Bruce Daisley: Blue Monday is rubbish, but the workplace is killing us

We’ve all grown tired of headlines about today being Blue Monday — some forgotten marketer’s attempt to label the calendar’s lowest ebb of workplace contentment — but the occasion does invite us to reflect on the state of modern work in the UK. At best, work has become much less happy, at worst, the excesses of it are causing a growing toll on public health.

According to a substantial survey by the Mental Health Foundation last year, three-quarters of us have felt overwhelmed by stress at some point in the last year, with work being the biggest trigger. Over the past decade stress and anxiety have become the number one cause of work days lost to illness.

Critically, data suggests that the past couple of years have seen work stress getting worse — commentators note that workloads have surged as economic conditions have worsened. So, though Blue Monday might have been invented as a marketer’s ruse, there’s due reason to sabotage the event to remark that the pain inflicted by work is worse than ever before.

One of the paradoxes of modern work is that most of us sit in open-plan offices, uncontained by walls, plugged in as never before to computer networks and yet our experience is to feel disconnected. Open-plan offices bring such an inundation of interruptions and distractions that for many of us the natural state of work is with a pair of headphones on.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the end result is that modern workplaces are isolated haunts, 60% of British workers report feeling lonely at work — and the majority of them say they don’t have a single friend there.

Surely this isn’t what work was supposed to be like? As workplaces seem to be on an inexorable path to isolation and exclusively electronic discourse it’s worth taking a moment to consider what the freshest research is revealing. Alex Pentland is a pioneering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He and his team used the latest technology to craft a tracking device that took huge strides evolving the study of modern offices. They effectively engineered the equivalent of football’s Opta analysis for the workplace, building heatmaps of conversation and activity, so who is talking to whom and where. Through Pentland’s work we were finally able to provide estimates for what different office activities were contributing to productivity. Pentland’s remarkable discovery was that emails and meetings accounted for a tiny amount of workplace output. Their minuscule contribution (about 2% each) was so low that it invited us to ask what we’re really getting done at work. Pentland’s star contributor? Face-to-face discussion — chat — accounts for two-fifths of what we get done. He found that workers going over to run something past a colleague ended up in rapid evolution of ideas — far more so than the turgid monologues which take place in meeting rooms.

If Pentland is right that open discourse is the dynamic force in organisations it makes the email-induced stress and loneliness of modern work even less defensible. Work is creating anxiety that isn’t even being transferred to a better bottom-line.

Last year, Stanford University professor Jeffrey Pfeffer published a comprehensive analysis of the toll of modern work — he said it was no exaggeration to say our jobs are killing us.

In Pfeffer’s words, most modern working environments “have health effects comparable to or even greater than exposure to second-hand smoke”.

Caution is advised. The same employers who often oversee toxic cultures are willing to misdirect us to the solutions — especially if they end up looking like the white knight.