The weird truth about work is we actually like it
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That’s it. Summer is over. Beaches are emptying. Desks are filling and Pret A Manger queues are growing, as Europe and America go back to work.
The FT office, like countless others, is full of the usual post-holiday commiserations about the jolt of logging on after so many days of switching off, sleeping in and generally not being on deck.
I have nothing useful to say about this, mainly because I idiotically failed to take time off in August. But I have also been contemplating a weird and unsung truth about work: people actually like it a lot more than they think.
This is far from evident at a time when work’s reputation is being clobbered.
The Great Resignation might have eased since the pandemic but talk of toxic workplaces, toxic bosses, burnout, stress and quiet quitting, or doing the bare minimum at work, is by no means over. Nor is news about the right to disconnect, the four-day week and Quit-Tok videos showing young workers boldly chucking in their jobs in real time.
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. Bonjour Paresse, or Hello Laziness, a bestselling 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 “bullshit jobs” after the 2008 financial crisis that was another global hit and later became a book.
Perhaps the upheaval of working life that 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 per cent 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 per cent.
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 per cent of workers say their work is stressful “often or always”. That is obviously not good. But a whopping 69 per cent believe that 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 that 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 that 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.