Australian employees are among the world’s most stressed and engage in ‘quiet quitting’ at work at a significantly higher percentage than the world average, according to new analysis.
The State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report shows 47 per cent of Australian workers experienced stress during much of their working day compared to the global average of 44 per cent.
Only workers in the US, Canada and East Asia experience higher levels of workplace stress, with 52 per cent of employees in those regions reporting a high level of stress in their work day.
The report, from global analytics and advice firm Gallup, surveyed 122,416 employees across 10 global regions including Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia, among others.
Gallup Managing Consultant Heather Barrett said the research behind the report was the largest ongoing study of employee experience in the world.
“These findings really help us understand how employees, globally, are feeling about both their work and their lives,” she said.
“It helps us uncover those critically important predictors of organisational resilience and performance that leaders and decision-makers need to be considering.”
Ms Barrett said stress around the world continued to be high, with four of the 10 regions reporting an increase in the percentage of employees experiencing a lot of stress at work the day before the survey was conducted.
The Sub-Saharan Africa region reported the largest increase in stress levels, up 9 per cent on the year before.
Australia and New Zealand’s stress percentage remained the same as 12 months ago, but still recorded the second highest regional percentage of daily stress.
“We saw stress around the world, during the COVID-19 pandemic, peak in 2020,” Ms Barrett said.
“And then it peaked again in 2021 and it actually hasn’t let up since, so 44 per cent of the world’s workers stated that they experienced stress a lot of the day.
“This is the highest rate that we’ve seen in our study for the second year in a row.”
The study also analysed employees’ level of engagement at work and while 23 per cent of the world’s workers said they were thriving at work, 59 per cent are still ‘quiet quitting’.
Gallup Managing Partner Pa Sinyan said 18 per cent of the world’s workforce was also actively disengaged or ‘loud quitting’ and experiencing a lot of frustration at work.
“But by far the largest group at the 59 per cent in that category we refer to as either not engaged or what’s increasingly referred to as quiet quitting,” he said.
“It means that while they are not destructive, they are not having their needs fulfilled at work to the stage that engages them, makes them want to give discretionary effort or go the extra mile.”
In Australia and New Zealand, 23 per cent of employees are also actively engaged but there is a much higher percentage of workers that fall into the quiet quitting category, at 67 per cent.
Just 11 per cent of Australian and New Zealand workers are actively disengaged at work.
“The world is full of untapped potential is what the data is clearly telling us, with six and 10 of us not necessarily going the extra mile and not feeling triggered or driven to achieve more than we could,” Mr Sinyan said.
Workers in South Asia recorded the highest level of engagement at 33 per cent, while Europe recorded the lowest, with just 13 per cent of workers actively thriving at work.
Mr Sinyan said a lack of workplace engagement often resulted in higher absenteeism, and employees that did not take ownership of tasks or issues at work.
In dollar terms, the study estimates low employee engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion, which is about nine per cent of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
One area where Australia and New Zealand did excel came in the job climate category, which asked workers whether now was a good or bad time to find a new job.
In Australia and New Zealand the sentiment among 81 per cent of respondents was that now was a good time to find a job, which was up 22 per cent on the previous year and the highest in the world.
In the US and Canada, 71 per cent of respondents said now was a good time to find a job, while in the Middle East and North Africa, just 34 per cent of workers felt the same.
Most workers in Australia and New Zealand also reported that they planned to stay in their existing jobs, with just 43 per cent saying they were actively seeking new employment.
The region where the most workers said they intended to leave their current job was in Sub-Saharan Africa, at 70 per cent.
