Australasia Report

The 2019 Worldcom Confidence Index is an invaluable benchmark for the confidence levels of business leaders.  In our second annual Confidence Index, we commissioned Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI), a research company that uses artificial intelligence (AI), to create a fully representative understanding of what audiences are saying. We captured and analysed the online contributions, in nine languages, of 58,374 CEOs and CMOs globally. This enabled us to identify which topics are highest on the leadership agenda, and how confident or concerned leaders are about the topic. 

Since we published our first Confidence Index, world events such as: the US/China trade war, Brexit, Amazon forest fires, the Hong Kong crisis, the increasing pace of global warming and the resurgence of diseases such as Measles, have continued to create a more uncertain world. Our second Confidence Index shows exactly how confident or concerned business leaders are about dealing with these challenges.  

This year’s findings have uncovered a 21% decline in confidence globally since 2018.

This is the first time we have produced a Confidence Index report for Australasia. We captured and analysed the online contributions of 1,838 business leaders from Australia and New Zealand There are some interesting similarities and differences with the global results.

The top eight findings for Australasia are:

#1 Australasian leaders are the most confident globally, alongside leaders from Europe and Asia

#2 Influencers are the top audience for leader attention, but leaders are concerned about communicating with them – producing a CI score that is 23 per cent lower than the global CI average

#3 Employee-related topics dominate leaders’ agenda

• Employee-related topics take four out of top five topics
• Upskilling and reskilling is the most discussed topic but has the lowest CI score
• Leaders are concerned about reaching this audience. Employees has the second lowest CI score of all audiences.

#4 Leaders have confidence in their ability to protect their brand in a crisis

#5 The impact of the media is the third most discussed topic, but Australasian leaders are very concerned about the media’s impact – with a confidence ranking of #20 of 23 topics 

#6. Australasia most confident region about global trade agreements and tariffs 

#7 Australasia is the second most confident region globally about handling issues around global warming and extreme weather 

#8 Australasia is the most confident region when it comes to handling the impact on businesses of the way political leaders communicate on social media

The Global report for the Worldcom Confidence Index 2019 can be seen here. You can view the full Australasian report here or see the deck below. To have the best viewing experience please use full screen mode.