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.”
