It’s not just a human tragedy that only a minority of employees feel they are in ‘good’ jobs. Little excitement and too much stress damage business performance, says Steve Crabb
More evidence emerged this month about the depressingly poor standard of job design and people management in this country: in a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, only 39% of employees rated their jobs as “good”.
The research was based on information collected by the New Economics Foundation, which asks people to categorise their jobs according to how exciting and how stressful they find them. “Good” jobs are exciting but not excessively stressful. The result is a pool of data that employers can use to benchmark the state of employment relations in their own organisation - or to use a technical phrase, the health of their “psychological contract”.
According to Nic Marks, head of wellbeing research at NEF: “Interest and excitement are key elements in the psychological contract between employers and employees. If employees don’t feel their role is exciting, this will be reflected in their, underperformance, and lack of commitment and satisfaction.
“Employers should look to create a balance between the challenges of the job and the individual’s abilities if employees are to flourish in their roles. This will ultimately help to create good jobs, and good jobs not only benefit employees and the organisation, but ultimately society as a whole. ”
A healthy psychological contract should translate into higher productivity, high-performance working and lower staff turnover, all of which impact on the bottom line.
You can see this from the way excitement and stress are generated. Employees find work exciting if their jobs are varied, they are clear about their roles and they have a reasonable amount of security. Stress is caused by a lack of support from supervisors, poor relationships with colleagues, concerns about status and a dim sense of identifying with the organisation as a whole - in other words, a combination of job design and the quality of front-line management.
On that basis, you’d hope for more than 39% of workers saying their jobs are “good”.
It gets worse. Another recent CIPD report - Employee Well-being and the Psychological Contract, found that:
n 42% of employees say they have little control at work
n 21% say their jobs are either very or extremely stressful
n 26% say they receive little or no support from their supervisor
n 37% say that their workload is too heavy
n 20% do not believe the demands of the job are realistic
n Only 38% of employees are willing to place a lot of trust in senior management to look after their interests.
Nor is this a problem confined to less senior operatives - graduates actually report lower levels of satisfaction and commitment, despite the fact that they often hold senior positions.
Yet, it isn’t all bad. Although only 39% of employees claim that they have the high excitement/low stress jobs that qualify as good, only 12% are in jobs that are actually awful by NEF’s standards - ie low excitement/high stress. The rest are somewhere in the middle - 57% of us say our jobs are exciting and 70% say we aren’t under undue stress. The problem is, the two don’t tend to occur in combination often enough. Until we start to get these basic principles right, we are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs when it comes to closing the productivity gap with our competitors.
n Steve Crabb is editor of People Management
More evidence emerged this month about the depressingly poor standard of job design and people management in this country: in a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, only 39% of employees rated their jobs as “good”.
The research was based on information collected by the New Economics Foundation, which asks people to categorise their jobs according to how exciting and how stressful they find them. “Good” jobs are exciting but not excessively stressful. The result is a pool of data that employers can use to benchmark the state of employment relations in their own organisation - or to use a technical phrase, the health of their “psychological contract”.
According to Nic Marks, head of wellbeing research at NEF: “Interest and excitement are key elements in the psychological contract between employers and employees. If employees don’t feel their role is exciting, this will be reflected in their, underperformance, and lack of commitment and satisfaction.
“Employers should look to create a balance between the challenges of the job and the individual’s abilities if employees are to flourish in their roles. This will ultimately help to create good jobs, and good jobs not only benefit employees and the organisation, but ultimately society as a whole. ”
A healthy psychological contract should translate into higher productivity, high-performance working and lower staff turnover, all of which impact on the bottom line.
You can see this from the way excitement and stress are generated. Employees find work exciting if their jobs are varied, they are clear about their roles and they have a reasonable amount of security. Stress is caused by a lack of support from supervisors, poor relationships with colleagues, concerns about status and a dim sense of identifying with the organisation as a whole - in other words, a combination of job design and the quality of front-line management.
On that basis, you’d hope for more than 39% of workers saying their jobs are “good”.
It gets worse. Another recent CIPD report - Employee Well-being and the Psychological Contract, found that:
Nor is this a problem confined to less senior operatives - graduates actually report lower levels of satisfaction and commitment, despite the fact that they often hold senior positions.
Yet, it isn’t all bad. Although only 39% of employees claim that they have the high excitement/low stress jobs that qualify as good, only 12% are in jobs that are actually awful by NEF’s standards - ie low excitement/high stress. The rest are somewhere in the middle - 57% of us say our jobs are exciting and 70% say we aren’t under undue stress. The problem is, the two don’t tend to occur in combination often enough. Until we start to get these basic principles right, we are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs when it comes to closing the productivity gap with our competitors.
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