The 50% figure lands. But the more revealing number is not in the report: what do the leaders of those unhappy employees believe the figure to be?
In my experience, considerably lower. Not because they don't care, but because the signals reaching them are unreliable. What travels upward through most organisations is not what people actually think. It is what people calculate is safe to say. Honest information about how things feel travels poorly toward the top.
This is what makes the wellbeing investment case harder to act on than it looks. A leader who doesn't know the real scale cannot calibrate their response to it. And the reason they don't know is not a data gap. It is a communication gap.
The harder question behind this report is not what leaders should do about unhappiness. It is why they are consistently the last to know, and what in the way organisations communicate upward makes that the structural default.
I'm something of an eternal optimist - so I remain hopeful that we'll see the pendulum swing back if we keep putting the pressure on employers. It'll get messier for sure, but we have to hope for and work for better. Work is so much of our lives - it shouldn't suck so much.
Work seems to be following a the broader societal trend of widening gaps like the K shaped recovery or Wealth gap. One one side you have the tech sector and companies like Meta and on the other, companies that still see people as their greatest assets. Either way, I think we’re entering an era where your career isn’t going to make you happy or even feel secure. The era of being a “career prepper” is nigh
The 50% figure lands. But the more revealing number is not in the report: what do the leaders of those unhappy employees believe the figure to be?
In my experience, considerably lower. Not because they don't care, but because the signals reaching them are unreliable. What travels upward through most organisations is not what people actually think. It is what people calculate is safe to say. Honest information about how things feel travels poorly toward the top.
This is what makes the wellbeing investment case harder to act on than it looks. A leader who doesn't know the real scale cannot calibrate their response to it. And the reason they don't know is not a data gap. It is a communication gap.
The harder question behind this report is not what leaders should do about unhappiness. It is why they are consistently the last to know, and what in the way organisations communicate upward makes that the structural default.
I'm something of an eternal optimist - so I remain hopeful that we'll see the pendulum swing back if we keep putting the pressure on employers. It'll get messier for sure, but we have to hope for and work for better. Work is so much of our lives - it shouldn't suck so much.
Work seems to be following a the broader societal trend of widening gaps like the K shaped recovery or Wealth gap. One one side you have the tech sector and companies like Meta and on the other, companies that still see people as their greatest assets. Either way, I think we’re entering an era where your career isn’t going to make you happy or even feel secure. The era of being a “career prepper” is nigh
https://davidarmano.substack.com/p/career-preppers