Niagara Falls Review e-edition

Work challenges can lead to work overload

SCOTT SCHIEMAN CONTRIBUTOR SCOTT SCHIEMAN IS A PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY AND CANADA RESEARCH CHAIR AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the “big quit.” The claim is that workers are leaving their jobs in droves.

Job dissatisfaction is a strong predictor of quits. So, if the big quit hypothesis is true in Canada, we should have seen an increase in workers’ overall dissatisfaction from pre-pandemic levels. Have Canadians become more unhappy with their jobs? To find out, I collaborated with Angus Reid Global to launch a series of nationally representative surveys of workers as part of the Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Study (C-QWELS).

In September 2019, before the pandemic, I asked 2,500 workers: On a scale that ranges from “not at all satisfied” to “extremely satisfied,” how satisfied are you with your job? A majority (61 per cent) reported high satisfaction and only a minority (15 per cent) voiced low satisfaction.

Then, in September 2020, I posed the same question to a new sample of 4,000 workers. Little changed: 62 per cent reported high satisfaction and only 11 per cent reported low satisfaction.

This is hardly a dissatisfaction tsunami … but maybe that changed by 2021?

Not really. In September 2021, 59 per cent reported high satisfaction and 13 per cent reported low satisfaction. Collectively, my surveys demonstrate that Canadians’ job satisfaction didn’t nosedive. This is surprising given the hype about the big quit. (Then again, much of that is driven by trends south of the border.)

Then I wondered, even if overall levels of satisfaction didn’t decline, is it possible that the good things about work that typically enhance satisfaction lost a bit of their shine during the pandemic?

To identify those good things, I asked workers what boosts their satisfaction most.

Among the many job qualities mentioned, one stood out: challenge. Jobs with challenge require us to learn new things, provide a variety of tasks and allow us to develop our skills and abilities.

Workers who identified challenge as the main reason for their high job satisfaction expressed comments like: “I use all of my skills and learn something new every day,” “there’s stimulating problem solving,” “my skill set allows me to be creative and keeps me in an environment where I must constantly learn,” and “there’s always variety — no two days are ever alike.”

By contrast, those who blamed the lack of challenge for their low satisfaction aired complaints like: “A monkey could do my job — it isn’t challenging,” “I used to do work with people that actually helped them and I was able to be creative but now I mainly move paper around,” and “I am no longer doing the complicated and interesting tasks I was hired to do … I’m doing primarily mundane administrative tasks.”

The data supported my hunch that the link between job challenge and job satisfaction weakened (by about 15 per cent), especially as the pandemic dragged on into September 2021. This is surprising because challenge is typically among the strongest — and most stable — predictors of satisfaction. It is unusual to detect fluctuations of this size in such a short period.

What might have caused this? Digging deeper into the data, I discovered that workers in challenging jobs experienced a significant increase in overload during the pandemic. Overload happens when you feel overwhelmed by the amount of work, or when the job demands exceed the time that you have to do the work.

Those who attributed their dissatisfaction to overload articulated grievances like: “I’m asked to do more with less — a continual burnout cycle,” “there are additional tasks outside the job description being added onto my plate constantly,” “my job is very demanding with unreasonable expectations and a heck of a lot more work added on,” and “the work mainly involves putting out fires … this type of work can be fun when it isn’t panicked all the time.”

Complicating things, a vicious cycle can emerge. Employee turnover often generates more overload for those employees who remain, which in turn undermines their own satisfaction. “Job responsibilities keep changing to meet demands caused by people leaving the company,” vented one frustrated worker.

Pandemic or no pandemic, job satisfaction matters. Employers care about their workers’ satisfaction because of its effects on morale, turnover intentions and actual quits.

When “I feel challenged” increasingly mixes with “I feel overwhelmed,” it is time to take a serious look at what’s going on. One employee in this predicament described the toll: “fatigue and heavy mental load.” Another put it even more succinctly: “It’s exhausting!”

For satisfaction’s sake, we need to keep this short-term trend from becoming the new normal.

BUSINESS

en-ca

2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-11-27T08:00:00.0000000Z

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