Lesen Sie diesen Artikel hier in der deutschen Originalfassung. “This job is wonderful, but thankless – we’re making ourselves ill.” This is how one respondent summed up the situation in our survey on working conditions in architecture. 70 to 80 per cent of the architects surveyed earn less than the Swiss median wage for university graduates. Women are under-represented at higher levels of the hierarchy, suffer from work-related health problems significantly more often, and appear to leave the industry more frequently than men from the age of 45 onwards. Office owners work the hardest, are least likely to take sick leave due to work, and have a much more positive outlook on everything. Although the smallest offices pay the least, they have the happiest employees. And although satisfaction with pay is astronomically low, the view of office culture is thoroughly positive. Many of the survey results were predictable. However, although numerous anecdotes are circulating, there are few facts about working conditions in the architectural profession. Apart from a salary survey from 2017, the professional association SIA is unable to provide ‘any representative data or figures’. At the Federal Statistical Office, the occupational group of architects is often mixed together with engineering disciplines or the construction industry as a whole. This is why the 1,657 responses to our survey are so insightful. They cover five key areas: pay and benefits, working hours and workload, health and wellbeing, communication and culture, and satisfaction and motivation. ###Media_2### ###Media_3### Thank you! Wonderful! At last! These are some of the participants’ reactions. As we spent hours poring over Excel spreadsheets and searching for comparative figures, we asked ourselves: What is working well in our industry, and what isn’t? What constitutes a ‘normal’ structural problem i...