Feeling challenged at work can mean different things to different people. It implies that the job you have is hard, and that sometimes you need to be performing right up against the limits of your current capabilities. But it also implies that company or department leadership feels that the challenge is one you can meet, and one which might even expand that set of capabilities permanently. We asked employees, “Are you challenged at work?”
The information comes from the latest reading of an ongoing study by Comparably. More than 10,000 employees responded to the query.
A significantly larger amount of our male respondents said they indeed felt challenged compared to female respondents. There could be myriad reasons for results like this, but one must consider the possibilities that – to a certain extent – women are either expected to carry less or deemed less capably of carrying more challenging work. The other possibility is, of course, that men having a hard time getting a tough job done than women do.
African-Americans feel even less challenged at work than generalized female respondents did. There’s no hiding from the fact that both groups have had a classically harder time in the traditional American workplace than white males, and these number are most likely the result of those unfortunately reduced expectations over the long-term. Caucasians were as challenged as overall males. Responses from Hispanic/Latinos and Asian/Pacific Islanders fell right in-between overall gender results from men and women.
Employees from the executive and HR departments, as per usual, responded positively more than most to questions about the work they do. Since we often find those two departments at the top of the list, we can assume they took being challenged to be a positive thing. Way at the other end of the list, with barely more than half feeling challenged, are workers in Admin.
Employees with more elevated degrees tend to feel the most challenged at work. Oddly, workers with some college experience reported feeling more challenged than workers with a high school or Associate’s degree.
While men most often report feeling more actively challenged than women at work, that doesn’t hold true for every department. Female workers in Product, IT, Customer Support, and Admin report feeling more challenged at work than their male counterparts.
Latest reading as of December 5.
