Japanese pick their least-stressful jobs
WHICH jobs are the least stressful? That’s the question business consulting firm Biz Hits asked working people in Japan, and some of their answers may seem surprising.
Reported in Japan Today, the poll reveals that Japan’s workers consider warehouse and factory jobs to be the lowest-stress occupations, partly due to the lack of competition between coworkers.
The Japanese company Biz Hits polled 532 working men and women across the country, asking about their stress levels and sources of stress, as well as what jobs they had done.
The survey, carried out from Oct 17 to Oct 29 this year, first looked at the factors that could make a given job feel stressful.
When quizzed on the kinds of jobs they thought were stressful, a majority of respondents picked jobs that involve working with people, or traditional highpressure office jobs.
To a lesser extent, other sources of work stress were the absence of flexibility, having too much responsibility, and physical activity.
Low stress: factory and administrative work? Surprisingly, almost 20% of the Japanese workers polled said that warehouse or factory jobs were the least stressful roles they’d had.
And this first-place ranking is no coincidence, as workers appreciate how these jobs don’t put workers in competition with each other, don’t require highlevel skills, have few potential mistakes, and have little in the way of quotas, deadlines or bosses demanding results.
For some respondents, being able to concentrate on their work quietly and alone, with minimal colleague interaction, also contributed to this low-stress feeling.
In second place, administrative roles were cited by a total of 62 respondents. Once again, working alone and with standardised tasks were given as key factors contributing to the low-stress atmosphere.
This perceived lack of anxiety could also be down to the fairly flexible pace of work, and the fact that there aren’t any very difficult tasks involved, according to the survey.
Sales comes in third place – as in retail jobs selling items like apparel or food (33 respondents) – a surprising podium position given how many workers in the poll saw interactions with others as a source of stress.
One key factor cited by the workers surveyed is the lack of strict sales quotas, making these positions particularly low-stress despite being customer-facing.
Other jobs cited include data entry (4th position), waiting tables (5th) – despite the level of physical activity involved – receptionists (6th) and truck drivers/delivery people (7th). – AFP-Relaxnews