The Modern-Day Worker Has Never Been Better Off

Only a few decades ago, you couldn’t apply to jobs from your couch, “networking” on LinkedIn did not exist, and working all day from home in your PJ’s just because you felt like it was a fairytale. The typical path after college was to find a 9-5 job at a big company, climb the ladder, and retire at 65. Give this roadmap to any college graduate today and they will throw it in your face.

Most people worked 8+ hours a day, Monday through Friday with very little flexibility as to how they worked, who they worked for, and where they could work.

The environment we live and work in today vastly differs from the pre-digital era. Without a doubt, the internet and digital revolution have immensely improved how we choose to work.

Run It Back

Let’s imagine you are a 22-year-old college graduate in 1991.

After you proudly walk across the stage, waving to your beaming family in the audience, you are ready to change the world for the better. Armed with a $150,000 piece of paper, you have no doubt that you’ll be able to find the perfect opportunity to make an impact.

The only problem is that stage you walked across was in Brookings, South Dakota with a population of 16,000 people. At this point, you have 2 options when determining where your next big step into the real world is going to be.

You can:

a) See what your small town has to offer in the job section of the local newspaper. It may not be the job of your dreams, but hey, it is a great way to get your “foot in the door!”

b) Printed resume in hand, blindly move to the biggest city you can, and hope you find something that sticks before you run out of money.

Let’s fast forward to 2023. Having emerged unscathed from the pandemic, (apart from the frat parties you missed due to COVID restrictions), you again walk across that stage, ready to make a difference. While options a) and b) are still available, a third option c) has been unlocked:

c) Hop on your personal computer, ask ChatGPT to make you the perfect scannable resume with keywords from your favorite online job postings, and voilà, you are ready to start applying to the thousands of job postings available in any city you can dream of from the comfort of your parent’s couch.

While in 1991 the right choice to make may have been pretty difficult, the opportunities afforded with option c) today are endless.

I make this point to illustrate the modern-day professional has levels of flexibility and optionality that the college graduate of the pre-computer age would have drooled over. The boom of the internet, remote work capabilities, and technology-oriented occupations have made the job search easier and more personalized. Long gone are the days of printed resumes, cold-calling, and ambiguity.

Furthermore, with unlimited character job descriptions and salary transparency laws, the amount of information workers have on new opportunities has never been better. Giant U.S. states like California and New York show candidates exactly how much one can expect to make before applying, allowing prospective employees to decide if the hours spent perfecting the application, gathering references, and completing multiple rounds of interviews, are going to be worthwhile.

While COVID-19 was devasting for our world as a whole, its presence ushered in a new era of work and rapidly transitioned companies of all sizes to both hire employees and conduct business remotely. Never in history have a higher percentage of jobs been available to people that feature hybrid and remote work options. Workers around the globe in many industries from healthcare to tech now have the opportunity to take their kids to school, cook more meals at home, and tackle the evergrowing pile of laundry glaring from the corner of their rooms.

The last 3 decades of change, and particularly the last 3 years dealing with potential economic crisis, recessionary fears, and the COVID-19 pandemic have been some of the most tumultuous in history for workers. Yet, we cannot ignore the new era of work that has emerged from the ashes and given professionals so much more control over their daily lives.

With these positive developments in mind, I would expect, I would even bet, that professionals are much happier today than they were in the past. Yet, I found the opposite to be true.

A recent study by BambooHR surveyed almost 60,000 people from over 1,600 companies around the globe over the past 3 years to gauge employee satisfaction.

Their findings suggest that professionals are more unhappy at their jobs today than they were at the height of the pandemic at the start of 2020. This trend has led some to dub the current state of work the “Great Gloom”.

The data found by BambooHR is not unique. The data represents a wider trend that people today are more unhappy and pessimistic about the state of their lives and the world in decades. A recent poll by Gallup found that Americans’ satisfaction with how things are going in the U.S. matches levels seen during the 2008 Financial Crisis.

So, what gives? Why might workers today be so unhappy?

Terminally Online

The onset of the pandemic took the world by storm. Businesses were forced to shut down, people locked themselves in their homes, and the world came to a standstill.

Most traditionally in-person services needed to pivot. This largely accelerated the adoption of technology and brought more people online than ever before. This new digital wave across industries was the perfect catalyst for the remote and hybrid work arrangements we still see today. Much of what I expressed above as it relates to optionality and flexibility for workers today was only made possible because of the pandemic

Afraid and confused in 2020, we turned online for answers. The problem is, we have not been able to leave.

Americans spend more than 6.5 hours per day on average online, matching pandemic levels. While people are certainly leaving their homes more frequently for travel, we still see visits to restaurants, bars, and movie theatres 20+% lower than pre-pandemic levels. Instead, we are staying in our homes more after our jobs, opting for DoorDash, and watching the next episode of “The Kardashians” on Hulu. Furthermore, social media traffic has actually increased since the pandemic across popular sites like TikTok and Snapchat, making up an even larger portion of our time spent online.

As highlighted in previous articles, many of these sites have a proclivity to spread content that is extreme, pessimistic, and inaccurate.

When all we see and think about is inflation, mass layoffs, and recessionary woes, it is no wonder that people are still confused, afraid, and unhappy.

Archaic Leadership

While a majority of professionals today see the improvements in job flexibility as a good thing, CEOs do not. In recent months, our feeds have been filled with articles on leaders at a wide variety of Fortune 500 companies reneging on remote work promises. Some have threatened to weigh in-office engagement as a part of overall employee performance and even fire employees who do not want to come back into the office.

When I think about why employees may not be as happy as they were during the pandemic, I believe it may be because the autonomy they once had is being stripped away for “culture” and “collaboration”. As a young professional who works fully in person at one of these big companies, I certainly see the benefits of “water cooler” conversations and interacting with teams on-site. However, robbing professionals of one of the most valuable characteristics of their job, may be even worse for “culture”. Already, large-scale resignations have been made by employees at various companies where policies surrounding remote work have flipped.

The CEOs that have spoken up are not just a brave, select few. A recent survey found that 90% of 1,000 decision-makers at a variety of companies plan to urge employees back into the office by the end of 2024. This is in direct conflict with employees in the labor market, with 68% of full-time employees preferring a hybrid schedule.

Unless all companies come to the same decision and truly do choose to mandate an in-person, 9-5 workday, professionals will go to wherever their preferences will be met.

Loneliness

While arguably for the wrong reasons, the return to office mandate may ultimately help solve a bigger issue: worker loneliness. With less time spent outside our homes and in the office, the interaction we are getting with other humans is drastically lower than before the pandemic. Sure, we may be talking to each other on Zoom or Teams, but do these experiences adequately represent what it feels like to actually be with someone?

Since leaving college, it has been much harder to maintain friendships with colleagues whom I saw every single day. Daily “hellos” shared at crosswalks, across the classroom, or conversations in our campus coffee shop, all cease to exist. Interacting with these same people over a screen or while sitting on the couch on the phone has been far less rich than being able to do so with them by my side.

We saw much higher-than-average levels of loneliness and depression during the pandemic. Are workers with flexible arrangements feeling similar now?

Glassdoor recently did a 2022 survey on employee sentiment and its findings suggest that any level of remote work each week may be hurting relationship quality with colleagues. Additionally, a study by Gallup found that fully remote workers were on average less happy than those who only completed one day a week remotely.

This new way of work may have given us great flexibility and choice in the short term, but what is the overall impact on the way we live and socialize in the long term?

Living Between Dimensions

Without a doubt, the ways we find jobs and the tools we have to do so have greatly improved in the last few decades. On the contrary, the freedoms afforded to us during COVID-19 to work remotely may have been our best option during the pandemic, but may not be the best for our mental health and relationships today.

Additionally, if employees are to maintain their autonomy and find opportunities to work from home fully or hybrid on a large scale, we need to seriously reconsider how we approach our time spent online. I fear a reality where we all are so engrossed in our lives spent behind a screen that we forget to live outside of it.

The modern-day worker has never been better off finding the flexible job of their dreams. The question remains, will they be happier once they're in it?

-John Henry

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