More Than Half of GCC Employees Feel Constantly Stressed

**Tim Elliott** (0:00)
This is the Morning Drive. The latest GCC People Pulse from Ipsos and Employee Experience Exchange reveals a surprising contradiction in the region's workforce. Employees are more confident in their organizations than the global average, but half say they're under constant strain at work.
While at the same time, AI optimism is rising alongside fears over job security. So there are some seemingly disconnects there. So what do these findings mean for business leaders across the gulf? James Tarbit is Global Head of Employee Experience at the market research and public opinion consulting firm Ipsos. The man with the answers, I'm hoping, and he's here. So no pressure, James.

**James Tarbit** (0:44)
Good to meet you. Well, now, good to meet you, Susan. Thank you very much for having me on.

**Tim Elliott** (0:46)
I want to get to grips with this kind of contradiction. It's almost a conundrum, I think. The new GCC People Pulse Tracker shows, going to quote here, regional employee sentiment significantly outperforms the global benchmark. Nine points higher in advocacy, 22 points higher in confidence. Why is the GCC, the goal, first of all, bucking the global trend of worker disengagement? Let's start there.

**James Tarbit** (1:13)
So you've used a really interesting word there, which is disengagement, this concept of how do people show up at work, how do they feel about the organization they work for, and what does that mean for some kind of outcome, like engagement, whether it's engagement with their work, whether it's engagement with their organization.

**Tim Elliott** (1:28)
Yeah.

**James Tarbit** (1:30)
Data is a funny thing. You can make it do whatever you want. You can create whatever narrative you like out of data. And there are some organizations that will say that, yes, disengagement is on the increase, and people are less happy at work and less satisfied and less loyal.
Other times, you can look at it, you can say, well, it depends whereabouts you're coming from. You know, lots of the headlines about, well, workers have never been more disengaged. How far back are you looking? You're looking one, five, ten years. Broadly speaking, I would say, from our data and what we see, we haven't seen radical changes in the sentiment and the satisfaction that people have in their workplace. Actually, if you look back far enough, like back to the 1940s, 1950s, we're happier at work than we have been before.
So I think you have to look at where you're starting from what you're comparing to. Regardless of that, certainly from the data in the GCP Pulse we've just released, there's high levels of positivity in this region. There's high sentiment towards recommending the organization. There's very high levels of confidence. The confidence one I think is particularly interesting to me because it's considerably 22 points above the global average.

**Tim Elliott** (2:35)
Well, exactly right. So you've got this super high confidence, 81% of employees would recommend their employer. 54% of your respondents report being under constant strain.
We're getting to the conundrum, I guess, now. So when employees are happy with the company direction, but they're exhausted by whatever it is, the daily grind, for example, one, how can both be true? And two, what's the biggest risk for a business leader?

**James Tarbit** (3:06)
No, I think it's interesting. So we used the word strain in our question and we used it wisely because strain is the physiological or the psychological response to stress and pressure.
So when you're going through life, you come under stress, you come under pressure. It might be in your personal life, it might be in your work life. And if you react to that negatively, if that causes a negative response, that's being under strain. So strain isn't the same necessarily as stress, or it's not necessarily the same as just being under pressure.

**Tim Elliott** (3:37)
Will you stress kind of, I'm so stressed today. Yeah. No, no, you're just busy.

**James Tarbit** (3:43)
Yeah, exactly. What you're describing is the feeling that you have in response to the stressors in your life. And I think one of the interesting things working in HR and Employee Experience is, stress is an odd concept because employees generally hold their organization accountable for stress and strain, where their organization isn't necessarily responsible for that stress.

**Tim Elliott** (4:05)
You've got to blame someone, I suppose.

**James Tarbit** (4:06)
You've got to blame someone, and I guess it's easy to blame the place that you spend, well, eight hours of your waking day in your organization. But if you've had a particularly bad argument with your wife, if your youngest six-year-old hypothetically woke up at 4.45 in the morning and wouldn't go back to sleep, that puts you in a different mindset for the day. Hypothetically, a very specifically aged six-year-old daughter. Then by the time you get into work, the resilience that you have to deal with the stresses and the pressures of everyday life are different, but you're still going to say to your organisation, I feel under strain, you're stressing me out, I don't feel particularly good today. So strain is that.