Workplace unhappiness is a widespread problem with many causes: overwork, constant connectivity, continual distraction, loneliness, and lack of a sense of buzz. Companies can solve these problems by enabling employees to energize themselves and come together as team members. To accomplish these objectives, employees and employers have many options available to them. These include taking breaks, implementing periods of disconnection, limiting work hours, hosting social events, and instituting hack days or hack weeks.
Actionable advice:
Generate more connection and buzz by focusing on small teams.
For large companies, one of the reasons that hack days and hack weeks can work so great is that they involve huge workforces splitting into small teams. In larger groups, we have a tendency to get lost in the crowd and feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of communication channels we have to deal with. In contrast, exchange is easier when you’re part of a small group of people who work closely together. Instead of obsessing with our overall company’s culture so much, we should be focusing on cultivating the culture of small teams instead. For many companies, that requires creating smaller teams – eight or nine people is a good rule of thumb.
---
Workplace unhappiness is a widespread problem that deeply affects our health, well-being, and productivity.
Feeling unhappy at your job? If so, welcome to the club!
In one survey after another, the majority of people report negative sentiments about their work. An overwhelming 83 percent of American employees say their jobs make them stressed. More than half of all British workers report feeling burned out by their jobs. And when workers across the world are asked to rank their daily activities from favorite to least favorite, being at work ends up in second-to-last place – just a notch ahead of being sick in bed.
The picture is pretty bleak, and it gets even bleaker when you start looking at the consequences of all this unhappiness.
A stressful job doesn’t just make your life unpleasant. It can also take a heavy toll on both your body and your mind. Consider a study by Alexandra Michel, a researcher at the University of Southern California. She looked at how working long, stressful hours impacted investment bankers, who routinely put in 15-hour days at the beginning of their careers.
Michel found that the bankers exhibited a range of physical symptoms, including hair loss, extreme weight changes, panic attacks, and insomnia. By the fourth year on the job, they were suffering from an increased rate of diabetes, heart problems, and even cancer. The mental health consequences were also serious. They included higher rates of depression, anxiety, and addiction to drugs and alcohol.
These are all problems that should trouble us in their own right. But even if you were a totally heartless boss who cared only about your business’s bottom line, there would still be serious cause for concern – it’s not just workers’ health and well-being that are being negatively impacted, it’s also their ability to do their jobs.
Here again, the statistics speak for themselves. A study by researchers at Warwick University shows that happy workers are 22 percent more productive than their unhappy counterparts. And the symptoms of stress can also have a major impact on work performance. For instance, a lack of sleep can increase the rate at which workers make mistakes on the job.
Researchers have confirmed this connection in a variety of job sectors, ranging from the healthcare industry to the military. But you probably don’t need science to tell you what all of us have experienced first-hand: it’s hard to think straight when you’re exhausted.
---
Stress is generally bad for our creativity.
Sure, stress can have negative impacts on our health and well-being – but can’t it also be a good thing? After all, many people say they “work better under pressure.”
Hit a wall with a project? Nothing like a looming deadline to get your creative juices flowing – or so it seems to many of us. But that’s only true up to a certain point.
This might seem counterintuitive, but there’s a reason for that. In addition to interfering with our creativity, stress can also undermine our ability to make accurate assessments of our own achievements. As a result, the work we do under pressure can feel a lot more creative than it actually is.
That was the conclusion of a study conducted by Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School. In this study, office workers were given a diary to fill out while they did their jobs. The greater the time pressure they were under, the higher they tended to rate the creativity of their work. But when Amabile took a look at their diaries for signs of creative thinking, she found the opposite to be the case: the greater the time pressure, the lower the creativity.
Some basic neuroscience can help to explain why this happens. To be creative, we need to be willing to explore new ideas and take risks. Now, when we’re under pressure, the stress boosts our adrenaline, which can give our brains a little kickstart. But it also activates our brain’s fear system. This, in turn, deactivates the parts of the brain involved in exploration and risk-taking.
That’s one reason why musical artists often experience a “sophomore slump.” Consider The Strokes. In 2001, the New York City rock band released their critically acclaimed debut album, Is This It. But then the pressure to deliver a worthy follow-up album went to their heads.
After scraping whole recording sessions and restarting the project multiple times, the band finally released their sophomore album, Room on Fire, in 2003 – only to be met with mixed reviews. Many critics panned it, calling it a less inspired copy of The Stroke’s first album. In their view, the band had mostly just gone back to their same old bag of tricks, resulting in music that lacked a sense of freshness.
The lesson? Pressure encourages people to play it safe – to cling to old ways of doing things, rather than trying out new ones. In an economy where innovation is increasingly the key to success, that should be a concern for rock bands and corporations alike.
---
Many of us are exhausted by overwork, constant connectivity, and continual distractions.
Do you feel restless about your job? Does it seem like there’s always more work to be done? Do you feel guilty or anxious if you don’t keep busy?
If so, you might be suffering from a condition called hurry sickness – and you’re definitely not alone. It’s a condition that afflicts many of us. That’s because it’s tied up with some larger problems that are endemic to the modern workplace.
There are many ways we can end up getting overworked by our jobs. Long workdays and workweeks are the most obvious examples, but the problem isn’t just how many hours we spend at work. It’s also how we spend our time inside and outside those hours.
Inside our working hours, many of us feel unable to take any breaks, and we feel a relentless pressure to keep busy. Especially if we work in offices, we feel tied down to our desks, needing to constantly “stay on task” – whatever that task might be.
It’s hard to pinpoint and talk about it in the singular, because the task at hand is always shifting from one thing to another. Maybe you’re trying to focus on a project, but then you get an email that grabs your attention. Or you’re interrupted by a colleague who comes over to ask a question. Or you’re called away by your boss for yet another meeting.
Thanks to the rise of digital communication technologies, we’re constantly connected to our colleagues – and continually distracted by them as a result. If it’s not one of the 200 emails the average office worker sends and receives per day, it’s one of the myriad texts, chat messages, or phone calls that demand our attention. Meanwhile, thanks to the popularity of open-plan offices, we’re constantly vulnerable to our colleagues interrupting and distracting us in person as well. Add to that the obsession that many companies have with conducting meetings all the time, and it’s a wonder any of us can get any work done.
Or to put it another way: it’s hardly surprising that we feel like there’s always more work to do. The interruptions and distractions keep pulling us away from our work, and the messages never stop rolling into our phones and computers – even when we’re at home, where we continue to monitor them.
As a result, 60 percent of professionals stay connected to work for 13.5 hours per weekday and 5 hours over the weekend, for a total of 70 hours of connectivity per week. No wonder we’re exhausted.