Scott Schieman is professor of sociology and Canada Research Chair at the University of Toronto.
Paul Glavin is an associate professor of sociology at McMaster University.
How often do you find your work stressful? Would you say always, often, sometimes, hardly ever or never?
We posed this question to 5,000 American workers through the research firm YouGov and replicated the study with 2,500 Canadian workers with help from the Angus Reid Group. Our study, the MESSI: Measuring Employment Sentiments and Social Inequality, is designed to be representative of the working populations in the United States and Canada.
Given the ongoing narrative about how stressed everyone is these days and the prevalence of burnout, we hypothesized that most people would report their work as “often” or “always” stressful. But we were wrong.
In the United States, 32 per cent of workers say they personally find their work stressful often or always. Instead, most workers report feeling stressed at work sometimes or less.
But the bigger surprise in our data involves a remarkable perception glitch: 70 per cent of American workers think most other American workers “often” or “always” feel stressed on the job.
What about Canada? The perception glitch mirrors our discoveries in the U.S.: While 39 per cent of Canadians say they “often” or “always” experience their own work as stressful, 72 per cent think most other Canadian workers experience a high level of stress at work.
That’s a 38-point gap among Americans and a 33-point gap among Canadians.
In our Canadian survey, there’s another novel twist. We added a more local reference point by also asking what people’s perceptions of the level of stress experienced by most of their own coworkers. As the figure above shows, the perception glitch related to “most coworkers” falls in between personal experience and the perceived stress level experienced by “most Canadians.”
These findings challenge the narrative that work is overwhelmingly stressful for most people. Some critics may argue that the word “stressful” can mean different things to different people, and our qualitative data confirms wide variations. The sources of work stress can range from monotony to favouritism to e-mail overload to endless meetings to feeling stuck in your job to the complex challenges of remote work to forms of ambiguous discrimination or even ageism.
Some critics will twist perceptual pretzels to protect the narrative. But the evidence is compelling – and it deserves space in the conversation about what people actually think and feel about work.
Perhaps a bigger and more philosophical question is: Shouldn’t we expect to find work stressful at least some of the time? We all experience some pressures or demands on the job that are stressful. Most of us accept that reality. In fact, it can make a job more interesting and stimulating. But when pressure is chronic, it can threaten health. So, the fact that one-third of American workers and a slightly higher share of Canadian workers find their work stressful “often” or “always” is a concern to be taken seriously.
But the central take-away from our data isn’t the overall prevalence of personal stress. It’s the substantial gap between personal stress levels and the perceived stress levels of others. And that perception glitch exists despite all the noise contained in the word “stressful.”
When stress is too severe, we recognize it’s a problem. Rightly so. But when it comes to work and the economy, the perceived prevalence of “badness” is so misaligned – so overestimated – beyond what the data show to be the reality. This itself may cause additional unnecessary anxiety. Shouldn’t we also worry about that too?
Too many people are walking around these days thinking that things are much worse “out there” than they really are. And that’s not good for anyone.
It’s time for a subjective realignment about work – and a more optimistic conversation about what it can do for us. Fixing these kinds of perception glitches is a necessary first step.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column here.