Why we are all so angry at work

Hello, and welcome to Working It.

I have been working from one of those cool blended co-working/hotel spaces — this one was the newly opened Birch, at the southern edge of London. (Locals may remember it as the Selsdon Park Hotel — where my parents went for dinner dances, back in the day.)

It’s a gorgeous place (see below) but the noise of non-headphone-enabled Zooms and “walking meetings” turned out to be less than delightful. We need a new universal etiquette for working from public and semi-public spaces. Ideas welcome. Let me know if you already have one in your (co) workplace — and don’t include any twee “no laptops” policies. I hate them. People have to earn 👩🏽‍💻.

Read on for a look into why there are so many angry employees (especially here in the UK) and in Office Therapy we advise a burnt out 50-something.

Seeing red: why is everyone so angry at work? 😡

That hushed atmosphere in your professional workplace may well conceal raging emotions. And I am not talking about love. Anger is on the rise at work — and it’s especially heated in the UK.

New Gallup data from its huge State of the Global Workplace Report 2023, with information from more than 122,000 respondents, shows that almost one in five UK professionals (19 per cent) report feeling angry at work. The global average is 21 per cent, but what’s significant this year is that UK anger levels have risen 4 percentage points — and its workers are now far angrier than the European average (14 per cent).

Gallup collects its data by asking people about strong emotions they’ve experienced the previous day. Another depressing statistic: 90 per cent of UK workers are disengaged at work, meaning they feel unenthused about their work and workplace 😴.

So why is anger such a big topic? And what are we all so worked up about?

I asked Anna Sawyer, principal partner at Gallup, for her thoughts. She started off by telling me that, sadly, there’s no question on the survey about what exactly is making us cross. But she had some informed guesses. “When we look at negative emotions more generally, we see that they have been steadily rising for over a decade — this is looking globally — so actually predating the pandemic, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, inflation rises and so on. It has been a steady upward trend.”

Weirdly (and perhaps worryingly), UK workers now have the same anger levels as people in Ukraine. “You’d think they’d have a lot more to be angry about than we have,” said Anna. Quite.

One big factor is that stress in our personal lives doesn’t get left in the office revolving door. As Anna noted: “We don’t experience our work in a vacuum — so our life and our work intersect highly. What we are experiencing in our wider life — and in work — they blend across in terms of how we feel.”

Her advice for managers and leaders is to work out the underlying causes of workplace anger. That means listening — actual listening, where you are “present” in the conversation (rather than, say, checking WhatsApp or thinking about your next meeting).

And managers could even start by going back to basics to uncover whether there are core structural issues with people’s jobs. As Anna said: “An interesting fact we found out through our engagement research is that only half of us say we have clarity about what is expected of us in the workplace. So half of us pitch up at work every day and are not clear on what is expected of us. That’s unnecessarily stressful for people and you can imagine how, over time, that plays out in creating a less than positive relationship with the workplace.” 🤨

Have you worked out how to cool down anger or banish disengagement in the workplace? Do you think just 10 per cent of us are actually engaged when we are working? Let me know at isabel.berwick@ft.com.

Our FTWeekend Festival is back on Saturday, September 2 at Kenwood House Gardens, London! I’ll be talking about how to get a pay rise with fellow podcast host, Money Clinic’s Claer Barrett, and there’s a full day of debates, tastings, Q&As and more. A host of FT columnists and commentators will be there, plus star speakers including Greg James, Fi Glover and Michael Gove.

Newsletter subscribers can claim £20 off the festival pass using promo code FTWFxNewsletters at: ft.com/festival

This week on the Working It podcast

I’ve long been fascinated by the conflicting demands on HR professionals — tasked with supporting individuals through personal crises and encouraging a healthy workforce and workplace — but also with executing disciplinary processes and lay-offs. In this week’s “best of” Working It episode*, there’s another chance to listen to “What’s the point of HR?” with guests Jamie Fiore Higgins, an ex-Goldman Sachs senior employee who calls for independent HR functions to ensure staff are treated fairly, and my colleague Andrew Hill.

*We’re airing a repeat because I had a personal problem of my own last week: no voice at all 🤒.

Office Therapy

The problem: I am a senior manager in my early 50s. For the past year, I have been feeling burnt out and have been forcing myself to go to work. The quality of my work is nowhere near what it was. This is being noticed.

I have been thinking of retiring prematurely and living off my savings. But if it turns out that I am burning through cash at a rate faster than estimated, how difficult or easy is it for a 50+ man with a career break to get back to work? And is it a good idea to stop working? Or is it advisable to soldier on in whatever capacity possible?  

Isabel’s advice: Things go up and down very quickly at work — in six months’ time you may feel differently so don’t make any final decision yet. Some sort of change, though, is often a good thing. As we age, we tend to regret what we haven’t done (rather than regret what we did do in our younger years). Daniel Pink’s book The Power of Regret is good on this — there’s a Working It podcast episode with Daniel that you might find useful.

Workplace counsellor and FT contributing editor, Michael Skapinker, adds: “There may be a middle way. Have you discussed the possibility of a different role with your company — consulting, mentoring or part-time? It’s not purely about soldiering on or opting out. You have other options, and you’re right: leaving and then trying to come back when you’re desperate for money will be harder than finding a more balanced working life now.”

Got a question, problem, or dilemma for Office Therapy? Think you have better advice for our readers? Send it to me: isabel.berwick@ft.com. We anonymise everything. Your boss, colleague or underlings will never know.

Five top stories from the world of work

Best summer books of 2023: Business: The FT’s senior business writer, Andrew Hill, picks his favourite reads so far this year, including Zeynep Ton’s The Case for Good Jobs, a biography of the late Zappos founder, Tony Hsieh and The Rise of Corporate Feminism, about the history of secretarial and clerical work and the activists who fought for better pay and conditions.

AI shakes up the way we work in three industries: An in-depth look at how artificial intelligence is already starting to make an impact in film-making, coding and professional services. There’s a fascinating glimpse into how disputes about AI use have become one of the themes in the Hollywood writers’ strike.

The murky world of the job reference: Pilita Clark looks into why we dread being asked to provide testimonials for useless, back-stabbing or lazy former colleagues. What’s a manager to do?

Politicians must send the right signals on ‘green’ jobs: Everyone makes a noise about the green jobs boom, but as Sarah O’Connor points out, it’s yet to materialise — and there are massive shortages of workers such as heat pump engineers.

UK military is struggling to recruit tech experts: As the government tries to compete with the private sector for people with cyber-related skills, the military is losing out because of poor pay and inflexible careers, according to a new report prepared for the UK government.

One more thing . . . The Tortoise Media podcast, Epstein’s Money Men, investigates the connections between Jeffrey Epstein, the banks and Wall Street leaders who allegedly protected and enabled him. Episode one is about Epstein and his banker, Jes Staley, then at JPMorgan. Reporter David Taylor makes brilliant use of thousands of emails — released as part of court cases — as his source material.

A word from the Working It community: doing hybrid better

We had lots of responses to last week’s newsletter about the weird way that hybrid and flexible work have come to mean the same thing — specifically “three days a week in the office” — and why that’s not helping anyone develop truly flexible practices.

A succinct idea for reframing how we think about hybrid work came from professor Chris Rowley. He’s at Kellogg College, Oxford and Bayes Business School, City, University of London. Chris starts by acknowledging the blurring of “hybrid and flexible” in our minds, and offers an alternative — and far more sophisticated — model for employers and managers to use when looking at our working habits.

“It is more useful to talk about the hybrid world of work not as a simple binary choice of ‘either-or’ [usually a place: eg office or home] but rather on multiple spectra (as below):

Twin Choices in Flex/Hybrid

• Form: Location (Office vs Remote) & Type (Flexible vs Fixed)

• Employer Commitment (Low to High) & Extent (Low to High)

*More ideas next week — do keep the hybrid innovations coming to isabel.berwick@ft.com.