Longer commute to office results in lower job satisfaction: Study
If you are someone who complains constantly about commuting longer distance to reach office, you aren’t alone. We all know how taxing commuting to work can be if you have to regularly pave through insane traffic every morning to reach your destination and vice versa. Especially, people who are from the metro cities of India, know the drill, right? Now even a group of researchers have found that people who travel longer distance to work enjoy less work satisfaction than those who stay near their office and walk to their workplace.
The link between commuting and work satisfaction
A team of researchers from the University of the West of England has found a link between the time a person spends commuting and how satisfied he feels at work. According to the study conducted, ‘each extra minute of commuting time reduces both job and leisure time satisfaction—though not overall life satisfaction—and increases strain and worsens mental health for workers.”
20 extra minutes of commuting is as demotivating as 19% pay cut
As per the same study, when a person commutes 20 additional minutes to work, he feels as demotivated as getting a 19 per cent pay cut. This means, in order to make them enjoy better job satisfaction, they need to earn 19 per cent extra!
Commuting is more stressful than their job!
According to a report published in the Harvard Business Review, “When Ford Motor Company surveyed 5,500 people in six European cities, many ranked commuting as more stressful than their jobs, moving into a new house, or going to the dentist. In a 2006 survey of 909 working women in Texas, conducted by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues, respondents said the morning journey between home and the office was, on average, the least enjoyable activity of their day; the evening trip home was the third worst.”
The transition from personal to professional makes it difficult
According to experts, commuting from home to office or vice versa is the moment of transition from personal to professional. When a person arrives in office, he has to don his professional hat and switch roles—for example, from a caregiver he might have to turn into an aggressive marketing person. And when he travels from office to home, there is again a role reversal. Such transitions require a shift in mindsets and that can be very stressful. Also, travelling for longer hours is physically daunting, thereby it leaves a person with no energy to enjoy life after office. So, it does not come as a surprise that travelling to work for longer hours can make a person enjoy his work less than those who just have to cover a few kilometres to office.
How to make commuting less tiring
According to the report published in the Harvard Bussiness Review, in order to make the transition smoother, office-goers can try having some commuting rituals. Two researchers concluded that, “Those who maintained small routines on the way to work—such as checking the news on the train or having a look at the calendar for the day—felt more excited about the day ahead, more satisfied with their jobs, and less stressed-out than those who had no set routine.” The researchers explained that when people have lower anxiety levels before engaging in stressful tasks, it increases their enjoyment for the activity at hand, which even helps them recover from feeling low after experiencing loss or failure.
(All images used here are representational)