Blog
Job dissatisfaction: a growing problem?
19th October 2009
Very thought provoking recent piece in The Economist highlighting the saddening wave of suicides in France, apparently triggered by work-based stress at France Telecom. But the problem goes wider than that and poses tough questions about the negative effect work can have on our lives. Suicide is only the tip of an iceberg of work-related unhappiness.
The first question to ask must surely be why and how people are driven to such despair. France Telecom is making the difficult transition from state monopoly to multinational company. It has shed 22,000 jobs since 2006. An American survey found that between June 2007 and December 2008 the proportion of employees who professed loyalty to their employers slumped from 95% to 39%; the number voicing trust in them fell from 79% to 22%. Another survey that more than half of respondents described their job as “stagnant”, meaning that they had nothing interesting to do and little hope of promotion.
It’s likely that the main reason for the rise in unhappiness is the recession, which is destroying jobs at a startling rate and spreading anxiety throughout the workforce. It seems to be worse in industries facing tough times (e.g. cars) and where there is a rapid pace of technological change.
More worrying for managers is that misery is caused by the drive to improve productivity, which is typically accompanied by an obsession with measuring performance. Giant retailers use “workforce management” software to monitor how many seconds it takes to scan the goods in a grocery cart. The public sector, particularly in Britain, is awash with inspectors and performance targets. In Japan some firms even monitor whether their employees smile frequently enough at customers. Most employees also think that their firms do not feel much responsibility to protect jobs.
What’s to be done? One suggestion is that companies need to do as much as possible to come clean with workers, even if that means confirming bad news.