What Do Workers Really Want?

Her manager knew she was unhappy. In addition to letting her work from home, they offered her a pay raise and time off. But none of that could soothe the burnout that had been accumulating in my friend for years. Working long hours for low pay in toxic work environments is a common reality in competitive industries like design. My friend's company was not like that per se but the damage had been done already. She no longer found joy in design. A few weeks after we talked, she quit her job and went to bread school.

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People in similar jobs can have very different experiences. I interviewed two young designers from an agency where my friend used to work. Both had generously agreed to meet me, a stranger, at a bar around 7pm on a chilly Wednesday night in March so that I could ask them some questions about work. We made small talk and then started talking about what they liked and disliked about their jobs. Heavy workloads, high stakes, tight deadlines, and a lack of training on how to delegate were the first things mentioned. After airing some grievances, the tone shifted to humility and gratitude. They liked that they had creative control which was a sign of trust that they would do good work. They got to work on high profile projects, things that millions of people would see. This was incredibly rewarding.

 

"What salary would another company have to offer you to get you to work for them instead?" I asked.

 

"Definitely more than six figures," one of them said, "Maybe something like $200,000 if it was Apple. The type of work matters too. Like, I wouldn't work for a bank, not for $500,000 a year."

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The other agreed. "The promise of growth matters too," he added." Not a lot of people get an opportunity like the one I have. Working on my team, you learn a lot."

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"Totally. I know I'm not making as much as I could be making somewhere else. But you learn so much here that you just can't learn anywhere else. The way I see it, I'm getting paid to go to grad school."

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Eventually, the conversation came to an end. They told me they needed to head back to the office to finish up a few things "for another hour or two". I thanked them for meeting with me and noted the time. It was just after 8pm.

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Stories like these made me want to understand what people actually want from their jobs. To do this, I came up with a list of 50 potential work improvements, then designed a Maxdiff survey that asked people to make trade-offs between these items. I included questions about age, gender, and income, so that I could compute demographic-specific scores and rankings.

 

The following visualizations show that what you want from work depends on who you are. My hope is that they prompt more questions and deeper investigations into how we can accommodate the diverse wants and needs of our modern workforce.