Which Jobs Make People The Happiest?

What we do every day influences how happy we are so it makes sense that work plays a role in shaping our wellbeing. Jan‑Emmanuel De Neve and George Ward looked to the World Happiness Report and Gallup World Poll to establish which jobs makes people the happiest.

They noticed that people working in blue collar jobs (mostly a person who performs manual labour) report lower levels of overall happiness in every region across the world whether they’re in industries such as mining, manufacturing or farming they rated both they’re overall life evaluation and their specific day to day emotional experience lower than those of white‑collar workers (mostly a person who performs professional, desk, managerial or administrative work).

People in roles as executives, managers, officials, and business professionals appear to be happier across the board. Even when differences in income, education and demographic variables are taken into account, white collar workers reported fewer negative feelings like stress, worry or sadness and positive experiences such as laughter, smiling and enjoyment. Blue collar or white collar one thing is for sure, unemployment is destructive to ones wellbeing. Around the world individuals without a job report approximately 30% more negative emotional experiences in their day to day lives.

Digging deeper into the relationship between happiness and work the researchers looked at specific ratings for job satisfaction which relates to tangible factors such as pay, benefits and work life balance and engagement which deals with more intangible perks like being actively supported at your work or caring about advancing your companies interests. Even countries with extremely high ratings for job satisfaction, as high as 95% in Austria saw some much lower statistics for engagement. Only about 20% of people claimed to be actively engaged with their work with that number falling to about 10% in Western Europe and dipping even lower in East Asia.

Happiness itself has been shown to shape job market outcomes, productivity and business performance so individual and businesses alike tend to benefit from being happy at work. Once we know this the only remaining question is how we actively engage our teams in a way that’s meaningful whilst offering recognition, autonomy and the prospect of progression.