Workers Say They Are Overworked
A Microsoft study finds Bosses Need a Wake-Up Call.
Key Findings
- Leaders are out of touch with employees and need a wake-up call
- Sixty-one percent of leaders say they are “thriving” right now — 23 percentage points higher than those without decision-making authority.
- Gen Z, women, frontline workers, and those new to their careers reported struggling the most over the past year.
- Fifty-four percent feel overworked. Thirty-nine percent feel exhausted.
- Sixty percent of generation Z — those between the ages of 18 and 25 — say they are merely surviving or flat-out struggling right now
- Gen Z also reported difficulties feeling engaged or excited about work, getting a word in during meetings, and bringing new ideas to the table.
- 41 percent of the global workforce is likely to consider leaving their current employer within the next year, with 46 percent planning to make a major pivot or career transition.
The Work Trend Index survey was conducted by an independent research firm, Edelman Data x Intelligence, among 31,092 full-time employed or self-employed workers across 31 markets – between January 12, 2021 to January 25, 2021.
Mish
“Workers Say They Are Overworked”
Not the thousands of workers at Disneyland. They have been out of work for a year now, due to the government shutdown.
“Business Leaders Say They are Thriving.”
Government leaders are thriving as well. None of the governors, county supervisors, or city mayors have been laid off, unlike millions of workers due to government edicts.
From the linked article: “according to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index released Monday, which polled 30,000 people from a variety of companies in 31 countries and used trillions of data points around labor and productivity from Microsoft’s 365 software and LinkedIn network. The data found burnout is widespread — 54% of workers said they are overworked, 39% said exhausted. “
Good thing those emails and chats didn’t have to be tallied by hand, that would have taken forever.
Are the overall conclusions any different from previous years? Workers think that management is clueless; larger portion of business leaders report they are thriving versus rank-and-file workers — film at 11!!
It is surprising that working moms are deemed to be thriving at a somewhat greater rate than several other groups. Also, at least 1/3 of each group is thriving – doesn’t that seem elevated?
I’m taking spring break off and there isnt anything they can do about it.
I got fed up with my manager and wanted to find another job just as COVID hit. Now things have opened up, so I moved on. My co workers were shocked, but said they don’t blame. I’m the 5th or 6th person to leave the department (but not retire or be laid off) since my manager was hired.
And then there are these poor dweebs.
How Much Work Is Too Much Work?
Junior bankers at Goldman Sachs raise pointed questions about pay, hours and working conditions.
March 19, 2021
More robots/automation will serve to reduce workloads nicely.
41% = i’m coming for your crappy job and you’re coming for mine.
The chart looks to be a measure of self-perceived status. Bosses are on top and underlings clustered below with young single people at the bottom.
gun biz is doing very well: NRA bragged about blocking Boulder AR-15 ban a week before Boulder mass shooting
A Colorado judge blocked Boulder from enforcing its two-year-old assault rifle ban on March 12, ruling it violated a 2003 state law prohibiting municipalities from enacting their own firearms regulations. Boulder city spokeswoman Shannon Aulabaugh
Mentally ill person buys gun and goes shoots up a supermarket.
Is that allowed to happen in Putin-land?
Mass shooters are either crazy or they’re radicals. With a name like Ahmed Alissa , that lets out white supremacy as a hashtag I guess.
Too easy for nuts to buy guns. No doubt about that. But it’s social media influences that gives them their courage to act in most cases, no matter how crazy they are. I wonder what his social media accounts might tell us.
Was he in fact shooting an AR-15? Sounds like it from the descriptions…..but semi-auto rifle is all I can find…not watching any videos.
AR-15 was used in the shooting
How many years of kids playing out revenge fantasies with military weapons in video games does it take for guys with revenge on their mind to take the steps to acting out their best game moments in real life?
No need to look to computer games. Decades of watching people get shot and killed with graphic effects on TV and in movies have taken its toll too.
Doug78–you are probably too old to realize how few hours young men spend watching teevee and movies as opposed to the innumerable hours being immersed in shooter games.
They still watch enough films to see people getting blown apart in graphic detail if I believe the polls. I believe that many are like the Hikikomori in Japan and Korea; hyper loners who just can’t connect with others and don’t want to connect anyway. To kill is not easy and it doesn’t come naturally unless the perpetrator is desensitized beforehand.
You still don’t get it do you–there are way too many kids and young adults who are totally immersed in their gaming worlds, which largely consists of killing other people or creatures in very graphic ways with military style weapons.
Com’on Man. Hot diggity dog. Don’t be a dog-faced pony soldier on me. I get it. Gaming culture is toxic to a significate number of people that they lose touch with reality and who prefer the fake world to the real one. If we take the Japanese example we see that they can live in the gaming world because for the most part their parents take care of all their needs. They are deeply sick.
Also, with mental illness and unsociability, the time playing games goes up exponentially as it is a new reality that does not criticize or question.
I think violent games (which are pretty ubiquitous) do play a part in desensitizing kids to violence, as well as TV’s, movies, and even examples of other shooters. Lots of real shooters to study or obsess about.
His brother says (according to one article I saw) that he acted paranoid in high school. But then, what Islamic family wants to own that their kid got radicalized? Mentally ill means he was sick and didn’t get the right kind help. Bad as that might be, it’s better than “I wanted to take out some Christians and Jews so I shot up the food store.”
I tend to lean toward the crazy diagnosis, though, until it might be shown otherwise. Hard to know.
You and I are old enough to remember how tame TV and movies were when it came to violence. I think maybe he was a Hikikomori. He is a loner who just couldn’t relate to people and that’s all.
Of those who were pathological gamers at the start of the study, 84% of them still were pathological gamers 2 years later. This means that it isn’t just a phase children go through and get out of easily.
When looking for risk factors predicting who would become a pathological gamer, we found that children who were more impulsive, had lower social competence, and spent more than the average amount of timing predicted who became pathological (or “addicted” if you prefer).
When looking at outcomes, we were surprised to see that other psychiatric disorders such as depression, social phobias, and anxiety seemed to act as if they followed the gaming problems, rather than the other way around. That is, when children became pathological gamers, their depression, social phobias, anxiety, and grades got worse. When children stopped being pathological gamers, their depression, social phobias, and anxiety improved. Now we don’t know exactly what the causal processes are, but that probably isn’t the important issue. The important issue we can take away from this pattern is that gaming doesn’t seem to be simply a symptom of other problems, and therefore should not be ignored as if it is epiphenomenal. It is likely that pathological gaming is comorbid with other problems, where they can each reinforce each other in a downward spiral.
Result of third word migration and Biden’s America Last policies. I wonder how many more Americans will have to die to fulfill Democrat ideology?
This guy showed up well before Biden…. but do continue with your excuses.
Bob–I think your buddy GWB was more responsible…
…On a now-deleted Facebook page, Alissa described himself as “born in Syria 1999 came to the USA in 2002. I like wrestling and informational documentaries that’s me.” He also said he was “interested in “computer engineering/ computer science…. kickboxing.” Posts about mixed martial arts, especially jiu jitsu, dominated the page. Alissa sometimes posted about Islam, often about prayer or holidays….
What’s the trend? Maybe these results are actually lower than two years ago. Maybe two years ago the biggest complaint was commute times…
I wonder to what extent the business leaders and employees are involved with businesses not reliant on government support for operations.
My understanding is that the people below management feel that they are cut off from advancement without personal contact with the people with the power. Work is a more naked transaction now of effort for money without the interpersonal contacts that happened randomly during the day.
Intermittant rewards work best–remember!
Supervisory people feel secure because who’s going to complain about them? And to whom?
By the way, record bonuses 2020 in our steel fabrication business for all employees, top to bottom, 401k fully funded by the company on top, insurance fully paid with a $10/week employee charge.
It doesn’t have to be a hell-hole.
Not sure who these business leaders are…I wouldn’t use the word “thriving” to describe my practice . More like “coping” or “treading water”.
I do think self-employed people and execs tend to get some psychological juice from having more agency in their own situation than do people who work for wages. I wouldn’t say I’m NOT thriving, particularly…..but I don’t have the luxury of fantasizing about changing jobs. I know I will simply do the best I can, no matter how tough things might be.
Got back from the first apres-COVID vacation. It’s still a zoo out there, as far as I”m concerned. Glad to be back in my usual routine……travel still feels stressful to me.
I think it’s a big business/small business thing. Big businesses, particularly internet related ones, are thriving, and their employees are working hard. Small businesses are surviving, or trying to. My employees are getting about 2/3 of the hours they used to get, and if they are thinking of quitting, it would be to get more hours somewhere else, not because they are overworked. Personally, I haven’t drawn a paycheck since October. Thriving? Definitely not, but we are surviving, and business is picking up. Last week was our best week since last February, which admittedly is the slowest month in a normal year.
Yeah, it’s kinda ironic. I forgot that “business leaders” is synonymous with “corporate CEO”…and that small businessmen have no voice at all in the press.
The Wealth Gains That Made 2020 a Banner Year for the Richest 1%
By Alexandre Tanzi
March 22, 2021, 3:16 PM EDT
The rich got richer in the U.S. last year, as wealth created by rebounding stock and real-estate markets skewed toward high earners.
The richest 1% of households saw their net worth rise by some $4 trillion in 2020, meaning that they captured about 35% of the extra wealth generated nationwide, according to the latest quarterly study of household wealth from the Federal Reserve. The poorest half of the population, by contrast, got about 4% of overall gains.
…
Are you not following the Greensill scandal. Fascinating stuff. Took a boring business model selling receivables at a discount, reverse factoring , discovered Minsky and began lowering the credit quality and duration , duped the insurance companies till they found out and took it to the extreme and becoming a vehicle to basically lend ot one person, Sanjeev Gupta. It’s taking down David Cameron and is apparently so bad Credit Suisse is thinking of ending their secret sauce, mixing private banking and their lending arm. You seem to not be as interested in the financial scandals as the politics. You didn’t seem to interested in Wirecard. German regulators involved in both too.
Would be a worthy of a good write-up. This scandal sort of sneaked up.
this is just one story . the angles are many. You’d probably need dozen good articles to cover each leg of the story.
Incredible story that! Take bad assets, sprinkle Pixie Dust over them to get the AAA rating and them sell to qualified institutional buyers and sophisticated investors.
Don’t think this is receipt. This is outright fraud
Deceit
We’re having a hard time reconciling all of these stories about staff working from home being burnt out from putting in additional hours. In what we’ve observed, our staff are working the same number of hours, if not slightly less, when you consider a lot of the distractions at home. I’m talking about white-collar technical jobs in our case.
We’ve been very liberal about work from home, even pre-pandemic, but I think that the “struggle” people are facing is more psychological – blurred lines between home and work, and not being in the same routine as before.
Broadly speaking, I do not think this is because people are overworked.
I have a nephew who has worked from home for many years, but he tells me he doesn’t work at home, he lives at work… I think it’s better for folks to get away from home so they can share their lives with each other and have small talk. That seems harder to do online.
I’ve noticed among some friends that I hang out with their remote work schedule sometimes consists of maybe 4-6 work hours a day. I’m sure that there is the “but I get my work done” rationale, but I wonder if they were at the office 8 hours a day how it would compare. I’m retired, so I didn’t get involved in this work from home thing, and this is just an anecdotal observation, but still….
The typical corporate worker only “works” 4-6 hours daily anyway. The remaining time is often consumed with visiting others (“collaboration”), extended lunches, long bathroom breaks, etc. And that doesn’t even count the times the [still] smokers are away from their desks outside for 10 minutes every hour.
Also, I came across this interesting article today about a company that’s been doing remote only work for awhile, and how they warn against companies going back to a hybrid model of partial at home, partial in office schedules. I hadn’t really thought of it this way before, and wonder how applicable it would be in practice: