Europe 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.

In this second annual European Confidence Index, we captured and analysed the online contributions of 14,536 business leaders from 41 countries across Europe. There are some interesting similarities and differences with the global results.

The top six findings for Europe are:

#1 European leaders’ confidence falls but much less than the global trend – down six per cent compared to 21% globally

#2 Influencers are the top audience for leader attention, but leaders are very concerned about communicating with them – producing the lowest CI score for an audience on the European Index

#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 – coming #23 on the topic index
• Leaders are concerned about reaching this audience. Employees has the third lowest CI score of all audiences

#4 Leaders are concerned about their corporate image and brand reputation. This topic appears at #20 on the index. But their confidence in dealing with a crisis is high – coming second of all seven regions

#5 The impact of the media is the third most discussed topic, but European leaders are very concerned about the media’s impact – with a confidence ranking of #22 of 23 topics

#6 Europe most confident about issues around global warming and extreme weather

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