Dissecting the effects of workload and work intensification on teacher job satisfaction

Measuring teachers’ working time through questionnaires is standard for assessing workload and job satisfaction. Yet, this often focuses only on working hours and workload, missing crucial aspects of work intensification like diversity, fragmentation, contamination, and time pressure. These factors are essential since teaching involves cyclical, flexible, and irregular hours, often outside the conventional workplace. Ignoring these elements provides an incomplete picture of how the arrangement of working time impacts job satisfaction. To address this, we analysed a unique large-scale time-diary study from Flanders, Belgium, where 7,500 teachers logged over 1,250,000 hours across seven days. These diaries allow us to transcend mere durations, offering insights into when and what activities are performed, and under what circumstances. In our analysis, we examine how workload, workload composition, and work intensification affect job satisfaction. Findings indicate that neither workload nor workload composition affect job satisfaction; however, aspects of work intensification significantly influence job satisfaction, although not always in the expected ways. These insights highlight the need to shift our focus from the quantitative aspect of hours worked to the intensification aspects of working time—particularly diversity, fragmentation, and time pressure—suggesting policies that address these complexities in teachers’ schedules to improve their job satisfaction.