Over 40% desk job workers feel tired at work: Survey

More than 40% of people with desk jobs feel tired at work, a pandemic-era high, according to a survey released Wednesday by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by Salesforce Inc’s Slack Technologies.

The pain is particularly acute outside the US, where burnout rates are rising high enough to offset the modest improvements seen by American workers.

Researchers at Future Forum said economic uncertainty, fear of job cuts and increasing pressure to return to office work have increased workplace malaise. Women and younger workers in particular reported battling burnout.

Regional pressure is also letting people down. In the UK, strikes have paralyzed the country as public sector unions oppose modest wage increases. Japan’s government has asked firms there to help workers cope with the highest inflation since 1981. French citizens have taken to the streets to protest the government’s plan to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, which could result in some concessions on working from home. a government spokesman said earlier this week.

In the US, layoffs are increasing and return-to-office policies are shifting from recommended to required. However, workers there seem to be a little happier than their international counterparts. Only 41% of those surveyed in the US said they felt tired at the end of last year, slightly below the global rate of 42% and a modest improvement from earlier in 2022.

The Future Forum survey – conducted quarterly in the US, UK, Japan, Australia, Germany and France – has found that pandemic-era workers have more freedom to choose where and when they work, generally More satisfied, productive and less likely to quit. In the latest survey conducted late last year, more than half of people who said they were dissatisfied with their level of flexibility also said they were tired. Employees with fixed work schedules are more than twice as likely to say they will “definitely” look for a new job in the next year.

Brian Elliott, the Slack executive who oversees the Future Forum’s research, said, “All the benefits of flexibility are about how you give people the time to focus, rather than how many days of the week they sweat it out. ” “Flexibility also improves company culture, and every time I tell this to executives, it blows them away.”

It’s not just mandatory FaceTime that’s stressing out employees. Companies have thrown so much technology at employees that they can become overwhelmed. Okta Inc., a cloud software company that tracks app usage. Large employers now use an average of 211 different apps, compared to 195 last year, according to a separate survey.

A recent study in Harvard Business Review of 20 teams from three large employers found that workers toggle between different apps and websites 1,200 times each day, causing a “toggling tax,” which leads to workers Time, productivity and peace of mind can be spent.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)