Employee happiness falls to three-year low

Workers are feeling resigned to their unhappiness and even apathetic.

by Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech | Sep. 07, 2023

Mother and daughter business workers using laptop and touchpad working at office Adobe Stock

Story at a glance

A new report from human resource platform BambooHR found that worker happiness is worse now than at the height of the pandemic.

BambooHR collected data on worker satisfaction from more than 57,000 employees at 1,600 different companies.

The report shows that healthcare workers are the most unhappy.

Employees are less happy than they were at the beginning of the pandemic, according to a new report from human resource software company BambooHR.

The company collected data on work satisfaction from over 57,000 employees across 1,600 small and medium-sized companies since January of 2020.

It found that worker satisfaction has suffered a steady decline since 2020 and has taken a nosedive this year.

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BambooHR found that healthcare workers are the least happy out of the eight industries analyzed.

Healthcare worker happiness has fallen dramatically since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has plummeted in 2023, the analysis found.

One report by Elsevier Health found that 71 percent of doctors feel that their jobs have become worse over time and nearly half of healthcare workers plan to leave their current jobs by 2025.

That same report found that 39 percent of healthcare workers plan to leave the field completely by 2025.

“The healthcare industry urgently needs to address the causes of widespread unhappiness—especially the trauma, dissatisfaction, and burnout resulting from the pandemic,” the report reads.

Educators are also increasingly unhappy, feeling “overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated,” according to the BambooHR report.

Meanwhile, it found that the happiest industry is construction, possibly because of rising wages and a wealth of job opportunities.

The industry is suffering from a labor shortage, however, which BambooHR experts fear might strain employees.

Workers’ unhappiness seems to be less volatile than it was in 2020, with many employees this year expressing “a sense of resignation or even apathy,” the report states.