Source : THE AGE NEWS
Sixty-one years ago, journalist Donald Horne first distilled how he viewed our nation. “Australia is the lucky country,” he famously began, before following it up with a sucker punch, “run mainly by second rate people who share its luck”.
The first half of his phrase struck a chord that’s resonated through the decades, albeit often truncated to fit whatever worldview we wished to see. Now, a few generations on from Horne’s insight, there are startling new data points to add to our national conversation about who we are and how we got here.
A new report from Gallup sheds additional light on an uncomfortable question that we really need to ask: is Australia a great place to live but a lousy place to work?
Australia regularly ranks among the world’s best places to live. But a recent survey of its workforce tells a different story.Credit: Louie Douvis
For two decades Gallup’s annual research, the State of the Global Workplace, has been one of the most anticipated annual insights into our changing relationship with work. This year they surveyed 227,000 people from 160 countries, and it’s packed with complicated and nuanced contradictions.
The research confirms a long-term trend that less than a quarter of all Australians are engaged at work, with 12 per cent actively disengaged and the vast majority, over two thirds of workers, not engaged with their jobs.
“That means the majority of people are going through the motions,” says Claire de Carteret, the APAC managing director at Gallup. “They’re going to work, but they’re not as energised, connected, productive or thriving as they possibly could be.”
“If we really want to be more than just the lucky country, we’re going to have to confront our problems at work head on.″
As well as disengagement, the percentage of workers who say they experience stress each day at work has been steadily rising from one third in 2011 to half of all workers now, with Australians basically tying with the United States and Canada as the most stressed workers in the world.
Most of this stress is falling squarely on the shoulders of management. “We are asking a lot of managers,” says de Carteret. “Our productivity is quite stagnant in Australia, so we are asking managers to do more with less. We are asking them to be aware of wellbeing but also manage performance, and all the radical transformation with AI.”
But while the smoke signals coming out of our workplaces might be dire, as soon as we leave the office the results are more positive. A slim majority of Australians (56 per cent) say they are thriving, well above the global average of 33 per cent. And when asked to imagine if things will be better for them in five years’ time, most Australians still have a rosy outlook.
Combine this with some of the lowest rates of respondents who experience daily loneliness in our region, and you’ve got the paradox that many of us have a good life outside the office, but a disengaged and stressful one inside it.
“It’s not that every workplace is a lousy place to work,” says de Carteret, “but I think people are languishing at work, while we’ve also got a great lifestyle, safety, security and many social systems that protect the vulnerable people in our country.”
The contradiction is apparent, but so is our challenge. If we really want to be more than just the lucky country, we’re going to have to confront our problems at work head on.
The first step is to rip off our blinkers and acknowledge the state of our workplaces, highlighted by global reports like this that leave nowhere for us to hide. After that, all of us – workers, employers, managers and executives – needs to take collective ownership to try to solve it together.
That’s the only way we can ensure that Australia is not just a great place to live, but also a great place to work.
Tim Duggan is author of Work Backwards: The Revolutionary Method to Work Smarter and Live Better. He writes a regular newsletter at timduggan.substack.com
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