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IT’S A FINNY OLD WORLD

by | Sep 2, 2024 | Articles, Funny peculiar, It's a funny old world

In this column, we provoke fresh thinking and round up some of the weird, wonderful, quirky, surprising – and shocking – stories out there

 

‘Stress bragging’ at work brings everyone down

Bragging about how stressed we are can alienate co-workers, making us seem colder and less competent, and can cause increased levels of burnout among colleagues, according to research published in Personnel Psychology.

In their first study, Jessica B. Rodell and her team asked 360 US-based participants to evaluate a colleague sharing their experience of attending a conference. Participants were assigned one of four vignettes: a control vignette, in which the colleague said the trip had been good and shared the location of next year’s conference, a ‘talking about stress’ vignette, in which the co-worker noted that “things have been quite stressful of late”, a ‘stress bragging’ vignette, in which the co-worker shared that the conference was good, but that it was “just one more thing on my full plate… you have no idea the stress I’m under”, and a self-promotion vignette, in which the colleague bragged about receiving an award and how thoroughly they conducted their work, but didn’t mention stress. 

Participants who’d witnessed their colleague bragging about their levels of stress were significantly less likely to consider them warm or capable, even compared to those who self-promoted. Participants were also less likely to want to act helpfully towards their bragging colleagues.

The second study examined the effects of stress bragging on bystanders, with 187 pairs of employees and co-workers completing three online surveys, each spaced two weeks apart. 

Participants first indicated how much they felt their co-worker had been boasting, gloating or bragging about the stress they were under at work. 

Next, they were asked to indicate their perceptions of their co-worker’s competence, warmth, and their own willingness to help them with tasks. Finally, participants indicated their own levels of stress and burnout, at and outside of work.

Similar to the first study, co-workers bragging about being stressed were perceived as less competent and less warm, with participants feeling less inclined to lend them a hand. This study also found the co-workers’ stress-bragging led to teammates reporting feeling significantly more stressed and burned out themselves.

The researchers suggest this instead of creating camaraderie, showing off about workload may create a “transfer of stress” that adds to a general sense of anxiety at work, which may even spread throughout the organisation. 

  • Read the paper in full: Rodell, J. B., Shanklin, B. C., & Frank, E. L. (2024). “I’m so stressed!”: The relational consequences of stress bragging. Personnel Psychology: https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12645

 

 

Remote workers have highest productivity and best work-life balance

Fully remote workers are happier and more productive than those who work full time in the office or hybrid, finds a report from employment tech ‘unicorn’ (a startup valued at over $1 billion), Employment Hero: The StatREMOTe of Wellbeing at Work.

Meanwhile, the first randomised control trial (RCT) to investigate the benefits of embracing hybrid working, finds that hybrid workers report greater job satisfaction, better work-life balance, and higher life satisfaction than fully on-site counterparts, and resign at a a significantly lower rate (33% lower). 

The study, published in Nature, draws from the experiences of 1,612 graduate employees of Trip.com who were randomly assigned to work hybridly or onsite for six months. This lower resignation rate was particularly noticeable in those with longer journeys to the office, and for women. However, role had an impact – those in manager roles did not resign at a significantly different rate.

The RCT researchers, authors Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang, find that contrary to a widely held concern about reduced productivity outside of the office, those in the hybrid group were as productive as their physical-only peers (as measured by performance reviews over the next two years). The employees also felt that they were more productive when working in a hybrid manner – though this belief emerged only after they had tried it, with the group being overall ambivalent at the start of the study about whether it would improve their productivity. The number of workers who received promotions in each group were not significantly different in the two years following the study.

Employment Hero’s survey of more than 1,000 Gen Z to Boomer aged UK employees finds that 67% of fully remote workers rate their work productivity as high, compared to only 54% of hybrid workers. Some 59% of fully remote workers thought they had time to relax, compared to 46% of fully in-office/onsite workers, while 57% of fully remote workers were more likely to feel that their work-life balance had improved in the last three months versus 44% of hybrid workers and 38% of fully in-office/onsite workers.