According to an 85-year-old study from Harvard University, the unhappiest jobs are most often the loneliest ones, where employees are bereft of working with a team.
Since 1938, a Harvard team has interviewed more than 700 participants from all over the world and quizzed them about their work lives.
Robert Waldinger (MD) a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Harvard Study Of Adult Development, lad one of the longest-running studies on happiness and work-life balance.
The first conclusion is that we are social beings and that we need to be with other people: teamwork is necessary not just for productivity, but for employee morale as well.
The study found that jobs that require little to no human interaction and don’t offer opportunities for interacting with peers have the most miserable employees. “If you are more connected to people, you feel more satisfied with your job, and do better work,” revealed Waldinger.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, remote work has increasingly become the norm, particularly in industries like technology, food delivery, and online retail, where employees frequently work without direct contact with their colleagues
Remote workers are not the only group vulnerable to debilitating loneliness on the job. Customer service job roles where employees have to spend all their time dealing with angry clients and little opportunity to mingle with peers can often become depressed from the stress.
The saddest jobs due to loneliness are:
Delivery drivers.
Long-haul truck drivers.
Security guards.
Jobs with daytime or nighttime shifts.
Remote jobs.
Customer service.
Retail stores.
However, in all cases, loneliness can be addressed. For remote workers, it’s recommended to change spaces occasionally and do tasks at friends’ or family’s places or at a bar. For truck drivers, choosing regular stops where one can meet people, socialize, and even eat with colleagues is advised. The key is to ensure socialization.