American workers are 'unhappier at work' than they have been in years | Hacker News Reader

American workers are 'unhappier at work' than they have been in years

foxnews.com

23 pointsrustoo31 comments

Hello yes it is I Mr. Big Business CEO and could someone call up Fox and tell them to run an article that says "more money doesn't make employees happy, returning to office does", thanks.

And yet, other studies show that inflation is the cause, and WFH has lead to a huge uptick in happiness: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/05/05/remote...

It turns out that if you're a remote first org, you still need in person meetings every so often. I think a good number is to have everyone together for three days at the beginning or end of each month, but ymmv.

I think a good number is to have everyone together for three days at the beginning or end of each month, but ymmv.

Any number of days together over zero severely restricts the geographical region you can hire from. Surely, that limited hiring pool is going to affect your company more than 1-3 days together in the office will.

> Any number of days together over zero severely restricts the geographical region you can hire from. Surely, that limited hiring pool is going to affect your company more than 1-3 days together in the office will.

That's fine.

Meeting in person with the people you work with on a regular basis adds a lot. The idea that you can have people individually scattered all over is already being proven to have rough edges. Even pre-pandemic remote-first companies often had full week quarterly meetings, or even more often.

I think all teams are different, all workloads are different. This is a major seismic shift. The only sure thing is that offices are dead.

I would be pretty mad if I got a "remote first" job and they expected me to fly in twelve times a year.

I'd be less mad if they were up-front about that. In my current gig, I need to travel in 4-5 times a year, but they were clear about that at the very beginning. I don't think it's _necessary_, but it keeps them happy.

If this was known prior to you taking the job, I can hardly see anything to be mad about...I think this is what compromise might look like for some organizations. What you are looking for is "remote only" not "remote first".

Obviously, it'd be up front. And also, it'd be expected that you were in the same geographic region as the rest of your team. Hell, even the same time zone.

Springing that on unsuspecting people is slimy, anyways.

The vast majority of jobs can't be done from home as they require physical presence. WFH is an issue only for the top 10% of income earners in white collar jobs.

Perfect, let’s make white collar jobs miserable as well then shall we? Not saying that that’s what you are implying but that sure is the logic among some folks out there: “you have it too good”, “when i was your age i used to walk through 10 meters deep snow”, “i single handedly defeated the vietcong” and therefore so should you.

My office room has double layer soundproofing, a massive oled tv, 5 monitors one oled, a nice laptop arm, a playstation that gathers dust, wallpapers of my favourite childhood movies, and a huge office chair that feels more comfortable than any chair i ever had in any company.

If cows give more milk when happy and listening to music then so can humans gave their brains milked better when happy.

"Oh but why can't we think of the rich?" is what your response sounds like. The point of my comment is that whenever a topic like this comes up, the response here on hacker news is always WFH even though it only addresses a small fraction of the people affected. Responses like that reek of privilege. (To say nothing about the fact that the WFH crowd is even over represented here among the white collar jobs).

WFH will not solve this crises and it distracts from the point. Ultimately, people are stressed because of wealth inequality. A lack of wealth makes people hopeless and small things like WFH are bandaids when you are faced with never being able to have financial security in your life.

100% of the ~20 people I personally know who were happily doing their entire job just fine from home in 2020 and 2021 were in the 40-90 income percentile range. The ones who’ve totally lost that benefit are mostly on the lower end of that.

I know 4 people working in a call center (for professional companies: two synchronization and deployment plateform, and a customer platform for gold/black card owners, so it isn't really something you can easily move to another cheaper country), they had to come back onsite in the spring, one burned out and left in september, and an other took two month off (it's kinda nice because she's my dungeon master, so we play a lot more now).

And from what i've heard, the reason she had to take a break was because too many senior people walked away recently and she took too much responsability, too fast, and couldn't bear working after working hours for almost the minimum, not from the site.

So definitely not 10% income earner. I think my brother made more when he was a sound technician.

There is truly no magic in holding a meeting in person instead of on teleconference.

But HN told me zoom fatigue makes everyone unhappy just yesterday.

I think the most important thing about remote, local, and hybrid work is "it depends".

To other people's point, this is only an issue for a small percentage of population - many jobs are inherently physical.

Of the ones where remote vs hybrid vs local is in the running, it hugely depends. Does everybody actually live in a single area? Or are you multi-site to begin with? What are your teams structured as, what are you trying to accomplish, what are your processes and procedures like?

As horrible as COVID was from public health perspective, it was a boon for my particular operations project. We have a population of about 200++, two basic sites about 2500km away, and a scattering of people around the country. Hybrid model was... awful in retrospective:

For years, people not at the main site were effectively second class citizens. A lot of decisions would be made by "whoever happened to be around the cubicles", and chains of review, approval, and implementation were never followed. Left hand did not know what the right was doing. Speakerphones never ever worked in big conference rooms, and my biggest peeve was the sentence "You guys on the phone won't see this, but we are drawing the new architecture on the board here", with the runner up of "Sorry you can't hear Vince today, he's far away from the microphone, but he just outlined the strategy and basic requirements for the next phase for us" etc.

When we were forced to do fully remote... oh, bliss! We had to communicate with intent and consciously choose who needs to know what how and when. We become a smooth running machine. Our efficiency increased hugely, our results improved, and our people were happier!

We are slowly turning back into hybrid mode, unfortunately, and literally 15 minutes ago I was privy to "Sorry you 30 people on the phone can't hear Chris, but he just outlined our main focus for the next quarter" and I gotta say I did not miss it!

This article says it's inflation.

After some 5 paragraphs strongly implying but never claiming that it's due to WFH. And before other 4 paragraphs strongly implying but never claiming that it's due to WFH. But it does clearly say "well, we do know it's because of inflation, but..." in half a line on its only strong claim.

> BambooHR study found similarly that data from "more than 57,000 workers shows job-satisfaction scores have fallen to their lowest point since early 2020, after a 10% drop this year alone."

If you look at the data, tracking only starts in 2020, and people were happiest in April 2020. (when work from home was solid) Also, this eNPS number doesn't change that much anyway.

https://www.bamboohr.com/resources/guides/employee-happiness...

The actual polling report: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-...

I'd download and post the pdf, but their form inputs appear broken in firefox. :|

What a puff piece for ownership 8-/

It is amazing, that the decline in job satisfaction they describe is between 2020 and now.

In 2020 almost all s/w jobs were remote, now it's almost impossible to find fully remote work, and yet somehow remote work is why people are dissatisfied?

I would say the LACK of remote work is a significant cause of this dissatisfaction...

Fox News propaganda.

The great thing about data is - if you run enough studies and cherry pick the data - you can prove almost anything.

I would like a convenient word for articles like this that maybe cite a survey or two and interview random individuals. They are somewhat useless and could be written to make any argument. You can find one or two people who hold any opinion.

The article also seems like it’s partially anti-remote work propaganda as well.

Personally, work was never where I found joy anyway. Keep my paychecks coming in.

I think blogspam is what you’re looking for. Content which is primarily intended to generate clicks rather than be read in any capacity.

Not quite, because reputable journalistic entities do it in non-web formats.

NPR as much as I like it is a classic offender here. A lot of their segments revolve around individual experiences, which in a lot of ways is a good thing.

On the other hand, those personal experiences are just that: personal. Sometimes it seems like they're interviewing someone with an experience that is extremely unique and unlikely to happen to anyone else.

Another scenario I see played out a lot is that they're interviewing someone who is struggling with a social issue that seems pretty obviously resolvable to most listeners. But it's like, that doesn't really matter, because there's no compelling story to tell without that struggle.

Meaningless jobs, bullshit work, and unaffordable housing. Of course people are unhappy when they don’t see what the point of it all is.

Uncle Ted. That's all I'm going to say.

On top of that, there’s little bigger-than-you ideas floating around. It feels very brave-new-worldish. Even in mainstream stuff like climate warming stuff. Most people just party and pay lip service. Few people do destructive stuff that makes little sense. And very few people actually do anything worthwhile. And looks like there’s little in the movement itself guiding people towards productive paths.

The way we have been ranking/sorting people to give them "better" jobs with more responsibility and better pay is completely broken, open to cheating/abuse/gaming. The result is that we promoted a large cohort of people with little to no merit. Now since it was all fake in the first place they cannot contribute meaningfully and the ones who could have are laughing their ass doing things for themselves instead of a meritless system. This is just like before most revolutions where somehow a group of people found a way to enslave the others to extract most of the value they produce while doing nothing of value themselves and even worse have behaviors/ideas/domination fetish that makes everything works less efficiently than it should...

Are we really 'at' work if we are remote? Maybe it should be unhappier at home.

Original article: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/workers-morale-pay-ben...

Paywall removed: https://archive.is/SakUq

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