The panelists said that if you can’t strike a healthy balance, it leads to employee burnout, which in turn leads to employee check out. That’s the worst case scenario for everybody involved, a definite lose-lose situation. There’s more to that ‘check out’ mentality beyond just having a poor work-life balance though. Mashable recently published an article that sums it up rather nicely: a bad job is the root cause of it all, more so than unemployment. To clarify, Bevan explains that psychosocial job quality “involves the degree to which jobs promote control, autonomy, challenge, variety, and task discretion”. All of those elements combined have a direct impact on whether or not our work adds to or detracts from our psychological well-being. So, what did Bevan uncover? First and foremost, he found that there’s a clear link between being engaged in good work and one’s mental health. Now, being unemployed isn’t preferable – we all can agree on that. However, Bevan stressed the fact that that the traditional axiom that any job is a good job isn’t accurate or true. The misappropriated mindset here being that having a poor-quality job, which is boring and routine, is good because it keeps you connected to the labor market: nobody wants to see gaps in your resume. Further, the study shows that people who applied for and were offered more optimal jobs showed “significant improvement in mental health”. Conversely, people who stayed on at poor-quality jobs showed a “significant worsening in their mental health”. Both of these findings are in comparison to those who remained unemployed. So, at the end of it all, the real question to ask isn’t how to get any job as quickly as possible. Rather, it goes much deeper: we need to figure out, as a society, how to build optimal and rewarding jobs for our employees. Bevan leaves us with some wise words to wrap up: If you need a new job, maybe check out one of these sites to find yourself a startup jobs. Or, even better, check out Tech.Co’s job board.
