Deloitte has released their third Well-being at Work Survey and guess what? The workers aren’t so well. Here’s a fun figure from the survey of 3,150 C-suite executives, managers, and workers across four countries for you:
Only 43% of workers say their organizations have left them better off than when they started.
Well-being isn’t doing so well either. Not for workers and not for their managers and leaders:
For the third year in a row, some people reported that they’re still struggling with their well-being. Just 56% of workers feel their overall well-being is “excellent” or “good.” In fact, workforce well-being remains relatively unchanged since we first began surveying workers in 2022, suggesting that most organizations may not have figured out a way to move the needle on this yet.
Leaders aren’t immune to well-being challenges either. At least four out of 10 workers, managers, and executives say they “always” or “often” feel exhausted or stressed. The situation is so bad that 59% of workers, 66% of managers, and 71% of the C-suite say they’d seriously consider taking a job with another company that would support their well-being.
The theme of the survey is “human sustainability” but what even does that mean? It’s a fancy phrase for not treating people like shit. Explains Deloitte:
Leaders may wonder whether a focus on human sustainability is what’s best for their business. Facing growing stakeholder pressures, dwindling worker health, and other workforce-related risks, our survey found that shifting from a mindset that centers on extracting value from people toward an approach that focuses on helping humans thrive is a leading course of action.
The irony of Deloitte writing this is not lost on us. Clearly it is on them.
Here’s another fun section. Deloitte has mapped out the difference between leadership and worker views on a few factors like workloads, bringing your whole self to work, fairness, flexibility, and autonomy. Although 71 percent of the C-suite is ready to GTFO to a more well-being conscious company because they’re so stressed, for some reason almost 90 percent of them think their workers’ workloads are always or often reasonable.
They also think they’re doing great on the human sustainability front (they aren’t).
Here we see a figure that shows more disparity between the perceptions of the C-suite and the actual experience of workers. Note the 22 percent of workers who rank their financial well-being as poor or very poor (literally).
Said Deloitte, again with a complete lack of awareness:
For executives, these disconnects should signal that it’s time for a change. It’s important for leaders to develop a more accurate picture of how workers are really doing if they want to move human sustainability efforts forward. Leaders should involve workers to help identify their needs and values, how they perceive their current experience at work, and how human outcomes can be pursued together. Furthermore, they should engage not only their own team members, but also future workers, community members, and other members of the organization’s human ecosystem.
Worker surveys, forums, interviews, or focus groups, are all good options for helping leaders understand the big picture around how their workers are faring. Otherwise, absent any impetus for change, organizations may elect not to take any action around advancing human sustainability.
Ah yes, those notoriously accurate worker surveys in which people are eager to share their true views and not at all afraid of retaliation.
Read more: The important role of leaders in advancing human sustainability [Deloitte]
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