Stress is causing more than a third of employees to feel dissatisfied about their work, according to a new survey by Workwear Express.
In a survey of over 1,020 UK employees nearly 40% said that they feel unhappy in their jobs. Over 65% said that they were not happy to some degree, whilst just 14% confirmed that they intend to stay in their current position for the next year.
Just under a quarter of respondents (22%) said that they had never felt dissatisfied in their current job; less than the number who admitted to faking a sick day to avoid having to go in (25%).
So what is causing such a significant amount of employees to be so unhappy with their work? Workwear Express looked into this and found two dominant answers, unsurprisingly both related to stress.
60% of the workforce agreed that it was either poor management (31%) or a heavy workload (29%) that caused their dissatisfaction. However 28% of those in a management role said that they were also unhappy in their roles, with the same amount again explicitly stating that they felt stressed all of the time at work.
Work-Related Stress
Stress is the key factor in the results of this report. Both an employee who feels that they are not managed properly and an employee with too heavy a workload are likely to feel like they are under undue pressure to perform.
Given how widely stress affects employees (a recent survey found that more than half of the UK workforce turn to drink to cope with the pressures of their work), it’s a subject that you will more than likely need to address at some point within your own business.
Whilst UK companies acknowledge the importance of reducing employee stress, they could be doing much more to make this happen.
Only a third of companies in the UK use corporate work-life balance programmes; this is despite a recent study finding such programmes to be the most effective way of reducing levels of employee stress.
