The way we work is fundamentally broken. How do we fix it?

There’s a certain question I guarantee you’re always asked within a few minutes of meeting someone for the first time. “So,” it begins, “what do you do?”

We love putting other humans into mental boxes, trying to figure out who you are by what you do, and there’s no easier link to someone’s identity than the job they’ve chosen to spend one third of their lives doing.

No matter which way you look at it, the way we are working is broken.

For many people, work is the most important aspect of their lives. We work from late teens to late 60s, sacrificing the most productive hours of our day, and the most agile years of our lives, to our careers. But if we’re not careful, our job easily can become our identity.

For years, that was me. After co-founding Junkee Media, a digital media publisher for young Australians, my job and identity became intricately linked.

I often joked that my surname was ‘From Junkee’ after being introduced multiple times a week – in meetings, at conferences, in bars, to new friends – as ‘Tim From Junkee’. The two were so interwoven that even I had difficulty trying to properly separate the two.

However, when I finally decided to leave the business I’d cofounded in 2020, I spent the next few years experimenting with different ways of working that has led me to a new and sad conclusion.

Something is about to break, and if we don’t rethink our relationship with work soon, that something will be us.

Since 2021, I’ve been studying countless research papers about meaning at work, happiness, stress and other topics as I wrote Work Backwards, my new book on the future of work. I travelled the world spending time with many of the leading professors who have dedicated their lives to trying to understand these topics.

In doing so, I discovered that so many independent research studies are all flashing amber, their combined alarms warning us that our current approach is flawed. No matter which way you look at it, the way we are working is broken.

There are three large megatrends that are dominating our work psyches. The first is that most of us are simply overworked. Burnout at work, with its interlinked dimensions of occupational exhaustion, depersonalisation and a decrease in feelings of personal accomplishment, is at an all-time high across most professions. A 2022 McKinsey report indicated that almost a third of all employees worldwide experienced burnout symptoms sometimes, often or always.

Working too much is literally killing us. The World Health Organisation concluded that working 55 hours or more per week – the equivalent of the relatively common white-collar timetable of 8 am to 7 pm Monday to Friday – is associated with an estimated 35 per cent greater risk of a stroke and a 17 per cent higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared to working a standard 35 to 40 hours a week.

We are also, on the whole, disengaged with the work we are doing. Each year Gallup Research speaks to 1000 people in 160 different countries. In 2023, they found that only 24 per cent of people were actively engaged at work, 59 per cent were not engaged and 18 per cent were actively disengaged.

They categorised over three quarters of all respondents as either quiet quitting (“filling a seat and watching the clock”) or loud quitting (“directly harming the organisation”).

The third disconcerting trend is that we are increasingly apprehensive about the future. A recent PwC report confirmed that 60 per cent of Australians are concerned about the future of their work and their job prospects, and around a third of workers are already worried that their roles could be replaced by AI technology in the next three years.

All of these statistics reflect the sad reality we’re in: we’re a nation of overworked, disengaged and apprehensive workers. So, what can we do about it?

There are structural and individual ways of looking at it. Structurally, changes to the inbuilt inequality in our systems is going to take long-term political reform and pressure, however what we can control today is the way that we as individuals think about how and why we work.

One confronting and oversimplified answer is that we need to work less so that we can allow space to dial up everything else in our life that is not work: our friends, family, health and hobbies. All of these are way more important than our jobs ever will be, and paradoxically they help us to be better workers in the hours that we do.

Another is that we need to have a proper national conversation about work, at all levels of business and government. The pandemic years have given us a glimpse into the tools that we now have to rethink better ways of working, like hybrid working, four-day work weeks, flexible workplaces and artificial intelligence, and we should be experimenting with these to help rebalance our lives.

Given where all the research is heading, something is about to break, and if we don’t rethink our relationship with work soon, that something will be us.

Tim Duggan is the author of Work Backwards, Cult Status and Killer Thinking. He co-founded Junkee Media and writes a monthly newsletter called OUTLET that gives One Useful Thing Literally Every Time at timduggan.substack.com

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.