The Great Gloom: Employees are unhappier than ever, BambooHR report says

BambooHR, a cloud-hosted human resources platform based in Lehi, has launched its Employee Happiness Index, a new quarterly benchmark report that analyzes eNPS or employee satisfaction results from more than 57,000 global workers across eight key industries.

The first report shows eNPS scores have declined steadily, despite both highs and lows since 2020. In fact, since June 2020, the average eNPS has decreased by 16 percent. When looking at just the past year, overall eNPS fell 11 percent from June 2022 to June 2023, deteriorating at a rate nearly 15 times faster than the previous two years combined — showing employee happiness to be worse now than during COVID.

“It’s possible the end of the Great Resignation is signaling a ‘Great Gloom,’ as options for better jobs dwindle, remote work sputters and record inflation chokes pay,” report authors said.

The report also measures how employee satisfaction changes month over month. While 2020’s dramatic swings were an outlier, the continuing downward trend of employee dissatisfaction has seen less and less volatility over time, showing how entrenched the Great Gloom is becoming.

“The new norm of ‘unprecedented times’ is causing enormous stress,” said BambooHR CEO Brad Rencher. “Today’s complex problems will require leaders to be proactive, adaptive and data-informed to beat back the Great Gloom. To succeed in a rapidly evolving world, businesses will need to prioritize employee experience in real, meaningful ways like never before. Anything less than a holistic approach to developing the mental, emotional and physical well-being of each employee, in addition to their skills, will fall short.”

The unhappiest industries are two of society’s most-critical and most-impacted by the pandemic: healthcare and education. Healthcare employee happiness has dropped 32 percent in the past three years (June 2020 to June 2023), but half of that drop occurred in just 2023 (a 16 percent decrease from June 2022 to June 2023.) From June 2022 to June 2023, education workers' happiness fell 5 percent, twice as fast as the previous two years.

Happiness is up slightly this year for workers in both the nonprofit and travel and hospitality sectors as they continue to rebound from the pandemic, despite still ranking low on happiness overall. Restaurant, food and beverage workers’ average eNPS has fallen 31 percent since June 2020, with little signs of recovery, having dropped 8 percent since June of last year alone.

Scores for happiness in the tech have “dropped off a cliff,” the report said, declining about 3.5 times faster than previous years. Average tech employee happiness scores have declined 14 percent from June of last year to June of 2023. With a less dramatic decline but higher volatility, the finance sector’s eroding happiness is tied to similar factors as tech: shrinking venture capital, bank closures, massive layoffs and return-to-office mandates.

The happiest industry is construction, as deep backlogs of work and high residential demand have created coveted job stability and increased wages. The construction industry’s average eNPS of 49 for 2023 has remained steady.

As multiple studies have shown, revenue and employee engagement are inextricably linked, with disengaged employees costing the global economy upwards of $8.8 trillion, a recent Gallup poll said, meaning gloomy employees could have stormy economic repercussions.

“HR is often viewed solely as a tactical administrative function without any meaningful metrics,” said Anita Grantham, head of human resources at Bamboo. “However, any leadership team that is only tracking sales and marketing performance is being irresponsible and overlooking their largest cost center: their people. ENPS is one of many tools businesses need to track their organization’s health and catch problems quickly and thoughtfully. When margins shrink, it’s easy to get reactionary, but playing the long game and taking care of your employees is always good business.”

The new report, “In 2023, Employees are Unhappier Than Ever. Why?,” contains the full details of the second quarter 2023 Employee Happiness Index, complete with charts and industry-specific breakdowns for construction, tech, finance, nonprofit, food and beverage, travel and hospitality, education and healthcare.

All source data is from BambooHR’s eNPS platform gathered between January 2020 and June 2023, and includes more than 1,600 companies, tracking over 57,000 unique employees’ responses from small and medium-sized organizations within the U.S. and internationally. The data analyzed includes more than 1.4 billion self-reported eNPS scores since January 2020.