KUALA LUMPUR: A recent SkootJobs.com online survey found that 26.6 per cent of the respondents comprising Malaysian youth were suicidal about their jobs.
The survey among over 15,000 youths aged 18 to 35 years, found 33 per cent of them hating their jobs, while another 25.3 per cent said they were ‘OK’ with their jobs.
Only 8.7 per cent loved their jobs and another 6.1 per cent liked their jobs, according to the job site company in a statement today.
Its chief executive officer Asim Qureshi said: “I feel things are improving, but this survey shows that there is still a long way to go.
“What I can say is that we are seeing employers working much harder now than a few years ago to sell themselves to employees.
“We can see that in the quality of ads they post as they’re realising that if they want to build the best teams, they need to attract the best talents, and that hard work presumably extends to retaining the talents too.”
According to David Fernandez, a psychologist with over 20 years of experience, in the long run this (unhappy workers) would affect employers because the productivity of a person who loved his or her job outweighed one who did not.
“If employers pay more attention to the statistics at hand, it will be a great help in tackling the worryingly high levels of suicide in Malaysia. It is the second leading cause of death among Malaysian youth,” he said.
Fernandez said the easiest way to combat the problem of unhappy workers was to make the workers feel welcomed at work and encouraging them constantly.
David Low from leading venture builder LaunchPad, a company that hires both foreign and local talents, said Malaysian employers needed to see this as a wake-up call.
“Generally across Malaysia, companies suffer from high employee turnover rates which seriously affect their competitiveness.
“While many companies blame employees’ willingness to move jobs for marginally higher offers, employers need to realise that they too play a big part as they are not engaging with their young talents. That’s criminal,” he said.-BERNAMA