International Week of Happiness at Work is this week, and it’s something all of us at Bark.com are huge advocates of. However, we’re aware that the majority of our professionals are self-employed, and how they feel about their jobs isn’t always recognised.
On top of our own curiosity, recent research has revealed that workplace happiness in Britain is down 20% in the last three years, with 83% of frontline workers unable to recall anything that has made them feel more positive about their working life in the last month* – pretty shocking statistics.
So, we decided to ask 40,000 of our professionals across over 43 different sectors to fill out our Happiness Survey, to see just how happy rolling out of bed in the morning makes them. We specifically asked them to rate how happy their jobs made them from one to five – with one being ‘unhappy’, and five ‘very happy’.
We discovered that when it comes to the happiest profession in the country, the title goes to Landscaping, closely followed by Dog Walkers and then Counsellors.
Here are the top ten happiest professions according to our research, as well as the percentage of people which said their job makes them ‘very happy’:
- Landscapers – 86%
- Dog Walkers – 78%
- Counsellors – 74%
- Wedding Photographers – 68%
- Architects – 65%
- Tutors – 63%
- Tennis Coaches – 62%
- Ski Instructors – 59%
- Gardeners – 55%
- Personal Trainers – 51%
Although this week is all about happiness at work, our survey also gave us some insight into some of the unhappiest professions in the UK. The ten unhappiest professions, as well as the percentage of people who said their job made them ‘unhappy’, is as follows:
- Cleaners – 73%
- Plumbers – 68%
- Accountants – 61%
- Electricians – 60%
- Life Coaches – 57%
- Window Cleaners – 56%
- Painter & Decorators – 54%
- Lawyers – 51%
- Web Designers – 50%
- Tree Surgeons – 50%
When asked ‘what is your favourite part about your job’, more than two thirds (67%) of the people working within the top five happiest sectors stated ‘working outside’. On the other hand, for the people who worked within the five unhappiest sectors, when asked what they most disliked about their job, more than half (59%) said they felt their job had ‘no real value’ – which we found surprising.
We also decided to break the data down by region to reveal which areas of the UK are the happiest at work. Here you can find the five happiest regions, and the percentage of professionals who stated their job made them ‘happy’ to ‘very happy’ in each of these areas:
- West Midlands – 71%
- City and County of Bristol – 68%
- Buckinghamshire – 62%
- Cornwall – 61%
- Wiltshire – 57%
We’ve also pulled together data for the unhappiest regions, which you can see here, as well as the percentage of respondents who selected ‘unhappy’ in our survey.
- Greater London – 48%
- Lanarkshire – 43%
- Lancashire – 42%
- Durham – 40%
- Surrey – 36%
Kai Feller, co-founder of Bark.com, said,
“Being happy at work is very important, both for an employee and an employer. The happier your staff are, the more productive they’ll be, and aside from this, employers should always want their employees to feel happy and valued.
“Given Bark.com’s hundreds of thousands of professionals across such a huge variety of sectors, we were in a good position to find out which professions are the ‘happiest’, and you never know, it might inspire someone to take the plunge and change careers!”