There is a lot of talk about how difficult it is for businesses to find and keep workers. Whether you call it “The Great Resignation” or another term, something is clearly happening. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is, “What’s driving this?”.
There is no lack of speculation on this question. Some believe people are lazy. Others believe that workers have hated their jobs for a while and used the shuttered economy as a chance to move to new opportunities.
In this article, we’ll look at what the data says about whether people hate their jobs, what work arrangements are best, and what businesses can do to ensure they have right-sized labor capacity.
The Pew Research Center conducted a very interesting survey in February 2022. The top categories of reasons given for quitting a job were:
In summary, it seems that the search for better flexibility and more money were the two largest contributors to the Great Resignation. Which brings up other questions:
If people hate their job, we have a problem, and it’s unlikely to disappear quickly. So, how many people hate their job? Well, how you ask the question and how you conduct the survey will give you different results. Objectively, the data tells us that “hate” isn’t a very good description of how most people relate to their job.
As always, you have to be careful about the details. An article by Zippia claims that 65% of U.S. workers are “happy with their jobs,” but when you look at the source data from Gallup, you find that this is actually the percentage of workers who say they’re “completely satisfied with the physical safety conditions” of their workplace, which is something quite different.
The wording of a question is definitely important: when looking at job satisfaction by age group, only 31% of those in the 18-29 age group say they are “satisfied with their job,” a number that climbs to 42% for those aged 30-49 and peaks at 49% in the 50-64 group.
Similar to this correlation between age and satisfaction (the lower one is, the lower the other), there is a pay-satisfaction correlation: the lower pay they receive, the less satisfied a person is.
But as far as measuring how much people hate their job, Gallup’s engagement survey provides the best insights. This respected organization has been studying work topics for many years and finds in its latest survey that 36% of workers are engaged with their work, 51% are neutral, and 13% are “actively disengaged,” which is the closest description you’ll find for “hate my job.”
These results are similar to those found by the General Social Survey, which has been asking workers since 2002 about their satisfaction at work and found in 2021 that 16.4% are “a little dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied.” The percentage of workers who are engaged at work has been steadily climbing from 26% in 2005 to 36% in 2020.
Still, having between 1-in-8 and 1-in-6 workers dissatisfied is not a good thing, and those numbers might be underestimated. Dissatisfaction results from a continuing gap between one’s aspirations and reality. It’s possible that the relatively low reported dissatisfaction numbers reflect a coping mechanism by employees that takes the form of lowering one’s expectations or choosing excessively positive answers so as to reduce cognitive dissonance, which would make those numbers just a lower bound.
In any event, businesses can’t afford to ignore the situation and be content with the relatively high satisfaction numbers. They’re high, but still far from 100%.
As Douglas McGregor recognized, the fact that humans are “perpetually wanting” beings is a good thing, because those wants are a condition for motivation.
A prerequisite to motivation is believing that we have power over our actions and surroundings (this is called “having an internal locus of control”). Some psychologists have even described the need for control as a biological imperative. One way to prove to ourselves we have control is by making decisions.
In other words, locus of control is a learned skill. Charles Duhigg, in a book I highly recommend (Smarter, Faster, Better), explains that part of what a Marines boot camp is designed to do, is to reinforce internal locus of control, which Marines call teaching a bias toward action. Another thing Marines learn at boot camp is to ask themselves and others “why am I doing this?” when things get tough. That’s because motivation is easier when the task has a personal meaning or purpose.
According to Duhigg, this might explain why, although a Marine’s starting salary is only $17,616 a year, the Corps has one the highest career satisfaction rates. You can see the same mechanisms at play in nursing homes: residents who take control of their surroundings live longer and healthier lives.
In summary, motivation increases when the choices we make show us in control, and endow our actions with larger meaning. This brings us to how on-demand labor changes things.
For workers who are most likely to suffer from dissatisfaction at work and for the industry sector that needs as many workers as it can get, on-demand labor platforms offer a solution. We know from talking to Veryable Operators that one of the things they value is being in control. Making decisions about what Ops to bid on gives them the internal locus of control that too often is missing on the shop floor.
Another aspect in this discussion comes from Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory. It basically says that factors involved in producing job satisfaction (and motivation) are separate and distinct from those that lead to job dissatisfaction.
Among the factors producing job satisfaction we find in order of decreasing power: achievement, recognition for achievement, work itself, responsibility and growth or advancement.
Among the factors producing job dissatisfaction we find: company policy & administration, relationship with supervisor, work conditions, salary, relationship with peers, status and security.
The theory was first drawn from a study of 203 engineers and accountants, but at least 16 other investigations on a wider range of populations have replicated the original. In total, a sample of 1,685 employees from all walks of life were asked what job events had occurred in their work that had led to extreme satisfaction or extreme dissatisfaction on their part.
Two different types of needs are involved here. One set of needs stem from humankind’s animal nature: pain avoidance and all the learned drives that become conditioned to basic physiological needs. The other set of needs relate to the ability to achieve, and through that, to experience psychological growth.
As an example of pain avoidance, money in our societies is the means to obtain food and shelter, hence pay is a “hygiene factor” which leads to demotivation when it’s too low, but doesn’t mechanically create motivation when it exceeds a certain level.
The stimuli for growth needs are things like job content, whereas for pain-avoidance, they are found in the job environment.
The problem is that everybody is different and has different wants. In the traditional organizational design, it is up to HR departments to design the mechanisms by which people are motivated, as can be seen with “Total Rewards” systems. But this is a fallacy; in practice, it is up to managers to understand the true needs of their team members and define ways to increase and maintain their motivation levels. That’s a problem for two reasons:
A comprehensive analysis of almost 150 research studies shows that empowerment is the best intrinsic motivator. The feeling of empowerment comes from judgments people make about four aspects of their work:
This dimension is the most powerful source of job performance and satisfaction. Leaders can do three things to strengthen it:
As you can see, empowering takes time!
Is there an alternative? Yes! Those who know best what workers want and what motivates them are the workers themselves, not the managers. Workers are also the best people to act on this. Furthermore, taking action will provide them with a sense of agency and control, which increases motivation and satisfaction. What is needed, then, is to place people in conditions where they can make decisions based on highly visible and clear information.
When businesses organize in the way Veryable has been advocating, this can be greatly facilitated. We advocate for companies to determine their “stable workload.” This is the workload that is free from typical variation. If you’re familiar with control charts, that’s the lower control limit on a graph of your customer demand.
We strongly believe that businesses will maximize their performance when they set their full-time employee levels to meet this quantity of workload, and build and manage a pool of on-demand labor to meet the variation of demand beyond this level.
When a business chooses this form of production system, they can provide workers with self-selection opportunities: some people will find the job security and predictability of being a full-time employee more rewarding, while others will find satisfaction in being in control and exploring a variety of companies, industries and jobs.
When a business has a solid base of full-time employees and an equally solid variable labor base (we call it “Your Labor Pool” or YLP, to indicate that this is a group of on-demand workers you’ve vetted and built up), it can start to structure its organization accordingly.
This starts by messaging consistently and credibly to its full-time employees that:
The role of managers in this system is to identify and prioritize challenges so that continuous improvement not only drives the company toward its future needs but does so in a way that provides growth to all workers.
Workers who value an internal locus (i.e., who have a strong need to have control over various aspects of their life) and need more variety and renewal than others will naturally gravitate to on-demand labor. The very nature of this type of work meets their needs better, but businesses working with them should follow some guidelines to increase their attractiveness to these workers:
In conclusion, the belief that most people hate their job is lacking objective support. Sure, anybody will have bad days, but you’re hating what happened to you that day, not your job per se. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves: a majority of workers do not find their job engaging, much less love it.
The ability to have a job that engages you depends on a simple question: are your needs met? Because every person has a different set of needs and a different weighting on the common needs we all share, the best way to find a good fit is to maximize their exposure to different environments and thus the probability of finding the right one.
You can improve this probability by communicating loud and clear about who you are, what work is like at your company, what rewards people can expect and what is expected of them in return. At Veryable, we believe we are changing the conditions under which both workers and businesses struggle, and that flexibility offers the best solution.
We could even imagine a time when the normal way to hire employees and to find an employer is to get to “know each other” through ops! You can start a new labor model today by creating a free business profile on Veryable's on-demand labor platform.
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