It may be silly season, but the numbers on this survey are pretty alarming nonetheless: according to hospitality recruitment website Caterer.com, 66 per cent of 4,300 people it surveyed detest their current job and 43 per cent actively dread going to work every day.
The hospitality sector’s employees came out as unexpected cheerleaders for their sector — just over 49 per cent feel enthusiastic about going to work and are dedicated to their jobs. Only 19 per cent feel no job satisfaction whatsoever.
Compare that with despondent retail workers or (worryingly) those based in an office (a description that takes in a wide variety of jobs), who are overwhelmingly underwhelmed by the prospect of going to work each day.
So who were the UK’s least enthused employees? Here’s a list of the least loved jobs.
| Job | Glee factor (% who are enthusiastic about their jobs) |
| Retail | 7.2 |
| Office-based | 10 |
| Labour | 11 |
| Sales (phone or door-to-door) | 16.9 |
| Skilled (designer/electrician) | 20.4 |
| Forces/Police | 28.6 |
| Social work | 29.9 |
| Education | 30.8 |
| Charity | 34 |
| Healthcare | 48.9 |
Not surprisingly, jobs with more of a structured career path and prospects for advancement elicited more enthusiasm than those without. But ’skilled jobs’ should surely rate higher, if employers are giving people access to apprenticeships and other learning opportunities. And shouldn’t public-sector roles in social work, education and the forces inspire dedication, given their more vocational nature?
The misery factor in a job is not necessarily confined to a particular sector, believes The Table Group founder Pat Lencioni, who also wrote the best-selling “Three Signs of a Miserable Job”.
He defines the three signs for Work in Progress as:
- Anonymity — which is the feeling that employees get when they realize that their manager has little interest in them a human being and that they know little about their lives, their aspirations and their interests.
- Irrelevance — which takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Every employee needs to know that the work they do impacts someone’s life – a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor – in one way or another.
- Immeasurement — which I realize isn’t actually a word. It’s the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees ho have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day or in a given week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers, to gauge their progress or contribution.
Maybe this is where the problem lies. A smaller survey by performance management software business SuccessFactors of 139 UK or Eire-based HR executives has found that, while many have a succession plan of some description in place, the majority don’t have a formal process that can be used to identify and develop a continuous stream of talent within the business. Employees, then, have little sense that they might progress beyond a certain point and almost no promise of getting to the top job.
Forty per cent lacked any way of identifying future talent — at the top, or presumably at any level of the business. And managers in two-thirds of the organisations weren’t held accountable for developing people.
It’s not that businesses don’t recognise the importance of talent management. But the processes aren’t in place to create a recognisable career progression. The introduction to a McKinsey chart lists familiar obstacles — short-term cost-cutting on talent spend, a shortage of the right type of person, poor line management, no cross-departmental collaboration.
But the chart itself is more eloquent, showing line managers and HR professionals frequently at odds on who’s responsible for finding and keeping the best people. No-one appears clear as to who is accountable for talent management in the business. Surely that’s a job worth getting enthusiastic about.
