Employees are happier with how information is being shared with them at work compared to when they worked in the office earlier this year, pre-Covid-19, as revealed in the annual Information Sharing Research*

The change has been so great that the question asked in the Happiness Test, powered by WorkL, is now the highest scoring section in the survey. The overall score jumped six percentage points (66% vs 72%) with all questions related to information sharing seeing a positive increase compared to March 2020.

Reasons behind this increase in happiness range from being that managers now feel that they have to keep their teams updated more given that they are physically not together and that it’s employees who are working in isolation who can be trusted more. Another cause is that employees are finding the time without a commute to read everything that their managers are giving them.

The report also exposes the industries who are good at sharing information and those who need to improve. The Tech industry comes top and not far behind comes the Marketing & Advertising and Real Estate industries. It’s the Chemicals industry which scores the worst, followed by the Agriculture and Architecture sectors and Education is notable for a poor performance on ‘my views are heard at work.’

Those who have worked in an organization for longer, consistently feel more in the dark about the business they work for, meaning that it’s mainly millennials who are feeling happier with how and what is shared with them as they begin their careers.

The ethnicity analysis has shown that Asian employees are happier with how information is shared with them, followed by white and black employees.

Engaging Business Co-Founder, Andrew Hirsch comments on the findings; “How can this positive trend continue when employees hopefully head back to the office, even if it’s only for a few days a week? Managers must continue to ask themselves if their employees are being trained and given the information they need throughout their careers as well as to share the information which is shared with them. Organisations must create a culture of two-way communication to improve performance, both with employees and commercially.”

Engaging Business*

The data has been taken from the free WorkL Happy At Work Test which has been taken by over 20,000 employees globally since 2017 and also compares industries, management vs non-management and age. The Co-Founders are former Trade Minister and ex Managing Director of Waitrose, Lord Price, and Andrew Hirsch, former Global Chief Executive of the John Brown Group.