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That’s it. Summer is over. Beaches are emptying. Desks are filling up and queues for takeout are growing as Europe and the US get back to work.
The FT office, like many others, is full of the usual post-holiday condolences about the shock of coming online after so many days of disconnecting, sleeping in and generally not being on deck.
I don’t have anything useful to say about this, mostly because, like an idiot, I didn’t take any days off in August. But I’ve also been reflecting on a strange and under-recognized truth about work: people actually like it a lot more than they think.
This is far from obvious at a time when the reputation of work is taking a hit.
The Great Quit may have subsided since the pandemic, but the conversations about toxic workplaces, toxic bosses, burnout, stress, and silent resignations, or doing the bare minimum at work, are by no means over. Neither are the news stories about the right to unplug, the four-day week, and Exit Tok Videos showing young workers bravely quitting their jobs in real time.
The idea that work is horrible, especially corporate work, is not new, of course. Dilbert comics have been around for a long time. Since the 1980s. The office It was first broadcast in 2001. Hello Paresse, Hello Laziness, a successful early guide to quitting smoking quietly by French economist Corinne Maier, was first published in 2004.
The late American anthropologist David Graeber wrote a rehearsal about “bullshit jobs” after the 2008 financial crisis that was another global shock and later became a book.
Perhaps the disruption Covid has brought to working life is deepening the instinctive feeling that work makes most people unhappy.
But what if that’s not actually the case? What if the belief that we’re all fed up is itself debilitating, for both workers and employers?
That fear appears to be justified by the work of researchers like Scott Schieman, a Canadian sociology professor who has looked beyond the Quit-Tok headlines to ask people how they really feel about their own jobs.
After collecting data from 42,000 workers in the United States and Canada since 2019, they have come up with some surprising results.
The research he conducted late last year shows considerable 79 percent In the United States, 80% of workers are somewhat or very satisfied with their jobs, but guess how many think most Americans feel the same way: only 49%.
There is a huge gap between what employees see with their own eyes and what they believe to be reality. The gap becomes even wider when people are asked how often they find their job stressful.
Schieman found 32 percent of workers say their job is stressful “often or always.” Obviously, that’s not good. But a whopping 69 percent believe that most Americans feel the same way, which is also worrying, as most respondents say they feel stressed at work “sometimes, rarely, or never.”
There are similar perception gaps when it comes to feeling underpaid and thinking that relationships between bosses and employees in the workplace are bad.
In other words, people think they are lucky one-offs, and when faced with evidence suggesting otherwise, they simply don’t believe it. “A lot of them actually say, ‘People lie,'” Schieman told me.
These results are consistent with other data that have long shown relatively high levels of job satisfaction in the US. They also mirror the findings of Schieman’s research in Canada, a Workers’ Paradise Compared to the US
Obviously, some workplaces are really toxic. Workplace stress is a real problem and some employers really do resemble Miranda Priestly, the cruel boss of The devil wears prada.
But that doesn’t mean we should assume that most work is hell. Schieman and his colleagues have also found that when people think that most workers are dissatisfied, they tend to feel less committed to their own work and their own employer.
This can’t be good for anyone. It also reflects other gaps between reality and what voters think about the state of immigration, the economy and the willingness to tackle climate change, which isn’t helpful. Still, if you’ve just packed your beach towel and are sitting at your desk, it might be worth keeping in mind that you’re probably doing a job that leaves you, and most people, reasonably satisfied.