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The Emotional Life of Work
By Bradley Brenner, Ph.D.
The human resources consulting firm Towers Perrin created quite a stir when it revealed its study showing the deep emotional connection that workers have with their work - and clearly documented just how negative those emotions are for most employees.
Strong (and Mostly Negative) Emotions
Using sophisticated market research techniques that actually measure the intensity of emotion, Towers Perrin surveyed 1,100 workers in mid-sized and large companies. Overall the study showed that workers have a tremendously strong emotional connection to their job - both positive and negative. More importantly, the overall emotional balance was negative, and one-third of the emotional content was “intensely” negative.
The key factors were:
An excessive workload
Concerns about management’s ability to lead the company
Anxiety about the future - particularly longer-term job, income and retirement security
Lack of challenge, which intensified the frustration about the workload
Insufficient recognition for the level of contribution and effort, and concern that pay isn’t commensurate with performance.
Of course, it’s not all bad. Employees had strongly positive emotions around their sense of self-esteem that comes from their work, from other people at the workplace, and from their ability to see the results of their work. Though these factors were overshadowed by the negative ones, they were nevertheless strongly positive and added significantly to the overall emotional content of people’s relationship with their jobs.
The Emotional Connection to Work at a Personal Level
This information may help you to understand why your job -- the one that used to bring happiness and a sense of accomplishment -- feels like an endless march. In the past you may have felt as though your career was something meaningful, something that was more you, but now your work life just keeps moving forward and you still find yourself unhappy at your job several years later.
You may:
Dread going to work on a daily basis
Feel underutilized and over qualified
Be bored and numb at work almost all the time
Feel as though you are an insignificant part of a large machine
Experience a nagging sense that there is something better for you, but unsure of where or how to begin a search for something new
Have noticed a fundamental mismatch between your values and those of your employer
Have less confidence in your abilities at work, feeling stuck and ineffective
Find that job dissatisfaction expands well beyond work, causing distress and conflict in your personal life
Examining the Health of Your Career
I became a psychologist so that I could assist people with improving their lives. One area of life that is often not given much attention is our career and work life. I attempt to remedy this by working with people who are struggling to find the right career, experiencing distress on the job, or lacking a sense of purpose and excitement about their work life. In my work with clients, we look at the following avenues for change:
Avenues for change:
Assess and address a values mismatch
Understand how your personality and your work interact
Find your career interests and passions
Recognize and rebuild self-efficacy that may revitalize your career.
Explore how career dissatisfaction impacts your life well beyond your job.
Tackle problematic relationships at work
Address other aspects of life (for example, feeling down much of the time) that impact enjoyment of work.
Bradley Brenner, Ph.D.
Dr. Brad Brenner is a psychologist in private practice in Portsmouth. He is credentialed with the National Register of Health Services Providers in Psychology, an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland, and board member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, a psychotherapy training institute in Washington, DC.
In his practice he offers long and short term psychotherapy, career counseling, vocational testing and interpretation, and couples counseling. Contact him at 401.369.8951 or visit www.RhodeIslandPsychotherapy.com for more information.
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