Opinion | Is high abandonment driven by exhaustion, boredom, or both?

There is a lot of talk these days about the “great abandonment”. The claim is that workers are leaving their jobs en masse.

Job dissatisfaction is a strong predictor of resignations. So if the big churn hypothesis is true in Canada, we should have seen an increase in overall worker 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 worker surveys as part of the Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Study (C-QWELS).

In September 2019, prior to the pandemic, I asked 2,500 workers: On a scale from “not at all satisfied” to “extremely satisfied”, how satisfied are you with your work? The majority (61 percent) reported high satisfaction and only a minority (15 percent) expressed low satisfaction.

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

This is not a tsunami of dissatisfaction … but maybe that will have changed by 2021?

Not really. In September 2021, 59 percent reported high satisfaction and 13 percent reported low satisfaction. Taken together, my surveys show that Canadians’ job satisfaction did not plummet. This is surprising given the hype about the big dropout. (On the other hand, much of that is driven by trends south of the border.)

I then wondered, even if overall satisfaction levels didn’t decline, is it possible that the good things about work that generally improve satisfaction lost a bit of their luster during the pandemic? To identify those good things, I asked workers what increases their satisfaction the most.

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

Workers who identified the challenge as the main reason for their high job satisfaction expressed comments such as: “I use all my skills and learn something new every day”, “There is stimulating problem solving”, “My skill set allows me to be creative and maintain in an environment in which I must constantly learn ”and“ there is always variety, no two days are the same ”.

On the contrary, those who blamed the lack of challenge for their low satisfaction expressed complaints such as: “A monkey could do my job, it is not a challenge”, “I used to work with people who really helped them and I was able to be creative, but now I mainly move paper ”and“ I am no longer doing the complicated and interesting tasks that I was hired for… I am mainly doing mundane administrative tasks ”.

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

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

Those who attributed their dissatisfaction to an overload of articulated complaints such as: “They ask me to do more with less: a continuous burnout cycle”, “there are additional tasks outside of the job description that are constantly added to my plate”, “my work is very demanding with unreasonable expectations and a lot more added work ”, and“ work consists mainly of putting out fires … this type of work can be fun when there is no panic all the time ”.

To complicate matters, a vicious cycle can arise. Employee turnover often creates more overhead for the employees who stay, which in turn undermines their own satisfaction. “Job responsibilities keep changing to meet the demands caused by people leaving the company,” said one frustrated worker.

Pandemic or no pandemic, job satisfaction matters. Employers are concerned about the satisfaction of their workers because of its effects on morale, turnover intentions, and actual resignations.

When “I feel challenged” is increasingly mixed with “I feel overwhelmed,” it is time to take a serious look at what is happening. An employee in this situation described the cost: “fatigue and heavy mental load.” Another put it even more succinctly: “It’s exhausting!”

For the sake of satisfaction, we must prevent this short-term trend from becoming the new normal.