The world is in a dysfunctional relationship with work.
So concludes Hewlett Packard's 2024 Work Relationship Index, which was released earlier this week. The company's second annual workplace surveyed 15,600 knowledge workers and managers in 12 different countries and measured worker sentiment across three different stages -- workers who felt they had a healthy relationship with work, workers in the "watch out" zone, and workers who felt as though they did not have a healthy relationship with their jobs. What they found was only 28% of knowledge workers felt like they had a healthy relationship with work, compared to 42% of IT decision-makers and 51% of business leaders. On the flip side, 30% of knowledge workers felt as if they had an unhealthy relationship with their work, as did 16% of IT decision-makers and 12% of business leaders.
This tells us two things: first, the majority of workers are in that "watch out" zone. And second, there are big sentiment gaps between management and employees. A far greater percentage of business leaders (51%) reported having a healthy relationship with work than did knowledge workers (28%); a far greater percentage of knowledge workers (30%) reported having an unhealthy relationship with work compared to 12% of business leaders. And the most notable sentiment gap of all -- the percentage of knowledge workers who reported having an unhealthy relationship was greater than the percentage who reported a healthy relationship.
So what accounts for this discontent outside the decisionmakers' suites? According the HP Work Relationship Index, there are six critical focus areas that comprise a healthy work relationship:
And the results also log trust in leadership as the attribute with the largest impact on workers' work relationship index (WRI) scores. Yet only 26% of workers surveyed said trust in leadership was consistently part of their workplace experience. And for knowledge workers in the unhealthy-relationship group, 91% said their company's leadership doesn't own making mistakes, and 93% said their company's leadership does not demonstrate emotional intelligence.
There's also a gap between what workers say is important to see from management and what they are seeing. 78% of knowledge workers surveyed said it's important for their senior leadership demonstrate empathy, while only 28% of knowledge workers can recall actually seeing this in action among the leadership.
By contrast, 89% of the business leaders surveyed said they believed their employees really feel management genuinely cares for their well-being.
Why do these significant perception gaps between workers and workplace leaders exist? Perhaps it's inevitable that people who have a great relationship with their work will inevitably make it to the top leadership levels and thus that positive relationship endures. Or perhaps there's an opportunity for management to examine how their relationship to their work differs from their reports' relationship to work -- and figure out how to identify areas to change. This survey offers anyone in a workplace an opportunity to do a gut check on how their own work relationship is going -- and if you're a workplace leader, this is a great opportunity to ask whether you're really tuned in to how your reports are feeling about their work relationships too.
