The price we pay for high engagement at work

Let me make clear upfront that, on balance, I believe that engagement at work is a good thing, both for the individual and the organisation. But those two small words, “on balance”, are really critical. It would be a mistake to assume that engagement at work is always, and solely, a positive phenomenon.

Dozens of books, and probably thousands of academic papers, have been written on this topic. I’m unlikely to do it justice in a simple blog post — so look forward to experts correcting me or adding nuance. But as it has become fashionable to talk about the social contract, and how it is broken, I wanted to add an angle that I don’t see discussed as much as the facts might warrant.

What about the unspoken contract made by highly paid, highly educated professionals? Sure, they enjoy a lot of benefits as a result of their positions — material wealth, interesting work, lots of autonomy, and often a sense of purpose or meaning. As mentioned above, on balance, they rate their lives better than those in less-well-paying, less interesting jobs.

The unversality of this phenomenon is illustrated by a fascinating dataset of more than 25,000 survey responses from 37 countries (ranging from Austrlia to Venezuela) generated by the International Social Survey Programme Work Orientations Module and fascilitated by an international codification of different types of occupations by the International Labour Organization. [Sic! I had to check twice, but yes, they use British spelling of “labour” but US spelling of “organization”. I’m sure there’s an interesting story there.]

As the left-hand panel of the chart shows along the X-axis, people in more highly educated occupations, such as professionals and managers, tend to rate their job interesting much more often than those in more “blue collar” elementary occupations. Conversely, as seen on the X-axis of the right-hand panel, the more educated people are in an occupation, on average, the less likely they are to view a job just as a way of making some money.

In other words, as you might have expected, more complex jobs with more personal control and variability tend to be more engaging for humans. [You could also speculate that those who have invested more of their life into climbing the career ladder tend give their job more importance and define themselves more by what they do.] But is there a dark side to this level of engagement? It would appear so: stress.

On both panels of the graph, those more engaging and higher paid jobs appear also to be significantly more stressful. [Note: I’ll do the individual-level analysis when I have a moment, but this is consistent with what I’ve seen, for example, in the World Values Survey and the UK Understanding Society survey. Obviously, we can’t rule out omitted variable bias: that people more prone to stress are also people more likely to strive to achieve higher-level-positions — something important to check.]

So, are people in these jobs signing up to a lifestyle that is inconsistent with their long-term wellbeing?

Well, just like engagement is not always good or bad, neither is stress. It is fairly standard to assume that there is an “optimum” level of stress — one that maximises performance but can be recovered from, without long-term negative consequences. However, I believe it’s also fairly standard to assume that people themselves are really bad judges of when they might or might not have reached a tipping point that might lead to burn-out. Alternatively, someone might notice they are getting close to the danger zone, but might not be able to change their expectations and behaviours to avoid a crash.

Judging by the rise in the incidence of burn-out and job-related mental health issues, my hypothesis is that not everyone is making a fully-informed decision about the trade-off between positive and negative engagement at work*. And, perhaps more importantly, it would seem likely that — since all types of workers experience these issues — the causes of work-related ill-health differ significantly depending on the individual and their work situation. This, in turn, means that there are no cookie-cutter solutions.

[* I’m not intending to imply that every person necessarily has the option to choose — even though the “great attrition” would suggest that an increasing number are making different choices from the past.]