Real Estate Employees Face The Most Pressure At Work

Employees in the real estate industry are the worst affected by pressure levels in work—over two-thirds admitted to being bullied and 83% said they’d worked until they were physically ill. That’s according to data from salary comparison website Emolument released today.

In addition to bullying and work-related illness, 71% of employees in real estate also said their boss invaded their personal time.

Emolument’s pressure scale is formed from an average of employees ‘yes’ responses to three questions—does your boss invade your personal time? Has the amount of work you are doing ever made you physically ill? Have you ever felt bullied at work?

What it reveals is that the real estate industry has a long way to go if it wishes to attract the new wave of employees—millennials specifically—who value well-being at work much more than previous generations.

The numbers, though, read positively for employees of the tech industry—an increasingly popular career path for many MBAs and b-school students after graduating.

Indeed, 25% of IE Business School’s 2016 MBA cohort landed jobs in tech. And a plethora of schools are reinventing their curricula to accommodate technological change—the International University of Monaco for instance has launched a tech-centric MSc in Marketing of Luxury Goods and Services to prepare students for the future of the industry.

The figures released by Emolument may act as a window into why the tech industry is such an appealing career venture for MBAs—compared to their counterparts in real estate, only 15% of tech workers said their boss had invaded their personal time, with 43% of workers becoming physically ill and 33% feeling bullied in their jobs.

Other popular MBA and business school graduate career paths don’t fare as well as the tech industry, but are still moderately ranked in comparison with real estate.

33% of employees in consulting claimed their boss had intruded on their personal time—46% and 43% admitted to working until physically ill and being bullied at work respectively.

Although over half of financial services workers had been affected by physical illness, the figures read similarly to the consulting sector—38% had their personal time interrupted and 46% felt bullied at work.

Incidentally, the sector that witnessed the highest level of bullying was the media—78% of employees had experienced it at some point in their careers, they said.

The figures were comprised across various industries and countries—the numbers don’t make for pleasant reading in Germany.

Often recognised as the EU member with the strongest economy, the country ranked poorly in each of the categories.

Over two-thirds of employees asked in the country had worked until they were physically ill, and reported being bullied—64% of workers also admitted their boss had invaded their personal time.

But whereas bad omens hover over Bavaria, their European counterparts in France ranked lowest on the pressure scale among the countries featured. Only 9% of workers said their boss intervened with their personal time.

This stems from a new employment law passed in January 2017 that gives workers the right to disconnect. It was introduced to quell the vast numbers of employees not knowing when to switch off, due to the nature of receiving emails on smartphone devices regardless of whether they are in work or not.

The new law in France could hint at a change in attitude towards the affect of technology on working hours—especially as younger generations start to make up much of the workforce.

“While transparency on company and sector performance when it comes to well-being at work is not widely available, standards are likely to improve thanks to pressure from millennials,” says Alice Leguay, CMO and co-founder at Emolument, “especially in industries where they are most ubiquitous such as technology.

“Other industries will have to play catch up if they want to retain their competitive advantage.”