The idea that work is awful, especially corporate work, is of course not new. Dilbert comics have been around since the 1980s. The Office first aired in 2001. Hello Laziness!, a best-selling early guide to quiet quitting by French economist Corinne Maier, was first published in 2004.
The late US anthropologist David Graeber wrote an essay about “bullsh** jobs” after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis that was another global hit and later became a book.
Perhaps the upheaval of working life Covid ushered in is deepening an instinctive sense that work makes most people unhappy.
But what if it actually doesn’t? And what if the belief that we are all fed-up is itself debilitating, for workers and employers alike?
That fear seems to be justified by the work of researchers such as Scott Schieman. He is a Canadian professor of sociology who has looked beyond the Quit-Tok headlines to ask people how they actually feel about their own jobs.
Having collected data from 42,000 workers in the US and Canada since 2019, he has come up with some striking results.
Research he did late last year shows a hefty 79% of workers in the US feel somewhat or very satisfied with their own job. But guess how many think most Americans feel the same way? Just 49%.
That’s quite a gap between what employees see with their own eyes and what they believe to be reality. The gap grows even larger when you ask people how often they find their work stressful.
Schieman found 32% of workers say their work is stressful “often or always”. That is obviously not good. But a whopping 69% believe most Americans feel the same way. This also seems worrying when most respondents say they are stressed at work “sometimes, hardly ever or never”.
Similar perception gaps exist when it comes to feeling underpaid and thinking relations between bosses and employees in the workplace are bad.
In other words, people think they are personally lucky outliers and when confronted with evidence suggesting otherwise, they simply do not believe it. “A lot of them actually say, ‘People are lying’,” Schieman told me.
These results are in line with other data that has long shown relatively high levels of job satisfaction in the US. They also mirror Schieman’s research findings in Canada, a workers’ paradise compared with the US.
Obviously some workplaces really are toxic. Work stress is a real problem and some employers really do resemble Miranda Priestly, the cruel boss in The Devil Wears Prada.
But that doesn’t mean we should assume most work is hell. Schieman and his colleagues have also found when people think most workers are dissatisfied, they tend to feel less committed to their own job and their own employer.
This cannot be good for anyone. It also echoes other gaps between reality and what voters think about the state of immigration, the economy and willingness to address climate change, which is unhelpful. Still, if you have just packed away your beach towel and are sitting back at your desk, it might be worth bearing in mind that you are probably doing work that makes you, and most other people, reasonably satisfied.
Written by: Pilita Clark.
© Financial Times
