Harder, better, faster, stronger? Work intensity and ‘good work’ in the United Kingdom

• Published date: 01 May 2022
• Author: Tom Hunt,Harry Pickard
• Date: 01 May 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12364

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Harder, better, faster, stronger? Work intensity

and ‘good work’in the United Kingdom

Tom Hunt

1

|Harry Pickard

2

1

Sheffield Political Economy Research

Institute, University of Sheffield,

Sheffield, UK

2

Newcastle University Business School,

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Correspondence

Harry Pickard, Newcastle University

Business School, 5 Barrack Road,

Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 4SE, UK.

Email: harry.pickard@newcastle.ac.uk

Abstract

Work intensity in the United Kingdom has increased,

yet gaps in our understanding of its causes and effects

remain. It is often missing in current debates around

job quality. This paper presents new evidence on the

relationship between work intensity and job insecurity

and on the negative effects of high work intensity for

health and well-being. Its findings help to inform

debates about ‘good work’.

1|INTRODUCTION

There has been a sustained increase in work intensity in the United Kingdom in the last two

decades (Green et al., 2022). Work intensity, or work effort, is a measure of the physical or

mental input an individual puts into their work. High work intensity is associated with high

workload, working to tight deadlines and working at speed. Research has shown a negative

association of work intensity with health and well-being outcomes for individuals and that

high work intensity can lead to an increase in mental health problems, particularly stress

and anxiety. In the United Kingdom, work-related stress, depression and anxiety have

increased in recent years with workload estimated to be a major cause (Health and Safety

Executive, 2020). Analysis of work intensity indicators in the European Working Conditions

Survey 2015 and the European Social Survey 2010 showed that the United Kingdom ranked

highest among the EU28 for the percentage of workers reporting that they work to tight

deadlines, second for working very hard and average for working at high speed (Felstead &

Green, 2017). Yet despite this evidence, the drivers behind why individuals in the

United Kingdom are working at high intensity and why work intensity has increased are

unclear. New evidence to better understand an issue that affects an increasing number of

individuals is needed.

DOI: 10.1111/irj.12364

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distrib ution and

reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2022 The Authors. Industrial Relations Journal published by Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Ind. Relat. 2022;53:189–206. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/irj 189

This paper contributes to meeting that gap. Through analysis of data from the Skills and

Employment Survey 2017, we examine which individuals report working with high intensity

and the potential consequences of high work intensity on health and well-being. The paper pre-

sents new evidence on the relationship between working at high intensity and insecurity at

work, namely, the anxiety that some individuals report experiencing about how their pay and

hours may change. Our evidence adds weight to the contribution by Gallie et al. (2017) that a

more comprehensive concept of job insecurity is required. They argue for greater attention to

be given to job status insecurity, where uncertainty is experienced about changes to valued fea-

tures of an individual's job, alongside the attention traditionally given to job tenure insecurity,

the likelihood of whether an individual retains their job or not. Building on this contribution,

we argue that our findings on the relationship between working at high intensity and insecurity

at work help to advance our theoretical understanding of job insecurity, raise new questions

about why some individuals work at high intensity and encourage further research into the

effects that job status insecurity can have upon individuals. We also present new evidence con-

firming the negative association between work intensity and harmful health and well-being

effects. We find that individuals who work with high intensity are more likely to experience

negative effects upon their emotional and psychological well-being and are also more likely to

work while sick. This finding highlights the risks of potentially harmful spillovers from high

work intensity for others.

In light of our findings, the paper argues that work intensity is a critical issue for under-

standing contemporary working conditions in the United Kingdom, their effects upon workers

and for efforts to improve job quality. Research into job insecurity and labour market precarity

since the 2008 financial crisis (Adams et al., 2018; Rubery et al., 2018), along with growing con-

cern about in-work poverty and atypical employment arrangements such as zero-hours con-

tracts and ‘gig’work, has seen job quality rise up the political agenda. In 2016, the UK

government commissioned The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices in 2016 (Taylor

et al., 2017) and published its ‘Good Work Plan’in 2018 (Department for Business, Energy and

Industrial Strategy [BEIS], 2018). Despite being critiqued for overemphasising the benefits of

‘flexible work’(Moore et al., 2018) and lacking empirical evidence (Nolan, 2018), the Taylor

Review stimulated a debate among policymakers about job quality and what constitutes ‘good

work’. Work intensity has been a marginal issue within that debate. Our findings provide new

evidence about why this needs remedying. They make a case for broadening the terms of the

debate about what good work is beyond the current focus on lower-paid workers to also con-

sider the conditions and well-being of higher-paid workers. The paper also makes a new con-

nection between work intensity and work-related challenges that have taken on new urgency

since the COVID-19 pandemic such as presenteeism and the higher prevalence of remote

working.

The paper begins with a review of the literature on work intensity, noting the existing evi-

dence about the causes and effects of work intensification and the challenges of investigating

work intensification. The next section describes our data and empirical approach. Our findings

are then presented before a discussion section and short conclusion.

2|THE WORK INTENSITY DEBATE

Work intensity is a measure of work effort and is defined by Green (2001, p. 56) as ‘the rate of

physical and/or mental input to work tasks performed during the working day’. Work

190 HUNT AND PICKARD