People worldwide are broadly unhappy with their jobs, according to Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of the forthcoming book Why We Work. In an August 28 New York Times column, he cites Gallup poll results showing that almost 90% of workers around the world were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from their jobs.
“Think about that,” he writes. “Nine out of 10 workers spend half their waking lives doing things they don’t really want to do in places they don’t particularly want to be.”
The situation is a little better—and improving—in the U.S. According to Justin McCarthy at Gallup, “For the most part, Americans’ satisfaction with various aspects of their jobs is higher today than it was in 2005. But despite these improvements, no more than one in three workers are completely satisfied with their salaries, stress levels, chances for promotion, and retirement plans.”
What is the source of this dissatisfaction? Schwartz in the Times cites Adam Smith writing in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations: “It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can.” Since then, writes Schwarz, employers have striven to minimize “…the need for skill and close attention—things that lazy, pay-driven workers could not be expected to have.”
Schwartz cites Smith’s example of the pin factory and the efficiency of a division of labor: “One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head.”
“Yet more than 200 years later, there is still little evidence of this satisfaction-efficiency trade-off,” writes Schwartz. “In fact, most evidence points in the opposite direction. In his 1998 book, The Human Equation, which reviewed numerous studies across dozens of different industries, the Stanford organizational behavior Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer found that workplaces that offered employees work that was challenging, engaging, and meaningful, and over which they had some discretion, were more profitable than workplaces that treated employees as cogs in a production machine.”
The good news for EE-Evaluation Engineering readers is that engineers are better treated than 18th century pin-factory workers—and many low-skill workers in the 21st century. Our recent salary survey showed broad job satisfaction among readers, with only 14% of respondents reporting being somewhat or very dissatisfied with their jobs.
In still more good news, jobs may be evolving to put more emphasis on social skills, as I reported earlier. In Gallup’s survey of U.S. workers, the highest level of job satisfaction—at 72%—was related to relations with coworkers.
Unfortunately, the Gallup poll didn’t ask about relations with customers, suppliers, clients, and others. But it’s not much of a stretch to assume that if good relations with coworkers within a company leads to job satisfaction, so should relationships with those outside your organization who are working toward similar goals.
Many workers may well be stymied by instructions that thwart constructive relationships with others. Schwartz in the Times cites as an example call-center workers who really want to help customers but who find the only metric by which they are measured is how quickly they terminate calls.
Concludes Schwartz, “Work that is adequately compensated is an important social good. But so is work that is worth doing. Half of our waking lives is a terrible thing to waste.”
