Overall job satisfaction among U.S. employees increased a modest 0.4 percentage points in 2023 from the year prior, according to the Conference Board’s annual Job Satisfaction survey released this month. A 62.7% majority of respondents reported being content at work last year, the highest share since the survey began in 1987.
But that record doesn’t tell the whole story: Worker sentiment fell across all 26 subcomponents of job satisfaction measured in the poll, which collected responses online from 1,699 working U.S. adults in November.
Could be that people prioritize the underlying categories differently and based their satisfaction on one they rated positively but most others were underwater. Like if you asked sports fans “are sports fun to watch” and then asked them to if each team was fun to watch. They’re likely to rate their team as more fun to watch than other teams, and in turn base their opinion of sports on watching their team, while they may not enjoy watching any of the others. Overall the survey could indicate that the majority dislike watching every team even as they also say they like watching sports.
You ask someone “How’s life?” they’re likely to say “Alright” or “Not bad”.
You ask “How’s the knee doing?” or “You still saving for that cruise?” and you’ll get a much more detailed answer which may completely contradict the original “Not bad”.
Wat?
Could be that people prioritize the underlying categories differently and based their satisfaction on one they rated positively but most others were underwater. Like if you asked sports fans “are sports fun to watch” and then asked them to if each team was fun to watch. They’re likely to rate their team as more fun to watch than other teams, and in turn base their opinion of sports on watching their team, while they may not enjoy watching any of the others. Overall the survey could indicate that the majority dislike watching every team even as they also say they like watching sports.
You ask someone “How’s life?” they’re likely to say “Alright” or “Not bad”.
You ask “How’s the knee doing?” or “You still saving for that cruise?” and you’ll get a much more detailed answer which may completely contradict the original “Not bad”.