Research/studies Worker health and wellness Worker Health and Wellness Office Safety Tips

Majority of employees say their jobs are highly stressful: poll

April 25, 2019
3 Comments
Mental health stress Worker health and wellness
stress level meter
Photo: donskarpo/iStockphoto

Carlsbad, CA — Nearly 4 out of 5 workers from a wide range of industries say they experience elevated stress levels because of their job, results of a recent online poll show.

Participants were asked by job search website CareerCast.com to rate their job-related stress from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest). About 78% rated their stress as 7 or higher, up from 69% in the 2017 survey. Similarly, a 2017 Gallup Poll found that 79% of workers felt stressed “sometimes or frequently” during their workday, a press release from CareerCast.com states.

Meeting deadlines was the most common cause of stress cited, at 38%. Interacting with the public and growth potential were tied for a distant second at 14%.

Sign up for Safety+Health's free monthly email newsletters and get the news that's important to you. Subscribe now

The most stressful jobs, according to scores from 11 stress factor categories, included enlisted military personnel, firefighters, airline pilots and police officers. Among the least stressful were diagnostic medical sonographers, compliance officers, hair stylists and audiologists.

The release cautions that the poll was conducted online and is not scientific. However, “the answers do reinforce what other scientific studies deduce: The workforce is stressed.”

Related Articles

Loud offices are stressful – but so are quiet ones: study

Post a comment to this article

Safety+Health welcomes comments that promote respectful dialogue. Please stay on topic. Comments that contain personal attacks, profanity or abusive language – or those aggressively promoting products or services – will be removed. We reserve the right to determine which comments violate our comment policy. (Anonymous comments are welcome; merely skip the “name” field in the comment box. An email address is required but will not be included with your comment.)

Title

Me
May 1, 2019
A lot of medical jobs are very stressful, trying to meet deadlines, patients treating staff very poorly
Post Comment Report Abusive Comment

Title

RONALD CAMPBELL
May 3, 2019
The problem with these polls is the methodology and bias. What age groups were surveyed the most? Younger workers do not tend to cope with bad stress as well as older workers. What job fields were considered? How do the respondents perceive stress? Do they accept it, resent it, thrive on it? Stress isn't necessarily bad, it largely depends on the individual. Do bomb disposal techs or fire fighters mind stress? Not likely since they know it's part of the job. The slant seems to be here that stress is a negative when that is not necessarily the case. I would like to have links accompany these articles to the metrics and supportive evidence used in making determinations of their results.
Post Comment Report Abusive Comment

Test, just a test

Job Resource
January 29, 2022
Among those with a household income of less than $50K, 73% report that money is a significant source of stress, while 59% of those with a household income of $50K+ say the same. When looking at households that are at or below the federal poverty level Provide flexibility to employees, whether it’s what they work on, when they work or how they work (how they work is particularly important for employers of frontline workers). Every single person has been impacted by the pandemic; providing flexibility at work will allow people to do their jobs while still being able to handle new stressors and responsibilities in their lives, such as a child’s education.
Post Comment Report Abusive Comment