One of the many criticisms you could make of us as a business is a reliance on company sponsored surveys to generate news stories about workplaces. We don’t publish all of them, you’ll be relieved to hear. The ones we reject are usually too nakedly self-serving. Even the ones that have some degree of statistical cred must be taken with a pinch of salt, distorted as they might be by loaded questions, self-reporting, deliberate lying and other response biases. Our attitude towards these polls is that they often contain some element of truth, especially if results are repeated over a period of time. When surveys over many years tell you that noise is the biggest gripe about office life, you should believe them.
We’ve spoofed ourselves recently as we always do on April Fool’s Day by suggesting that if you were to believe all of these polls, you’d conclude that nobody was actually doing any work. Much as the deodorant manufacturers of the 20th Century built up their business by pathologising the funk of humans, so too have we seen the patholigisation of work. In both cases there are real issues to be addressed, but things can go too far. By pathologising and medicalising real issues like the open plan, commuting, offices and work itself, we drive out nuance. These are complicated issues and not everybody experiences them in bad or the same ways.
The answer to such commercially driven narratives is not necessarily to rely on academic surveys. These too are subject to similar biases and often have Pantene-level sample sizes, frequently consisting of the researchers’ own students.
A recent development has been a proliferation in the numbers of surveys we get which are offered up to us as raw data from online polls or based on something like Google Trends. Often these will include rankings of the Ten Best Cities for Digital Nomads or whatever, based on criteria imposed by the sponsor.
Now, I’m flattered that PR companies think we have the resources of the Watergate era Washington Post, so we have the time and people available to unpick a spreadsheet, but these too go straight in the bin. But this must work in some way, or they wouldn’t keep doing it.
So too the reliance on Tik Tok trends to generate content. Sometimes these have interesting things to say, but most are just based on some pre-existing or baked-in behaviour that has been dressed up with a new, two-word label consisting of a capitalised adjective and a noun.
The Great Repackaging
People who follow me on LinkedIn will know how I feel about this stuff. Most are as fleeting as the morning dew, but some are taken seriously, such as The Great Resignation. The truth of that piece of post-covid hysteria was that it was a repackaging. A lot of people always want to do something else and they’ll tell you if you ask them.
I’ve been getting press releases from recruitment firms for long enough to know that if you ask a sample of people at any time about their attitudes towards what they do for a living, a large proportion will tell you they want to change. Often firms carry out these polls at the turn of the year while people are ruminating on life, which is why for the past 25 years the results show consistently that between a third and a half of people will say they are planning to change in the forthcoming year. Most don’t.
A corollary of this is the poll that suggests that if people don’t get x or y, they will quit their jobs. I can see that might be true if they have grown accustomed to something important like flexibility, but these too are often about less important matters, linked to whatever product or service the sponsor is flogging. Nor do I think that most people enjoy the luxury of being able to ‘quit’. What they mean is look for a new job that offers more of what they would like. This is perfectly normal.
Another distortion we often see in these surveys is one of demographics. Take the clichéd notion that the ‘office should be worth the commute’. The assumption about this seems to be that we are referring to a specific type of worker in a specific location. A knowledge worker in a major city who lives in the commuter belt.
There are many people in this situation, but the arithmetic is very different for most who may have a short car journey, cycle ride or walk to work. While we have been trying to resolve this equation along with the related luxury maths of how many days people should spend in an office every week, for the majority of people the resolution would involve their employers not insisting they are in the office at 9 am, which would have the added bonus of destressing and enriching parents and carers.
Now a new distortion is on the horizon and inevitably it involves AI. This week, a published survey on maternal healthcare in the US was based on data generated by an AI polling company called Aaru as part of a process called ‘silicon sampling’ which emulates public opinion polling on specific issues.
Now, whether this is more or less useful or accurate than actual human polling remains to be seen. One thing I do know is that we will be around to see it. Whether we want to be is another matter. Ask us in a few years.
Mark is the publisher of Workplace Insight, IN magazine, Works magazine and is the European Director of Work&Place journal. He has worked in the office design and management sector for over thirty years as a journalist, marketing professional, editor and consultant.
Image: Sedus
April 8, 2026
A word or two on what people tell you about work and workplaces
by Mark Eltringham • Comment, Wellbeing, Workplace design
We’ve spoofed ourselves recently as we always do on April Fool’s Day by suggesting that if you were to believe all of these polls, you’d conclude that nobody was actually doing any work. Much as the deodorant manufacturers of the 20th Century built up their business by pathologising the funk of humans, so too have we seen the patholigisation of work. In both cases there are real issues to be addressed, but things can go too far. By pathologising and medicalising real issues like the open plan, commuting, offices and work itself, we drive out nuance. These are complicated issues and not everybody experiences them in bad or the same ways.
The answer to such commercially driven narratives is not necessarily to rely on academic surveys. These too are subject to similar biases and often have Pantene-level sample sizes, frequently consisting of the researchers’ own students.
A recent development has been a proliferation in the numbers of surveys we get which are offered up to us as raw data from online polls or based on something like Google Trends. Often these will include rankings of the Ten Best Cities for Digital Nomads or whatever, based on criteria imposed by the sponsor.
Now, I’m flattered that PR companies think we have the resources of the Watergate era Washington Post, so we have the time and people available to unpick a spreadsheet, but these too go straight in the bin. But this must work in some way, or they wouldn’t keep doing it.
So too the reliance on Tik Tok trends to generate content. Sometimes these have interesting things to say, but most are just based on some pre-existing or baked-in behaviour that has been dressed up with a new, two-word label consisting of a capitalised adjective and a noun.
The Great Repackaging
People who follow me on LinkedIn will know how I feel about this stuff. Most are as fleeting as the morning dew, but some are taken seriously, such as The Great Resignation. The truth of that piece of post-covid hysteria was that it was a repackaging. A lot of people always want to do something else and they’ll tell you if you ask them.
I’ve been getting press releases from recruitment firms for long enough to know that if you ask a sample of people at any time about their attitudes towards what they do for a living, a large proportion will tell you they want to change. Often firms carry out these polls at the turn of the year while people are ruminating on life, which is why for the past 25 years the results show consistently that between a third and a half of people will say they are planning to change in the forthcoming year. Most don’t.
A corollary of this is the poll that suggests that if people don’t get x or y, they will quit their jobs. I can see that might be true if they have grown accustomed to something important like flexibility, but these too are often about less important matters, linked to whatever product or service the sponsor is flogging. Nor do I think that most people enjoy the luxury of being able to ‘quit’. What they mean is look for a new job that offers more of what they would like. This is perfectly normal.
Another distortion we often see in these surveys is one of demographics. Take the clichéd notion that the ‘office should be worth the commute’. The assumption about this seems to be that we are referring to a specific type of worker in a specific location. A knowledge worker in a major city who lives in the commuter belt.
There are many people in this situation, but the arithmetic is very different for most who may have a short car journey, cycle ride or walk to work. While we have been trying to resolve this equation along with the related luxury maths of how many days people should spend in an office every week, for the majority of people the resolution would involve their employers not insisting they are in the office at 9 am, which would have the added bonus of destressing and enriching parents and carers.
Now a new distortion is on the horizon and inevitably it involves AI. This week, a published survey on maternal healthcare in the US was based on data generated by an AI polling company called Aaru as part of a process called ‘silicon sampling’ which emulates public opinion polling on specific issues.
Now, whether this is more or less useful or accurate than actual human polling remains to be seen. One thing I do know is that we will be around to see it. Whether we want to be is another matter. Ask us in a few years.
Mark is the publisher of Workplace Insight, IN magazine, Works magazine and is the European Director of Work&Place journal. He has worked in the office design and management sector for over thirty years as a journalist, marketing professional, editor and consultant.
Image: Sedus