“Joy is not in things; it is in us.”
—Richard Wagner, Composer
As career coaches, VIM Executive Coaching is exposed to the same headlines as our clients, especially when the news concerns the topic of modern-day executive happiness. Joy has left, or is leaving, most work places.
It was Australian psychologist Dr. Craig Whitsed who, in 2021, studied institutional attitudes and change management among university academics. Long-term employees characterized the academic workplace as “stressful, toxic, and exploitative [with] cited factors that included neoliberal management, job insecurity, escalating administrative burdens, and reduced autonomy.”
It was little better in the corporate world. BambooHR, an online HR tracking organization, found through a survey of 50,000+ executives that while employee happiness rankings (last reported in August 2026) have climbed off of a 4-year low, in general, employees are still unhappy.
“New hires start off happy, while employees who are with the company for two to three years tend to be the unhappiest. Eventually, there’s a rebound: Employees with the longest tenure tend to be the most content.”
Unhappiness also seems to be a function of age.
“There is also a substantial gap when it comes to happiness among different age ranges: 26- to 30-year-olds are the unhappiest age group… which is 17 points lower than the 48 recorded by 51- to 60-year-olds.”
In 2025, the Conference Board found that “job satisfaction was 72% among workers 55 and older and just 57% among those ages 18 to 24.”
No Huge Surprises
The data on employee happiness, “joy” if you will, is not all that surprising. As the threat of AI, reduced staffing and benefits, outsourcing, international and political uncertainties, and even (down the road) vagueness over social security policy and retirement age come into view, the challenges facing younger executives is sucking the very life out of happiness.
While we try to anchor these posts with numbers and trends rather than opinion, going to websites such as Reddit (which is a huge “grid” of online forums and a massive social media platform where users share, comment, discuss and ask questions of one another) reveals that opinions of the modern workplace are dismal – at best. The advice (even encouragement) doled out includes “quiet quitting” (doing the very minimum as required to keep from getting fired), “phoning it in” (the absolute minimum effort, basically doing nothing for as long as possible), “Facetiming” (the old stand-by doing of lots and lots of busywork to impress management), and “Overemployment” (a remote work strategy for simultaneously holding down two or more jobs).
These strategies used to be called “Getting Over,” basically faking the career to allow body and soul to engage in more important stuff -- from unnecessary “work” travel to taking up hobbies while at work to disappearing from the work place for hours at a time.
The problems common to all these strategies is that careers can’t be built from them, professional development and innovation take a back-seat to self-indulgence, and like-it-or-not, employees are ultimately found out.
As organizations move more from lone wolves to teams, from fiercely independent to inter-dependency, it is not enough to merely survive. A lack of joy in the organization can only be held off for only so long. A lack of joy eats away at the soul, one’s reason for being, the very essence of what makes us look forward to stepping out into the world.
Joy Can Be Found
At the dawn of 2024, the magazine Psychology Today listed several strategies for finding joy in daily work place tasks, including the re-discovery of passion (what really makes an executive leader “tick”), finding and tapping into strengths, creating a positive mindset, reasonable setting of goals, building solid relationships, and prioritizing physical and mental health.
It is realized that on an individual basis some of the “easy tasks” listed in the article are easier said that done, for example, the re-discovery of passion or creating reasonable goals. It is why finding mindfulness and developing greater authenticity is so important.
Joy can be found, but often only after honesty and transparency replace posturing, stress and toxicity.