Why does everyone hate their job?

^{Work takes up most of our waking hours, so getting it right matters. I'm Clif P Lewis, an organisational psychologist, and I write about what the research says makes work work.}

Subscribe | Past essays | Advertise with us | Insane Media

🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by SurveyMonkey

Most HR teams run one big survey a year and hope the results hold. They don't. SurveyMonkey lets you run ongoing employee feedback — connecting your engagement, eNPS, and culture pulse surveys so you can track what's actually changing, not just where things landed last November. Pre-built survey programs, automated trend tracking, expert-guided send schedules. No research background needed. Trusted by HR teams at Google, IBM, and Zoom.

Learn more

Remember in F🔴R🟡I🔵E🔴N🟡D🔵S, during a game of trivia, when Rachel said Chandler’s job is that of “Transponster”? It was hilarious because it was so absurd. I would argue, however, that the chronology of Chandler’s career over the course of the show’s run is even more absurd, though much less hilarious. In fact, it’s quite depressing. Chandler actually worked in “statistical analysis and data reconfiguration”, and in the first season he quits. Shortly after, his (ex)boss offers him a raise to come back. He caves and goes back. For years, the promotions and raises keep coming and Chandler keeps staying, without his feelings towards the job ever changing.

I see a lot of Chandlers in my executive coaching work. Many of the people I coach are senior, very well paid and have more autonomy than most employees will ever get. By every measure you’d find in a job ad, they’ve won. And a surprising number of them, not all, but a significant number, are miserable, with few people at work they share a real connection with. I want to tread carefully here. My own observations during executive coaching conversations do not constitute generalisable data, and I can’t tell you the missing personal connection directly causes the misery. The recurring pattern, however, turns up too often to ignore.

Now if you’ve read up to here you might be thinking “Clif, it’s not that deep, I just need to get paid more and I’ll love my job”. Well, yes and no. First, monetary reward as a motivator has been studied quite extensively, and while being motivated and liking your job are not the same thing, the research does converge on a clear pattern. Incentives mostly buy more work, while the quality of that work is more closely related to how much people enjoy it (Cerasoli et al., 2014). Pay level also correlates only .15 with job satisfaction (Judge et al., 2010). So pay is necessary, it just isn’t enough.

To find what’s left once you take money off the table, we need to look further back than the last engagement survey. A few hundred thousand years further back, to be exact. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017) argue that human reason evolved for social jobs, namely justifying ourselves to others and arguing with them. They challenge the “intellectualist” view by asserting that our ability to reason did not evolve as a tool for helping individuals think better on their own, but as a way of coordinating with others and deciding whom and what to believe. That explains an odd quirk in how we think. On our own, we mostly look for reasons we were right all along and go easy on our own weak arguments. In a group that argues, the same bias turns into a strength, because everyone makes the best case for their view, the others pick holes in it, and the strongest argument tends to win (Mercier & Sperber, 2011).

The Wason selection task is a famously nasty logic puzzle. In Moshman and Geil’s (1998) study, fewer than one in ten students working alone solved it, yet about three-quarters of the small groups got it right. Mercier and Sperber compare the effect to getting sprinters to run 100 metres in five seconds by making them run together. Their image for the lone reasoner is a pen used underwater, a tool working outside the setting it was built for. That doesn't make thinking alone useless. People who stop and deliberate on their own, for example, get better at spotting fake news headlines (Bago et al., 2020). On tricky problems, though, a group that argues usually beats the same people working alone. That fits with how human cooperation seems to have started, with collaboration our ancestors could not do without, such as foraging for food nobody could get alone (Tomasello et al., 2012).

So the paycheque isn't what's broken. We're social animals who think best in company, sitting in jobs that ask us to perform alone. Next week I'll look at where that design came from, why it has been so hard to shake, and what leaders can do about it.

So the paycheque isn't what's broken. We're social animals who think best in company, sitting in jobs that ask us to perform alone.

Next Monday I'll look at where that design came from, why it has been so hard to shake, and what leaders can do about it.

If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.

Stay human,
Clif

P.S. Where do your pre-hire criteria stop matching what your team surely values and rewards? Reply to this email and let me know.

If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.

💡 Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the founders, creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and AI founders.