Partner Article

PERKBOX UNBOXES: Work worries keeping employees up at night according to online searches

Perkbox, UK’s fastest growing employee benefits platform has today partnered with SEMrush, the online marketing suite, to examine what work worries are keeping employees up at night according to online searches. The findings represent searches from 2015-17 for the UK and the US.

Over the last few years, how to engage millennials in the workplace has turned into an utmost priority for most business leaders, there’s no denying it. But efforts to try and fight back these issues might not have come to fruition yet. At least that’s what the UK and US most searched terms online suggest.

Employees spend a lot of time at work counting down their days/hours/minutes before hometime. To be exact, in the UK ‘how many working days in a year?’ was searched a stunning 1,237,000 times in 2017, 2,762,000 times in the US. It’s the most searched question by keyword ‘work’ of the last three years, for both regions.

But perhaps what’s most concerning is that searches for this term increased by over 14% YOY from 2016-17 in the US and more than doubled that amount (31%) in the UK. Employee engagement is clearly still not at its strongest.

Looking at search terms by keyword ‘boss’ also reflects some interesting findings. Mainly that we’ve lost a lot of respect towards our bosses in the last few years. Two clear indicators here:

How to impress your boss?’ which was searched 21,700 times in the UK in 2015 dropped to 18,500 searches in 2017 (a 15% drop). Although, at least it’s comforting to know that our US counterparts’ drop is more than double ours (33%) over the same time period.

‘How to prove your boss is bullying you?’ increased from 1,200 searches (2015) to 4,100 (2016) and 33,500 (2017) in the UK. The US won’t make us feel better on this one sadly - searches are high but have at least decreased YOY between 2015-17. In the UK, on the other hand, they have increased by a stunning 2691%.

Chieu Cao, Co-founder and CMO at Perkbox says:

“Good bosses are essential to any organisation. But as the world of work continues to change so will the qualities and characteristics for effective management - and that’s what’s likely to be showing in these searches.

Today, employees are not looking to ‘impress’ their bosses in the same way as they used to twenty years ago. ‘Impressing’ in today’s world of work almost means ‘challenging’ your peers as opposed to taking them at their word.

As a result, bosses that are ‘caging’ their employees into strictly doing their day-to-day tasks and belittling them for their new suggestions because they’re too ‘inexperienced’ come across as bullies.

Great bosses today must possess exceptional adaptability skills, and must want to build a relationship with their team based on trust, commitment and engagement - that’s the environment where great ideas truly flourish.

Olga Andrienko, Head of Global Marketing at SEMrush says:

“Search is the first place people turn to for answers and solutions. If people turn to Google for advice when it comes to their health and relationships, they are as likely to address work issues there. Google search can be an excellent indicator for what is worrying employees across a variety of industries. All companies need to take note and pull out learnings from Google search.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Alexandra .