The Seafarers Happiness Index is a means of engaging with crews on merchant ships to discuss the key challenges facing them, and
to gauge their levels of satisfaction.
This is an ongoing study measuring how happy people are about the various elements of their working life gives a picture of the real successes
and problems within seafaring.
It also provides learning opportunities to improve and develop.
The Index is made up of a standard set of ten questions and these cover key areas, such as mental and physical health, diet, rest, workload,connectivity, training, access to shore leave, as well as relationships at home and on board.
These are answered anonymously, and seafarers are encouraged to complete their answers during each trip.
The latest Index showed a seafarer happiness result of 6.69 in the first quarter of 2018, a figure averaged across the key areas of seafarers’
work lives.
This shows a rise from the previous Index report- and so we see that seafarer happiness is on the up.
If you are lucky to have a good chief cook,
you will be happy. But if not, all crew will be
affected when performing their duties.Harmony and unity on board is very
crucial in the safety and success of
operations on the ship.
To ignore or downplay the value of happiness in seafarers is to trample on the concept of these very human
constructs.
Seafarers prefer a happy life to an unhappy one, hopefully we can all agree on that much, and we need
to be able to make life as happy as possible, within the realities of what it is to be a seafarer.
GENDER
Female seafarers actually marked
themselves lower than the
general average this time around.
Which was a significant shift from
previous Seafarers’ Happiness Index Results
RANKS
Deck crew and officers tended to
be happier than their engineering
counterparts – and the middle
cohort of ranks, second officer
and third engineer, chief officer
and second engineer, performed
better. They recorded the highest
results across the board.
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