“Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’
Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it”
– – Dolly Parton’s 1980 hit, ‘9 to 5’
What does a person with 11 Grammy awards, a slew of platinum records, and a second-rate amusement park know about work, especially drudgery? Judging by the lyrics above, quite a bit, actually. According to Gallup’s “State of the American Workplace” report released earlier this year, over two-thirds of American workers have no emotional connection to their work or workplace. This means that Monday through Friday, on average, Americans spend just over 50% of their waking hours at jobs they don’t care about.
Dolly’s right ya’ll – that is crazy.
Gallup’s findings are grim. The research firm uses three main categories to classify how engaged employees are by their work:
- “Engaged”: employees who are involved in and enthusiastic about their work;
- “Not Engaged”: may be satisfied but are not emotionally connected to their workplaces and are less likely than engaged workers to put in discretionary effort;
- “Actively Disengaged”: emotionally disconnected from their work and workplace and jeopardize their teams’ performance.
Not Engaged workers account for 51% of all workers, while the Actively Disengaged account for 16%. Thus, over two thirds of U.S. employees just don’t care, and one third of the don’t care cohort is actually going out of their way to make things worse.
Since 2000, the numbers attributed to each category of engaged worker have mostly remained the same:
“What’s the point of it all?” is a question that can usually be attributed to those navel-gazing, supine-at-the-stars tokers of jazz-cigarettes. However, given the trend that this data represents, we may all stand to benefit from asking it of ourselves.
It is difficult to quantify the spiritual damage arising as a result of most of us spending too much time doing an activity that we have no emotional connection to, but the problem nonetheless needs to be reckoned with.
Someone who’s “engaged” with this blog post might intuit that this data provides a strong reason why, despite being the richest nation on the planet, the United States ranks 108th out of 140 countries on the United Nation’s “World Happiness Report.” They may also read this, knowing that work is a large part of a person’s identity, and feel concern that an increasing number of white-collar workers are killing themselves. Being an emotionally engaged person, the reader will subsequently feel a cold wave of despondence.
Someone who’s “not engaged” will know they just completed the task of having read this blog and feel satisfied in doing so. This person won’t put any discretionary energy towards understanding how the content relates to them.
The person who’s “actively disengaged” with this blog will have closed the browser after a couple of paragraphs so they could abscond from the supply closet with some new staplers.
As the numbers show, most of us are at “enough to drive you crazy if you let it,” levels of dissatisfaction with our work. While Dolly Parton is likely a fortunate member of the 33% of engaged American workers, her concern for those suffering from the drudgery of work remains just as true as it did when the song was released.