Workers are more satisfied with their jobs than they’ve been in nearly 40 years — at least according to The Conference Board’s annual job satisfaction report, out on Monday. But despite the top-line number being the highest, at almost 63%, since the survey’s 1987 inception, satisfaction with specific aspects of people’s jobs — including wages, benefits, workload and work-life balance — is actually dropping. 

Ask people, “Are you happy with your job?” these days, most will say yes. 

“Overall job satisfaction was up for the 13th year in a row,” said Allan Schweyer at The Conference Board.

​But only slightly. If you dig deeper and ask people how they feel about compensation, workplace culture and work-life balance at their job, there are signs of increasing dissatisfaction.

“Last year wages were more influential on job satisfaction than anything else. And this year, other factors like culture, the relationship with the supervisor, the people you work with, things like that, came up higher this year,” Schweyer said.

​People who switched jobs in the last few years are more likely to be dissatisfied with work than those who stayed put. That’s a big shift, Schweyer said.

“People may have left jobs during the pandemic because earlier on there were big wage gains to be had, and maybe people didn’t think about some of the other elements,” he said.

​Elements like workplace culture and opportunities for growth. A lot of people were also hired remotely and are now being required to come into an office, which not everyone’s happy about.

William Vanderbloemen, who founded and runs an executive search firm, said that may also be partly why people are putting more emphasis on culture.

“When you force people back in the office and they’re making a commute, all of a sudden they’re now paying attention to ‘I need to have a place that I want to go to,'” said Vanderbloemen.

​Plus, we just went through a major crisis, a global pandemic. “You have people coming out of that, really driven by something more than just getting through Monday to Friday,” he said.

​These days, Sean Higgins at the Competitive Enterprise Institute think tank said people are rethinking what they want out of work.

“The focus on work as just something that you do to earn a living has changed for a lot of people, and much more people are more interested in a job that gives them some type of satisfaction.”

​And, he said, those kinds of jobs can be hard to find.