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A cunning plan

March 2, 2011 1:29 by Samuel Potter

Kipp has talked about happiness at work many times before. Usually our rants are inspired by some piece of research or other, something that reveals how disenchanted we are with our employers or, as in the case of the Great Places To Work Initiative, something that tells us how much better our companies would perform if we were happier at work.

And today is no different, after the latest Bayt.com survey landed on our desk (they seem to arrive every month, just like clockwork; handy when you have a word count to meet). This particular release rather modestly buries the really big, headline number, deep in the content. Why? Given it’s an employment agency maybe they figured most people would dismiss the stat as being a set up, but we know the Bayt bunch to be good people so we’ll bring it front and centre: In the Bayt ‘Good Working Conditions’ poll, 94.3 percent of respondents, out of more than 12,000, said they are currently on the hunt for a new job.

Let that sink in for a second. More than nine out of 10 of us are looking for work elsewhere. Look around your office now – nine out of every 10 colleagues and employees is looking for job somewhere else.

A Bayt press release filler-outer puts that stat down to a “natural tendency to believe the grass is greener on the other side and to continuously seek out new opportunities as the Middle Eastern employment market betters.” To some extent that may be true, but Kipp can’t help thinking that’s being awfully dismissive of an incredibly large statistic. Nine out of every 10 employees is currently on a job hunt. Even allowing for a margin of error that still means a vast majority are unsettled.

Why should this be? Maybe it is a natural inclination to see the grass as greener. But that in turn could be because everyone’s working situation is so miserable they think the grass can’t fail to be greener, and that comes down to the management, and to their current company.

Which leads to the nest question: Why don’t employers do something about it? It can’t be good to have most of the staff looking for jobs elsewhere. Obviously, they don’t do anything about it because they can’t or they won’t. If they can’t, fair enough, but if they won’t, why not? Kipp believes they have a cunning plan (Yes, we got there eventually).

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Tags: employee dissatisfaction, employee happiness, employee happiness survey, employees, employees in the gulf, employees middle east, happy employees, staff dissatisfaction, staff happiness, staff happiness survey, survey, unhappy employees, workplace happiness