Half the world’s workers feel strain from Covid-19 threats and changes to their role

Half the world’s workers feel strain from Covid-19 threats and changes to their role

More than half of employees across the world have suffered from anxiety and stress as a direct result of threats to job security and changes in working patterns.

A World Economic Forum-Ipsos survey, carried out internationally between November and December 2020, also highlighted the negative impacts of home working, an increased sense of family pressies, a struggle to achieve work/life balance, and feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Research authors at the University of Sydney estimate the cumulative cost of lower productivity, hospitalisations and suicide from the impact on employees on the world economy to be $114 billion by 2025.

Covid interference

Overall 40% of homeworkers said they felt isolated. But there are clear cultural differences in terms of the impact of WFH: whilst 24% of Japanese people WFH felt lonely, this increased to 75% in Turkey.

Of those surveyed, 32% had worked longer hours; 32% shorter hours. 30% had taken a leave of absence, while 15% had left their job. Employees talked in terms of their falling productivity, the need to work early in the mornings and late at night and problems with their home office.

The worst effects were found to have been experienced among people aged under 35, business owners, women and lower-income workers.

Holistic help

EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell said: “It’s no surprise that such a large proportion of employees have encountered serious feelings of stress and anxiety – many of them perhaps for the first time in their lives. We’ve been used to reasonable levels of job security, or at least a clear sense of our options, of having a level of control over our working life.

“The reality is that the complexity of the pandemic situation means that no single initiative from HR, no increased support from line managers, is enough to secure wellbeing. Which is why external support from a service like an EAP, and access to professionals able to talk through tangles of work/home issues, has become such an essential for now and the coming years of recovery.”