxiety. Workers are losing confidence. They fear their roles are about to be replaced by machines.
Here is the fundamental flaw in engagement surveys — and it applies equally to this thriving statistic. They treat every employee as equal. The excellent and the mediocre get the same weight. The star performer who is quietly updating her resume and the perennial underperformer who has been doing the bare minimum for six years — they each contribute one data point. And so what you get is a number that tells you about the average. And the average is not what builds your business. That 56% could be your mediocre performers, grinding along as they always have. But it could just as easily include your best people — frustrated by the tolerance for mediocrity around them, bored by a lack of challenge, held back by managers who mistake compliance for performance.
Your best people are not afraid of AI. The excellent are adapting to it, experimenting with it, figuring out how to use it to outrun their peers. It is the mediocre who are most threatened — those whose value to the organisation was always marginal, and who now face technology that can do marginal work at scale. So ignore the 44% headline. Ask one question instead: are your best people thriving?
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