Why so many British workers have started to hate their jobs. And how to fix it

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/31/flexible-working-isnt-solution-britains-productivity-crisis/

Why so many British workers have started to hate their jobs. And how to fix it

Job dissatisfaction has never been stronger. From fewer meetings to more office friendships, these are the ways to solve a national crisis

By Bruce Daisley 31 December 2022 • 6:00am



Jim feels he learned a valuable lesson about work in the second half of his career. After spending the early part of his working life tearing around at a relentless pace in eager pursuit of advancement and promotion, he says it hit him late that he had actually made a mistake. As an experienced sales professional, Jim had reached a point where his stress levels were becoming a problem.

In every moment of his working week he felt there was a call he needed to be dialled in to, or a meeting he was supposed to attend. He’d not finished one scheduled event when his phone would chime that another one was about to begin. Jim felt like he was running on adrenaline and caffeine, and he was drinking more than he would like to admit in the evenings. It was a wake-up call regarding his health that shifted his mindset. “I realised I was struggling,” he says, “I knew something had to give.”

Jim also realised that most of his work was not even being noticed by his superiors. Although his diary was filled with meetings that he’d been making superhuman efforts to attend, Jim would only get the chance to contribute one or two things or just sit in silence. “I gradually stopped going to any but the most essential meetings. Genuinely, no one seemed to notice.”

These penny-drop moments about work are not uncommon. A gradual disconnection from some of the “performance” of work, is just one of the ways we become semi-detached from our jobs. Gallup’s Global Workforce Survey reports that just nine per cent of UK employees are engaged with their jobs. Employee engagement is a concept that has become big business in the field of human resources, as experts set out to measure the level of enthusiasm and dedication a person has for their vocation. In fact, in Jim’s instance, he has not fully disengaged with work, he simply developed an ability to maintain a distance from some of its more exhausting elements.

Jim isn’t alone in having an evolved relationship with work, but tech worker Charlotte goes further, telling close friends that she now “hates her job” at a famous internet company.

Working during the pandemic – dealing with endless video calls coupled with an increasing torrent of emails – left Charlotte exhausted and unable to switch off. She eventually told her manager that she felt overwhelmed. Attending a resilience course at her boss’s suggestion didn’t help. “The worst part was that I was too scared to admit to my boss that it [the course] didn’t work, in case it was decided I was the problem and there was something wrong with me.” Eventually, Charlotte was signed off work with stress, and now having returned to the office, she certainly counts herself as disengaged.

Evidently, there is a connection between workplace engagement and productivity, meaning that there’s an economic consequence to this trend. As the UK struggles with low productivity levels, disconnection with our work leads us to accomplish even less. The Government’s own figures suggest that productivity has stagnated in the 15 years since the 2008 recession. Liz Truss, the former prime minister, was reported to have believed that this was a symptom of laziness which could be solved with a greater commitment to graft. However, Jim and Charlotte’s experiences demonstrate something more nuanced – both of them started their careers toiling hard but the configuration of modern work left them estranged from it.

There is a bigger upshot to this disenchantment – it is having an impact on who enters and leaves the workforce. Jim’s case isn’t untypical; older workers typically show higher levels of disengagement. Studies have found that this detachment is generally a consequence of feeling undervalued or overlooked. Recently, this has had the effect of record numbers of workers taking early retirement. From classrooms to doctors’ surgeries to law courts, a large proportion of our most experienced workers are calling time on their working lives. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, more than 700,000 over-50s have left the workforce since the pandemic.

To add to the magnitude of these trends, at the other end of the scale, employment isn’t providing an allure to would-be entrants to the workforce. Official numbers have shown an astonishing rise in economic inactivity since the pandemic – according to the Office for National Statistics, the biggest increase is among those aged 18 to 24, with young men in particular turning their backs on work. In between these two groups there is increasing discussion of “quiet quitters”, and the “resignation generation”. Our disengagement with our jobs – or with the idea of working – has never been stronger. While political parties are united in their desire to kick-start economic growth with productivity increases, the mechanics of how to enact such changes are unclear.

In attempting to solve the engagement enigma, it is important to acknowledge that the nature of employment has fundamentally changed and is set for ever greater disruption by the imminent arrival of artificial-intelligence tools in the workplace. If we are to solve the problem, we should sound a note of caution at anyone who believes that a prescription of what worked in the past will provide easy answers now. So what is the solution? Many firms have decided that an engaged workforce is one that is freed from the restrictions that characterised our lives before the pandemic hit.

For the longest time, our relationships with work looked more like our relationship with school life. At school, study was dictated by clocks and places. We needed to be in a specific space at a designated time. However, these restrictions are removed in higher education. You could just as easily write an essay at 10pm as at 10am in the location of your choice. Achievement is based on performance rather than presence. Many companies have decided that this liberal style of study is what is required to motivate and inspire employees today and they have committed to greater flexibility as the answer to rouse half-hearted workers. But there might be reason to question whether such changes are a solution to the engagement crisis.

Despite the initial fizz of excitement exhibited by workers untethered from their desks, there’s one knotty issue we need to resolve: why haven’t increases in flexibility led to better productivity? To reminisce through the different eras of the pandemic, people will recall that it all began with the Government’s fear of economic collapse. At that peculiar moment in time, when we found ourselves queuing to enter supermarkets, organisations were anxious that they were not going to make it through the next year of trading. Yet despite such fearfulness, the conundrum of that period was that most companies dedicated to “knowledge work” (the term used to describe office jobs once the ‘office’ location had been removed) reported that productivity increased in the first year of enforced remote working. Confusion has arisen because those gains seem to have been subsequently lost – the latest data for worker productivity suggests it has fallen back to previous levels.

The Hawthorne effect takes its name from the Chicago suburb that housed a Western Electric factory which hosted a series of productivity experiments in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Researchers noted that employee output improved when the lighting was enhanced, but were left perplexed when it also improved after the lighting was reduced. To compound the confusion, further improvements were observed when changes were made to working hours and the scheduling of breaks. All changes led to short-term improvements, but it proved impossible to make these stick.

While reappraisal of the research has relegated the study to being regarded as little more than anecdotal, the Hawthorne effect still holds as an illuminating concept. Humans seem to strive harder when we feel we’re being observed or when we’re experiencing novel circumstances.

To some extent, the pandemic forced us all into a societal Hawthorne effect. Productivity rose through the first period of change, but firms have found those increases elusive ever since.

As productivity levels have reverted to pre-pandemic norms, new trends of working patterns have come under the spotlight. Recent research from Microsoft labels the challenge of the moment the “productivity paradox” – where 87 per cent of employees say they are productive in the remote elements of their jobs, but 85 per cent of managers aren’t convinced that their team members are getting enough work done at home.

Workers have certainly found flexibility appealing and the Government has signalled that it believes that greater engagement comes leaning into such adaptations. UK employees now have the right to ask for part-time hours or home-working arrangements from the first day of a new job. Prof Nick Bloom, a British economist at Stanford University, California has observed that if workers are afforded any flexibility, their first action is to attempt to work from home on Fridays. Research published by Central London Forward last month found that while Thursdays are now the busiest day of the week in offices, most workplaces were only a third full on Fridays. Even this is evolving; more recent evidence suggests that workers are happy to head to the office on a Monday but prefer to spend Thursday and Friday at home if they have the choice.

Flexibility is just part of an ongoing arms race of enhanced personal terms: paid maternity and paternity leave, over and above the statutory minimum, is now a given in most companies. Many now offer paid dependant leave and paid fertility leave as well. Other perks – from egg-freezing options to on-site nurseries and free food – are being deployed to lure employees and keep them loyal. Those who measure these things call this “The Smoothie Delusion”, where despite what management would like to believe, enhanced perks and benefits seem to have no impact on our workplace happiness levels.

There are also growing reservations about the march towards greater flexibility starting to emerge in Silicon Valley, a community that has historically attempted to attract the most employable recruits in the world with the promise of joyous workplace cultures and bounteous perks. Silicon Valley has also focused on aggressive overachievement, striving for market-beating results in a fiercely competitive sector.

In the face of Snapchat’s disappointing performance, that has seen the social media company’s stock slump to less than a fifth of its value at the start of the year, Evan Spiegel, its chief executive, instructed his employees that he wanted them to resume spending 80 per cent of their working week in the office.

Elon Musk has insisted that employees of Tesla, Twitter and SpaceX spend the whole week at their office desks (despite himself spending most of his own time working remotely). Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, spoke for many doubters when he questioned whether spending less time together was making a new generation of workers less productive and fostering less of a “tribal” spirit.

Despite these reservations, plenty of business leaders are convinced that wrestling with changes in working practices is a way to attract the best workers and keep them motivated.

David Richards decided to take flexible working one step further and move WANdisco employees to a permanent four-day working arrangement – with no corresponding decrease in salary. His business is a Sheffield and Silicon Valley-based technology operation specialising in “moving large datasets to the cloud”. It was one of 70 firms in 2022 that took part in a global experiment of working compressed four-day weeks. For Richards, this was a natural evolution and involved shortening meetings through the four days and requiring any personal commitments to be scheduled on Fridays. He is evangelical about the results. “Our sales have gone up ten-fold,” he confirmed.

Of course, this is not the solution for everyone, and some firms that have experimented with adaptive working have reported difficulties. John Readman, the founder of Modo25, a Leeds-based digital agency, discovered that while the experiment with four-day working had been broadly successful, his firm had to remove the perk from some underperforming colleagues. “With the benefit [of flexible working] comes a huge amount of responsibility to take ownership of your own time and be really disciplined,” he said.

One marketing firm in Manchester, which had tried its best to make a shorter week work, found that customers’ needs made it impossible. Other companies in the trial realised that social interactions suffered due to the urgent pace of getting work done with increased intensity. One firm introduced a traffic light system on desks, where employees signalled with a red light that others were unable to talk to them while it was illuminated.

If our objective is to experiment with different ways of working to improve engagement, such reductions in personal interactions at work are significant. Data from Gallup’s Global Workforce Survey suggests that the biggest predictor of an employee being engaged with their job is whether they have a work friend. Those employees who report having no friends often find the experience of work to be isolating and anxious. Given that context, a further reduction in social interactions would be an unwelcome change. There is growing evidence that flexible working isn’t necessarily having a positive benefit here – only 17 per cent of us working a hybrid blend of home and office work report having a friend, which is a third of the level that Gallup typically sees for office-based workers. Flexible working might give us more time away from the office but the hours we spend doing our jobs could be less fulfilling for us.

Some suggest that engagement can only be improved if we confront the issue of many people believing the increasing amount of technology has only made work more bureaucratic. In April this year, Microsoft reported that they’d seen time in meetings increase to 250 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. One study set about seeing whether cutting back with this bureaucracy could increase levels of motivation and productivity. Seventy-six companies (each with 1,000 to 100,000 employees) were asked to introduce one day of the week with no pre-arranged meetings at all, often styled something like ‘Meeting-Free Thursday’. Workers were able to arrange catch-ups with other colleagues individually or to have lunch together, but no meetings could be collectively dropped in calendars. The researchers found that fewer meetings caused a big surge in feelings of autonomy, productivity and satisfaction. There were also major reductions in workplace stress. Allowing employees the trust and freedom to do their job appeared to have a liberating effect.

While there is no doubt that for some employees greater flexibility is life-changing, the idea that flexibility will always improve work is a mistake.

Romy worked at a media agency in central London and says: “I always loved working [at the agency] because I thought it had a special culture, but that culture disappeared after the pandemic. I realised it was just a job and I eventually found a better-paid one.” A strong cohesive culture has long been the secret weapon of the best organisations. Irrespective of their take on flexibility, the most engaged firms recognise that tight bonds of camaraderie transfer into greater individual motivation. How many of us would say that a shorter, lonelier week is an improved way to spend our working lives?

Perhaps the mistake of the past two years is that the office has been seen as the battleground. Sides were taken as to whether people needed to be in the physical workplace or liberated from their desks. Like most culture wars, neither side was much interested in what the other side believed or why. Great organisations have always thrived by fostering a sense of collective strength – getting work done is about productive interactions with other humans, or having mutual trust that means that disagreements are a constructive part of any work life. How that collective strength is achieved is the most important thing. With the disruption from Covid, it is possible that we’ve lost sight of the social component of our jobs, dazzled by the technologically-assisted innovations in our hands. More than ever before, success in our careers is going to be determined by humans understanding the unique aspects that we bring to our jobs, individually and collectively. The future of work is people-shaped.

Bruce Daisley is the author of ‘Fortitude – The Myth of Resilience, and the Secrets of Inner Strength’