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Only one in four people, less than a quarter in the States, report high workplace well-being.
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That's really, really worrying.
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The way you drive home from the office, the mood that you're in, will impact your wife, your children.
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This feeds into our societies and our communities, big time.
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We should not have had to write a book on why workplace well-being matters.
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The world of work, in which God knows how much time we all spend, it ought to be naturally a positive place, and it isn't.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed.
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Today's guest is someone who's going to help us do exactly that.
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I'm speaking about Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral scientist at the University of Oxford and director of well-being research center.
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Jan is a leading expert on the economics of well-being and co-leads the world's largest study on how people feel at work.
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His latest book, Why Workplace Well-Being Matters, explores how happiness at work shapes our lives, businesses, and society.
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If you want to lead better, if you want to know how to have happiness in your teams, in your workplace, and in your life, go and grab a copy of this book.
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I promise you, you won't regret it.
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Please welcome to the podcast Jan-Emmanuel De Neve.
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Jan, it is great to have you here.
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Jay, thank you for having me.
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It's so wonderful to get the opportunity to to reconnect as well.
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First question I want to ask you is, you're part of the biggest study on happiness in the world.
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What's the most heartbreaking thing that you found?
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In the Western world, especially in the United States of America, a breakdown of our social tissue.
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And that underpins the decline of well-being as we pick it up, thanks to the Gallup World Poll metrics, the decline in the ranking of the United States in particular, which has now tumbled out of top 20 this year again, whereas about a decade ago the US had been 12th or 19th in the world.
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And that I think is a worrying decline given how important the United States is, needless to say, and we've been digging into why there's this gradual decline in the US in terms of their well-being as measured through how people experience their lives themselves, so self-rated life satisfaction.
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And what we're finding is huge inequality.
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So there's a very wide distribution in terms of well-being.
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And then there is the inequalities also in terms of generational differences.
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So we find that youth, especially in the United States, have tumbled off a cliff in terms of their self-reported well-being, the way that they experience their lives.
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If you were to look just at youth in America by itself, they they'd be 62nd or 63rd in the World Happiness Report ranking.
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Look at the 60-plusers, they'd still be in the top 10 of the World Happiness Report.
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And I think that's really telling.
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But I think if there's one thing that stood out in recent years, looking at from the World Happiness Report general well-being perspective, it would have to be the precipitous decline in well-being in the US in particular.
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Why are younger people becoming unhappier?
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There's a variety of things that play with youth.
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People are swift to point in direction of social media, but I think that's a little a little easy.
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It's easy to vilify the tech companies, but if you actually talk with youngsters and do qualitative focus groups, what you find is it's affordability.
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First and foremost, affordability of studies.
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The cost of studying has outpaced inflation by a long mile in the United States, and so you find that that's a real worry.
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The second thing that comes to the fore when you really dig into why youth is is off a cliff is the fact that they're very worried about the future of work. And I cannot blame them.
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How in the world you're going to catch up with ChatGPT at this point in terms of studying engineering or law or medicine or what have you?
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And so there's real worries and concern about what they'll be doing.
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And so this sort of social contract that's always been there about, "Okay, we'll always do better than our parents and every generation will make its step forward."
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There's a lot of doubt around that at the moment.
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And then there's no way around that.
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There's also social media.
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Um social media is an extraordinary tool but that does distract us from a lot of the things that would otherwise be more productive or potentially more purposeful.
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And now social media has done a lot of good and has the power of to do a lot of good and I think your podcast and and the wisdom nuggets of wisdom that you share through social media are extraordinary.
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But we really ought to be thinking hard, kids, parents, policy makers all together to see can we put the social back into social media somehow and do it together?
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So let's not cut corners and sort of blame social media and ban social media.
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No, we we ought to really work together.
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It's not something you're going to be putting back in the box anytime soon.
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It's here to stay, social media.
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It's about making it work for everybody in a way that is positive for well-being.
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So the drop in youth is a combination of factors.
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It's it's uncertainty, anxiety, distraction, and affordability issues for for youth at this point.
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So they're real they're really sort of an existentialist zeitgeist crisis that they're having to deal with and that's not easy for them to grapple with.
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And we pick it up in their self-reported life satisfaction.
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Yeah, I really like the fact that when you've actually sat down and talked to individuals, you don't get this glazed over view of what the issue is. Right?
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You get a very specific set of factors that are affecting well-being.
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When you talk about affordability, you mentioned education. >> Mhm.
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What has shifted in the affordability of education?
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How different is it in the last 30, 20, 10 years from when these 15 to 24-year-olds, their parents were growing up to where they are now?
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What have been the biggest shifts in affordability?
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Everything has become more expensive, but if you look at the cost of education, the cost of tuition fees has has risen quicker and faster than than inflation.
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Because companies and organizations require you to have degrees, and so there's sort of a monopoly, if you will, at a national scale around you have to have a degree in order to obtain a good job.
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And so then obviously there's a a premium to be extracted.
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Um and and and in markets, that's the way economics tends to work.
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But now I think there's going to be a lot of pressure being put on that now because it's not quite clear the extent to which learning through universities is going to happen and how that can be compared to learning through other means that might be less expensive.
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If Chat GPT is so good, as we've all seen it in action, and the other um uh large language models, then the whole question around learning and how to use your skills is going to be very different.
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Maybe other types of jobs, nursing, uh uh plumbing, uh the kinds of stuff that Chat Chat GPT is not very good at, as far as I can tell, maybe those kind of jobs will come to the fore and people will opt back into those kind of jobs.
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They will not always feel a need to necessarily go into tertiary education of the liberal arts type.
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We hire a lot of people and I can't remember the last time I looked at what college someone went to. Mhm.
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Because it's just not become an important factor because the skills that we need to grow Mhm.
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are not the skills that people are learning in college.
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We are expecting them to be able to prove it on the job, to show experiments, to create work.
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And of course, we're not hiring at the scale of the largest companies in the world.
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So, there's a different uh task for sure, but it's interesting to hear you say that because I think we are moving away from that as time goes on. I think so.
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Um depending on what career path someone takes.
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Yeah, and I think tertiary education, universities and colleges in particular, they're in for a ride because they'll have to both substantively the courses of what what the skills that are being taught cannot be outdated.
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And universities, they take a long time to change, but ChatGPT is really catching up.
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When you talk about uncertainty, when I was at college, we were being told that everyone should dream of being a data scientist. Like that was the goal.
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That's what would be the ideal career.
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If you were talking to parents today, what skill would you encourage them to think about exposing their children to or college students to think about learning in the uncertain environment that we're at right now?
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No, and frankly, myself, the team, ChatGPT does all the coding at this point for us.
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But it may not be far off that the real skill in the future of education will be asking the right questions and not the skill set to find answers through data science or engineering cuz tools and machinery and large language models will do that for us.
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But we still need to ask the right questions to prompt the machines to do the job for us.
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So, I think maybe we'll shift back to questions and the right questions rather than the skills to make and build out answers to questions posed by somebody else.
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I'll be teaching for the first time at University of Oxford a class on the science of well-being in business, policy, and life.
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And the fact that this new elective was over subscribed from never having been taught, a bit like Laurie Santos at Yale, uh though in this case within the business school, uh with a about a third of the entire MBA cohort signing up for this, a class that never been taught, no word of mouth, no nothing, I think also speaks to the question you just raised around uncertainty, looking for answers, asking the right questions.
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And so, that's exactly what we'll be doing in this class and speaks to the point we just raised.
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I will be asking in this class more questions than providing answers.
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And we will debate, it will be asking questions around purpose and meaning and and the role of income and well-being and and how much is enough um and what's the human case, not just the business case for investing in workplace well-being and so on and so forth.
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And so, maybe that's a sign of the times that I'm starting to teach this class with Oxford and that students are signing up for it in droves and it's about asking the bigger questions rather than just looking for tools and tricks and skills.
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I agree with that approach and we grew up at a time where answers made you smart. Mhm.
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And today we're living at a time where questions make you smarter because the answers are available. It's easy.
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Wikipedia, Google, chat everything. >> Yeah, it's it's easy.
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You >> The smartness comes through the right question. Exactly.
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And I couldn't agree with you more that whether it's art, whether it's math, whether it's engineering, whether it's design, it's like do you know what you're searching for?
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I want to go over what you just said about the conversations and the debates you want to start in your class and I'm so glad that that class exists because I think it's been needed for a long time, especially in business schools because the people that are at the business schools are going to go off to be leaders of organizations and companies and if they don't understand the value of well-being Mhm.
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it's pretty impossible for that that anyone else will.
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You just said there a question that you think people would debate is how much is enough.
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I wanted to get the empirical take on how much is enough.
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So, first and foremost, two Nobel Prize winners, Angus Deaton and Danny Kahneman.
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In 2010, they published a paper showing that you may remember the figure, about $75,000 was the golden number.
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Now, truth be told, it depends also on how you define well being.
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If it's about sort of positive experiences in the moment, then yes, they were right back in the days.
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Obviously, you would have to inflation adjust it today. It was about 75k.
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But if you if what matters to you is sort of life evaluations, how you evaluate the quality of life as you stand back, then income plays a bit more of a role and it went up a bit higher, like 100 120,000.
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Again, I would need to inflation adjust.
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The thing that all economists and all of the science agrees on is there's huge diminishing marginal returns to further income.
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And so for as soon as you reach about 100 120 150,000, then it becomes difficult uh more and more difficult to pick up differences in well being for further income.
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>> The relationship is logarithmic as I say.
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To have the same impact on your well being from moving from 20,000 to 40,000, you would need another 40,000.
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To then have the same impact again, you would need from 80 to 160,000.
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To then have the same impact on your well being again, you would need to move from 160 to 320,000.
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And so that's how it sort of creeps up.
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There's continues to be increases, but it requires way more money to find the additional increase.
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Now, you asked the question why.
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And the reason is unless you're inheriting money or you're winning the lottery, you still have to work for it.
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And you're starting to make compromises.
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And you're making compromises in terms of work-life balance, seeing your friends and family, stress, you're rising in the hierarchy, you're responsible for other people.
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And so there's trade-offs at that point.
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And while yes, more money may allow you to do more things and live bigger and nicer, you will be missing out on other drivers of well being.
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And this is where we come back to the science of well being is that in our societies we've been led to believe in particular so in the United States that money does make you happy and the more the better.
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Yes, but the trade-offs you're starting to make are real and they're real in terms of sharing meals with your friends and family.
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They're real in terms of looking after your own health, physical and mental.
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And so all in all, uh it weighs it back down and you find little or no difference anymore in people's life satisfaction above a certain point.
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And so there is a bit of an optimal point for well for for well-being in terms of income.
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It's interesting because it's not that we don't all want and need more money.
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It's the fact that those roles and responsibilities come with more work, more sacrifices, more choices, more more difficult options, could be more stress mentally and physically if you're not prioritizing that.
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And and it's interesting to think about that because you would hope that if people had more money that they would be able to reduce some of their problems, which is true.
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I think it can decrease some of your issues, but it's interesting to think about the proportion of happiness and You're absolutely right, but only up to a certain point.
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So the real issues that you're solving with money, the deeper issues like daily anxieties, paying off your mortgage, paying off your loans, paying for the basic necessities.
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You're there after say 100 or 120,000 dollars.
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Unless you live in like New York or LA or London. Yeah, yeah, of course.
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But but I I answer it this is always a complex dependent and inflation needs to be inflation adjusted etc. etc.
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But the the trade-offs start to weigh in after that sort of saturation point way more heavily than the benefits of further money at that point. >> Interesting. And that's real.
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And but the fact of the matter is the proof of the pudding is in the eating and the data's right there.
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I could show you right now if I brought up my computer that extraordinary line.
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So if you don't have much money, it matters a great deal cuz it solves real issues as you were alluding to.
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But after a certain point, obviously depending where you are, LA, New York will be a bit more, but after certain point the basic the amenities, necessities, the the real worries are taken care of, then aspiring for even more money will by all means go for it, but beware of the trade-offs you're making.
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And then that will start putting a real break on the the opportunity for improving your well-being because you're going to be your integrity might be out of the window.
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You'll be more responsible, stress, family, work-life balance, physical, mental health, everything we've just alluded to.
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And the fact of the matter is people underestimate these other drivers of one's well-being.
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In our societies and particularly in the United States, there's this real focus on wealth and income.
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And everything around us from marketing and so on and so forth pushes us to think in the direction of, okay, got to make more money, it'll make me happier.
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But we forego and underestimate the importance of something like the social connection, running into people, having shared meals, and and we can talk about this.
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We've got new data on this.
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It's just just extraordinary.
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In the United States, and this is brand new research just come out in the World Happiness Report published on March 20th of this year, International Day of Happiness.
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And one of the most We always knew social capital, the importance of social connections.
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In the field, we know that people underestimate the importance of social ties or social highs.
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I had no idea just how powerful and important our social lives were for our well-being until this.
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In the United States, we've got data on how many of your meals are being shared on a week-to-week basis.
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So, how many of your lunches, how many of your dinners.
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So, a variable that runs from zero to 14, seven lunches, seven dinners.
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If 14, we don't have anything about breakfast.
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But anyway, lunches and dinners.
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In the US, on average, people now have about seven of the 14 meals together.
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That means half of your meals on average in the US are essentially dining alone.
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What we've seen is an increase of 53% to be precise in America over the last two decades in dining alone.
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If you slice and dice it by age groups, it's been an increase of an almost doubling for youth.
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So, below 30-year-olds are now almost twice as likely to be dining alone on a day-to-day basis as compared to two two decades ago.
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Now, why does this matter?
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Going back to the point we made earlier, is if you run a regression, think of it as a horse race between variables, income, social connections as proxy through number of shared meals, employment status, etc.
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You would obviously think that while your income and employment status matter more, that coefficient will come in more strongly. No.
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The simple indicator, that number around how many of your meals over the past week were shared, is as influential in explaining people's life satisfaction as their relative income and their employment status. >> No way. Yes, way.
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And it's it's really striking.
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So, even for us, this was a real sort of eye-opener.
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Oh my god, we we knew social capital and social ties were important, didn't quite realize just how important.
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And we've been very lucky to have to be able to get information around sharing meals.
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Um, we we've got this over the past two decades, thanks to the American Time Use Survey, and we have it globally thanks to the Ajinomoto module on the Gallup World Poll, which has just gone in for 1 year.
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And my god, there's such variation in the extent to which people have social lives around the world.
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There's countries where out of the 14 lunches and dinners in a week, there's countries where there's only three or four meals shared.
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And then there's others, mostly Latin American countries, where it's sort of like 12, 11 12 out of the 14 meals are being shared.
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In the US, it's about seven. Wow.
18:44
Why why is it that millennials are becoming unhappier and boomers are becoming happier?
18:52
So, first of all, you got to know, and I'm sure you know this, Jay, but in one of the what we thought was one of the universal facts in well-being science was the U-shape.
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The The relationship between age and well-being is one that has the form of a U.
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People start higher in terms of well-being, so lose that happiness and well-being over the years, reach a midlife crisis.
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So, everybody talks about midlife crisis, but you actually pick it up in the data, it exists.
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And then from there on, in the midlife crisis over like early 40s, at the peak of of the pressures, um mortgages, small children, responsibilities at work, and all of it coming together.
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And then from there on, on average, people go up again in terms of well-being as measured through their satisfaction with life.
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Uh and only at the very, very end you see it come down again when physical issues and disabilities come into play.
19:41
What we're finding in the United States in particular, but generally in the West, is that first leg of the U, the high what is meant to be high levels of well-being for youth, that is gone.
19:51
So, I got in the news quite a bit with quotes along the lines of youth in America are experiencing their midlife crisis today.
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We find that that is empirically the case.
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So, this is long-thought uh universal truth that we thought was the case around the U-shaped relationship between well-being and age is just just gone.
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Now, the question of course is why.
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And in the United States, we touched upon it earlier, there's a number of reasons um why we believe youth are um having their midlife crisis today.
20:19
And it's got to do with the affordability crisis.
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It has to do with absolute distrust and anxiety, worry about the future of work for them, and the questions that raises about decisions around studies, for example, now.
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And then social media being a very um a force for distraction, and not really social uh or social as it should be.
20:39
And all of these things sort of come together, and you see it come together in the likes of people feeling more more lonely.
20:45
And if we look at the extent to which people share meals together, you find that youth, especially in America, is now almost twice as likely to be dining alone on a on on a on a day-to-day basis as compared to two decades ago.
20:57
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21:56
What does loneliness actually do to us?
21:58
Because we talk about it a lot, but what does it actually do? A lot.
21:59
So, obviously loneliness is a bigger concept and and the indication that we have here is the extent to which we share meals and that's coming down.
22:08
So, in in the World Happiness Report this year, we dig into this precisely question you're after.
22:13
And what we're finding is if you are less social, so if you have less social interactions, in other words, you're more lonely, you will have less social support. Duh, needless to say.
22:24
So, if you're having less social connections, it means that in times of need, you'll have less people to call on.
22:29
You also are less socially trusting of others.
22:32
People and Jay, this is important and I owe this to Professor John Helliwell, the founding editor of the World Happiness Report, who while we did the chapter three, he did the chapter two.
22:40
He found that um and he's always been very strong on this particular aspect.
22:45
We underestimate the kindness of people by a factor of two.
22:48
And so, left to our own devices and by ourselves, lonely, we underestimate the kindness of others.
22:53
So, we need to get in touch and in front of other people to find out that they're actually all right, other people.
22:59
Left to our own devices and in echo chambers within social media, we obviously um polarized in our thinking.
23:09
And so, this too, the New York Times really dug into this when I spoke with them, is loneliness, as for example proxy to the fact that we're having less and less meals shared, is also important in in sort of radicalization of opinions.
23:24
Because if you think about it, and I don't have strong empirical evidence for this, this is more self-conjecture, but still, when you speak with other people, everybody has slightly different views on the world, their their frames of of of views of the world and other people.
23:39
But the more you speak with people, the more you moderate your own views.
23:40
You generate a sense of empathy necessarily, and you find that your views need to be moderated because not everybody thinks the same way.
23:48
If we are less and less social, we eat by ourselves or with our phones in our hand rather than with others around the table, and this is clear in the data, then it's also one of the reasons why we're polarizing in terms of opinions.
24:00
It's because we're no longer moderating our views very much, and are stuck in our echo chambers.
24:04
And so, the result of which is more polarized political behavior.
24:09
And this, by the way, is very important generally because wonderful colleague and co-author of this book, George Ward, his early studies, and some of them co-authored, including published in the American Journal of Political Science, we find that how you feel about life is predictive of your political behaviors, your voting behavior. Interesting. In what sense? Talk to me about that. Well, think about it.
24:30
>> If you're unhappy with the way life is going, you're not in favor of the incumbent, obvious.
24:33
And so, you're way more likely to vote um anti-system.
24:38
And as in the United States, we've now seen the last decade as exemplified in the World Happiness Report, you see a decline in general well-being.
24:44
There's inequalities, there's people are happy, but people are less happy.
24:48
But generally speaking, decline in in well-being in the US particularly so for youths, you find thus a more fertile ground for anti-system votes, populist votes.
24:58
Now, that can go towards a a Donald Trump, that can go towards a Bernie Sanders, depending on a number of indicators, but the fact of the matter is the increasing number of people being unhappy makes them angry, makes them want to vote against the current system.
25:16
And that is most reasonable and most normal, but we are picking this up very strongly.
25:22
And what's really important here to know is that this is really an advantage of our kind of data, subjective well-being data.
25:29
They capture how people feel about their lives, and it's how they feel about their lives that makes them choose and vote a certain way.
25:37
And what's really powerful, and we owe this to George and others, we really find that if you compare this with economic proxies, it's how we feel about life is a lot stronger in predicting how we vote.
25:49
Quick example, GDP in the United States is growing, but well-being is dropping.
25:55
So, if you look at it from a traditional economics perspective, like an alien landing and you're neoclassical economist alien, and you arrive and you see the United States, and you're like, "Oh, wait, they're doing well, there's growth, so people must be happier cuz there's more growth and the GDP has grown as compared to last year." And it isn't.
26:10
And yet you have these and well-being is dropping, and as a result you obviously have these anti-system votes.
26:15
Now, I don't want to be scaremongering, but when we picked up these big differences where there's growth and yet people are getting unhappier, the first time this was picked up, and we owe this to John Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, was the Arab Spring.
26:28
If you looked at Egypt, Syria, remember this is now about a decade and a half ago, the Arab Spring, you would have said, "Things are going great in Egypt.
26:35
They had almost double-digit growth."
26:38
And yet well-being was dropping. Guess what happens?
26:40
The next time in our textbook on well-being science, we read the the analysis for the Hong Kong riots.
26:46
Back in 2019, youth in Hong Kong really stood up, and there was real riots, and there was real real concerns.
26:54
If you look at the GDP of Hong Kong, it is through the roof in a decade before.
26:58
It's It's like plus 60% in the space of a decade.
27:01
Yet, if you look at life satisfaction, especially that of youth, it's gone down.
27:05
It was minus 10 or 12% over that same decade. Wow.
27:07
So, you're looking at from the outside and saying like, "Wait, whoa, growth, fantastic."
27:13
And you look at how people feel in that society, and it's actually come down.
27:17
And it's when you see that difference, and obviously we're now starting to pick it up greatly in the United States as well, where there continues to be economic growth, but well-being negative and dropping, that fuels anti-system sentiment, and obviously makes it a fertile ground for for for discontent and and possibly more.
27:36
Yeah, it's incredible to see the connection between something like individual loneliness and then national outrage. Yes. >> Right?
27:44
Like that kind of You don't necessarily put the two together.
27:46
And one should, because it's the loneliness that makes us unhappy, and being unhappy makes us not wanting the current system and voting anti-system and thus uprooting everything. Mhm.
27:58
Um and so, that's sort of the linkage is there.
28:01
And this is where well-being science and actually capturing how people feel, which is what you're all about, is really capturing how we feel about our lives and how to improve that.
28:10
If you can put numbers on this, like we do in economics of well-being, you can capture this. And this is I'm not new.
28:16
I'm part of a larger movement called the Beyond GDP movement, where at a population level, we really try and think more holistically and capture what really matters, which is real progress in society is people's quality of life improving as they experience it, and not GDP is a means to an end.
28:35
Growth in GDP will likely enable, if done properly, greater and better lives, but the proof of the pudding is maybe not in the eating, but is in the measuring if people's well-being.
28:45
And so, we urge so strongly to do a lot more in the measurement.
28:49
You know, most countries actually do.
28:50
United Kingdom we've been doing really well.
28:52
Since 2012, the UK Office for National Statistics measures in the annual population household survey well-being.
29:02
How satisfied are you with your life these days?
29:03
We have that data since 2012 in UK and the official national statistics.
29:08
In the United States, it is not there.
29:11
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the the statistical agency in the US do not measure how people feel about their lives. Crazy, isn't it? That's crazy.
29:19
>> It's absolutely crazy. So they don't even ask? They don't even ask. We've been pushing.
29:22
An entire field of well-being economists, we've been lobbying, we've been working in Washington say like, "Hey, no, we we it's subjective."
29:30
Why do you think that is?
29:32
Because it's subjective is the argument.
29:35
And then then we make the case, but wait a second, subjective well-being, how you feel about life, isn't that what ultimately matters?
29:42
And then they're still not convinced and then we have to make the case for, well, but how you feel about life drives objective behaviors. Mhm. >> Like productivity.
29:50
And we can talk about it.
29:52
Or voting, like what we're seeing in the United States.
29:56
Um and yet it's difficult.
29:56
Yeah, I mean it impacts whether people get married or not.
30:00
Impacts the amount of children you have. Impacts everything.
30:02
Yeah, like our behaviors are and we all again Daniel Kahneman and others the extraordinary Nobel Prize winner, like why we do thing the things we do is because it makes us feel a certain way.
30:17
And yet US government is not interested or at least the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not interested in measuring people's subjective well-being.
30:23
I want to dive into work if we can because I think that's the core of this book.
30:28
Why workplace well-being matters, the signs behind employee happiness and organizational performance.
30:35
And the reason why I want to talk about this is because I think what's interesting is probably around three decades ago, we found happiness and meaning in multiple different places.
30:42
We had church or temple or community, you had home life, children, you had other friends that lived close by, you probably lived close to your family.
30:51
I don't live close to my family, you're not that close to yours. And then you had work.
30:58
Whereas now it feels like church, temple, community has gone.
31:04
We're further away from our families, so all the pressure is on work. Absolutely.
31:09
>> To provide all of this.
31:09
And that's why I think the work conversation is so important because we're now living at a time where that's the place that we're looking for meaning, for belonging, for connection.
31:19
But as you talk about it in the book, we're not getting it.
31:23
>> We're not getting it there. No, no.
31:23
Only one in four people, less than a quarter in the States, would report high workplace well-being.
31:29
And with high workplace well-being, I'd say it would it would mean a four or five out of five in terms of job satisfaction, for example.
31:37
And so that's really, really, really worrying.
31:38
And the other reason why we know why work is just so important, for all the reasons you just mentioned, is if you're being made redundant, as the English say, which is probably the worst term to use, um or being laid off, as they I guess they'd say in the States, is we see a huge drop in life satisfaction.
31:55
But to your point, only about half of the drop in life satisfaction of being made unemployed is due to the loss of income.
32:03
Most of the drop is actually explained by the loss of identity and social ties, which is exactly the point you're making.
32:09
People's identities are now tied up with their work and their titles, less so than with family or church or temple, as you say.
32:16
And so makes it all makes work all the more important.
32:18
So this blew my mind on page 74 of your book, figure 4.
32:24
2, only feeling sick in bed is a more unhappy activity than working.
32:32
Which means we would rather care or help for adults, wait in line, do admin or organizing, do housework, chores, or DIY more than working and studying.
32:46
The only thing we'd rather not do than work is is being sick in bed.
32:52
Yeah, so I we owe this study to George MacKerron who developed happiness, which is extraordinary, and like looked at what people were doing day-to-day and the work bit and especially spending time with your line manager, as it turns out, was really the worst thing.
33:05
Now, truth be told, while in the workplace, you do a number of things.
33:11
You're also socializing at work.
33:11
You're having lunch together, one would hope, or you're also exchanging and being excited by by by projects and developments.
33:19
Here what George MacKerron was after was really the work work bit and so that is is not particularly liked.
33:27
Whether it's the the happiness study that puts work so low in terms of emotional well-being terms daily activities, whether you're looking at the the world's largest study thanks to Indeed where we find and crowdsource data and find that only a quarter of people, actually less than a quarter of people feel happy.
33:42
But you look at our friends at Gallup who do engagement surveys around the US and the rest of the world, they also find that less than 20% of people are actually actively engaged in the work they're doing, which is a proxy for well-being.
33:55
And so there's a lot of room for improvement.
33:57
What can individuals do differently to find meaning at work?
34:01
>> Can I start with leaders?
34:02
>> Yeah, let's start with leaders. Let's go there.
34:04
Don't just talk the talk, walk the walk.
34:06
And I'll I'll back this up.
34:06
I feel kind of sad about this and it took me a while cuz I come out of a family of actual people managers.
34:12
My dad ran business and he was a an actual people manager and so that's what I thought a good manager was.
34:17
And starting in the study of workplace well-being is sort of drove me because I thought, okay, this is interesting and important and I care and it's sort of part of my DNA.
34:26
And lo and behold, and it was only about a year or two ago we were able to advise and set questions on an HBR survey of senior managers.
34:32
HBR being Harvard Business Review.
34:36
What we found is that 87% to be precise of managers, senior managers who say, "Yes, I care about my people and I would give competitive advantage and it's the right thing to do, blah blah blah."
34:46
In that same survey, we actually started to test testing them to look for what they prioritize when it comes down to it.
34:51
Only a third of people would actually prioritize their people over other stakeholders. How did you test them?
34:58
By essentially asking questions and sort of in a in the situation having to prioritize particular stakeholders.
35:04
So, for example, it would be customers and clients would be prioritized over people, for example.
35:11
But actually, Jay, the real point is only half of that third, 19%, actually has actions against people management and well-being of your people being a strategic priority.
35:22
Study by my colleague, Stefan Meyer, Columbia Business School. Great friend, great guy. We sit tight.
35:27
He studied with an army of research assistants all the earnings calls of the big listed companies in the US.
35:35
And that's typically the CEO and the CFO talking about financial results every quarter.
35:41
And they speak to the investor community.
35:43
What Stefan found was that the word customer, business development side, came up eight times more than people employee side of the business.
35:52
So, obviously, a business is essentially you got to have clients and you got to people delivering.
35:57
So, there's two main stakeholders here in delivering and running a business, obviously, the clients and the people who make it possible.
36:05
And yet, somehow customers to business development is so much more prevalent in their minds as their own people who deliver on the business.
36:15
But worse, when they then the sent sentiment analysis around when the word customer was raised, it was in the context of positive words, opportunity.
36:25
When the word employee was raised, it was in the context of challenge, problem, risk.
36:29
And so, the fact of the matter is, and this is the sound truth, is that, and again, this is about 20 I think only about 20% of senior leaders actually care, invest, act on the notion that take care of your people and they'll take care of business.
36:48
Most leaders, about 80%, I'm willing to put that number out there, um talk the talk but don't walk the walk.
36:55
What I find about that, having worked in the corporate world, is I found that a lot of leaders who never cared for themselves, so they don't know how to care for others. Possibly.
37:06
>> They were the person who came in and they had to carry everyone's laptops, they had to go run around and grab everyone's coffee, they had to go and walk someone's dog or drop their kid to school or whatever it was.
37:15
And now, as that person's come up the ranks, they've never even known what it feels like to have someone say, "How are you feeling? How are you doing?"
37:26
And because they don't give themselves that permission, they don't know how to do it for anyone else.
37:31
The amount of times I've coached senior leaders inside of organizations, and they'll always be like, "Yeah, we wish people were more productive, more proactive, more organized, more this, more that."
37:42
I'm like, "Yeah, but you realize people need a break, they need this, they need what whatever it may be."
37:48
And then they go, "Yeah, but I never did it." Exactly.
37:51
>> "I don't take my vacation, so why do they need it? Right?" And it's that.
37:52
But it's It's these senior leaders, they're so driven, they're so ambitious, and we going back straight back to where we started with this conversation, they make trade-offs with their health, with their humanity, their the empathy for others who may not be in the uh same spirit of wanting to be at the very top of the organization.
38:11
The partial reason why senior senior leaders just don't walk the walk as much as they should in terms of investing in people is because they didn't invest in their own work-life balance enough so they don't quite see it for the others.
38:24
So they need to be reminded.
38:26
And one of the ways of reminding and speaking to that caliber, to that level in the organization is to build out the business case.
38:34
And so in a way I I this is something I really have to get off my chest because and it took me a while to really get this is George and I, we should not have had to write a book on why workplace well-being matters.
38:46
When you think about it, Jay, as you know, the the human case ought to be self-evident.
38:50
I mean, we're human beings, we ought to care about each other.
38:54
It's in the scriptures and in our religions and our just our nature.
38:58
We all we we like being cared for and we ought to care for others.
39:01
So the world of work in which God knows how much time we all spend, it ought to be naturally a positive place.
39:07
And it isn't as as we show through the crowdsourced data with Indeed and many other places.
39:13
So it's the business case that then tries to resonate with you with with those senior leaders who have the power and the tools and the influence to try and raise workplace well-being for others.
39:23
But they have a tough time because they didn't invest in their own well-being perhaps sufficiently so to actually care about the well-being of others.
39:32
But they do what does resonate with them is numbers, the business case.
39:34
And so that's what we see what the book sets out is to show that investing in workplace well-being is actually good for the bottom line.
39:41
It's good for the bottom line.
39:43
So there's the human case which ought to be self-evident, but that didn't work out all too well and so the business case needs to be made.
39:50
And what the book does is to show the business case, the links between well-being and productivity, retention and talent attraction, and ultimately the bottom line in terms of profitability and even stock market performance in a way that's never been shown before.
40:04
And it took George and me, oh God, a decade and a half to put it all together in different academic papers and large large studies with major companies and to finally bring it together in the book, it makes a very strong case for why investing in workplace well-being is not just the right thing to do, but also the clever thing to do.
40:24
Do you think it's possible for people to have work-life balance and be at the top of a company?
40:29
That is such a good question.
40:31
It's hard to and every case is different.
40:33
So, one thing one caveat that listeners need to know is that we study big samples and is there's averages and there's always case-by-case might be different, but on average it is the way we find it.
40:45
I'm afraid the answer is to your question is yes.
40:47
I think people who make it all the way to the top have given up on a chunk of work-life balance.
40:51
And I think it goes back to right the start when you asked the question about money, does money make you happy?
40:56
And these high levels these very very big salaries it's surprising how little extra happiness it buys them.
41:02
And that is because they've given up and and trade-off other things like work-life balance.
41:08
Yeah, and I think we need to change that as well.
41:11
Because it won't change for everyone else unless it changes for someone at the top.
41:14
And then you start to see that oh, someone at the top sleeps eight hours and therefore they're more effective.
41:20
Oh, someone at the top works out and so they're more productive.
41:25
Because I remember a period in my life when I was working 18-hour days seven days a week and my wife would always say to me she'd say, "Hey, if you took care of your health, like if you worked out and you slept a little bit more, I promise you you'd be more productive and effective."
41:37
And I'd say to her, "No, no, no, you don't understand. Got to work this hard."
41:40
And it was only when I started to listen to her that I started to see the value of that.
41:44
And I was so much more effective, strategic, I didn't get ill as often, I wasn't dealing with migraines or headaches, I didn't have to take an Advil or whatever to suppress that feeling, like you just felt better.
41:58
But my wife had to literally coach me to that.
42:01
I'm very proud to be able to say that not not only is your wife right, we have the causal field evidence to back her up. Okay?
42:07
And you'll know the company that we had that took us 10 years to get to this point.
42:10
The company with whom we work to be able to show for the first time the causal effect of how you feel, whether that's through better sleep, working out, whatever, but how you feel from one week to another impacting how you perform that week.
42:22
It was with British Telecom, BT. Mhm. You'll know them.
42:26
They're one of the largest employers in the UK.
42:27
We tested all of their call center employees.
42:30
This was back in 2015 when this project started.
42:33
Took us 10 years to finally get to causal inference.
42:35
The way we did it, Jay, was by every week on Thursday at 4:00 p. m.
42:40
we pulsed these call center employees across all the BT call centers to see how they were feeling that week.
42:46
And whether that was because they slept well or whether they had been working out or private or or work life, we had an extraordinary data set around how they felt from one week to another.
42:54
And then we tied that to very granular levels of performance, of which is call center employees tend to have, which is seconds per call, customer satisfaction coming back from every call, weekly sales, which is obviously the the the the big headline performance number.
43:07
And what we find is a standard deviation change, a significant change in how you feel from one week to another, just like you were experiencing, >> [snorts and gasps] >> led to a 12% increase in uh weekly sales.
43:20
Now, that's actually a lower bound effect of how you feel on how you perform because what we found is that these BT call center employees, depending on the on the types of tasks they were doing, the effect of how they felt was greater on uh the performance.
43:34
So, if the task was just plain order taking, the effect of how you felt didn't have that much impact on how you perform.
43:41
But the higher order tasks, the types of tasks that you and your team and most companies these days will do in the future of work will only be consisting of, which is sort of tasks that require social and emotional intelligence and creativity, the stuff you do, there the effect of how you felt from one week to another was much greater.
43:56
We're talking 20, 25% impact on performance.
44:00
And so, yes, to the point, your wife is 100% right.
44:02
If you invest in yourself and you you feel better in your skin, as they say in French.
44:08
Just something beyond support, like feeling good, and then you will be performing better.
44:13
And all of this is super, super intuitive, because these tasks, dealing with customers, the the social activating your social emotional intelligence, is really only possible when you feel good yourself.
44:27
If you're not in a good place, and you're thinking about your worries or problems with in your household or what have you, then it's very difficult to raise or generate the empathy to deal with a customer and really perform and come up with something creative or do an amazing interview or be really present and engaged while you have other worries.
44:45
And so we pick this up in the data from one week to another.
44:47
People would say, "I'm feeling good. I'm feeling better."
44:49
And also feel feeling so good.
44:51
And you see this picked up especially in the tasks that require social emotional intelligence.
44:56
So long story to tell you how we actually nailed causality, but it has to do with weather differences around the call centers, and I'll spare you that story cuz it took us 10 years to nail the causal inference, but we got there in the end. No, I love that.
45:07
I mean, I'm happy for you to share it if you think it's important, but I love what you're saying because and the bigger point you made that I think I won't be able to make note of is in 25 years time that will matter even more.
45:18
Yes, because AI will take away to the routine tasks, the order taking tasks.
45:23
Well, already by now I think we started the study in 2015, 2016.
45:25
I bet you if we were to rerun the study, these sort of more menial tasks, order taking, probably are no longer there to begin with.
45:34
By the way, on the the causality issue, no need to go into technical details, but it's an important point to raise, which is that senior leaders, when a their chief people officer or chief HR officer comes to them and says like, "Oh, we found a study and and happier workers are more productive."
45:48
A typical response, and not fully wrong, would be well, yeah, but is it is it happiness driving performance or is it the business going well and us being able to invest in their well-being or the business going well and them making people feel good in the first place.
46:01
So, that chicken the egg problem, that So, there's what we call reverse causality.
46:07
It's a dynamic relationship.
46:07
If you feel good, you perform better.
46:08
If performance is going good, it feeds back into you feeling better in the first place.
46:13
So, it's a dynamic relationship, performance and well-being. >> Yeah.
46:18
And we were able to disentangle the two arrows in that dynamic relationship by leveraging weather differences, because anyway, long story.
46:27
And I urge you to read the paper that came out in Management Science on this.
46:30
What employee programs, well-being programs actually helped?
46:32
Because I think the challenge is there's so many well-being programs now.
46:36
Every company is subscribed to a million of them.
46:40
They're all available, but the actual take-up is low. Exactly.
46:43
>> Or people don't know what to do, or people don't know what's available to them.
46:46
So, what actually helped versus what people thought would help?
46:49
So, our well-being research center is quite well-known now in the HR space for pushing a basic, but very important argument.
46:57
A lot of the benefits and programs that you're referring to are individual options.
47:01
Um, mindfulness apps, you name it.
47:04
And those are good, and by all means continue them.
47:06
But, you're right, there's typically a pick-up problem.
47:09
So, a selection bias, and you actually uses them, and typically it's people who don't need them the most who actually uh uh use them.
47:16
And people who would benefit a lot from them are not using them.
47:19
And so, we find that that there's mixed evidence on those sort of more individualistic interventions.
47:25
And then, um, others like yoga and others are fantastic, but you cannot yoga your way out of more structural issues.
47:31
So, if you're underpaying people, offering yoga class is not going to help them.
47:35
If there's bullying in the uh uh in a company, you're not going to yoga your way out of that.
47:38
If the CEO is not setting the right tone, or or or or a culture that generally cares about people, it's like it's not yoga or mindfulness apps that's going to If there's just too much work, and you're stressing people out because of overwork, don't ask them to then also in the office do yoga on top of it while they're stressed out.
47:57
And then it's ways of working.
47:59
And so we've made a lot of claims and evidence and research on the fact that we've got to look a bit more broadly.
48:05
And so then in and then we've even done a huge systematic literature review around what interventions actually work the best by driver.
48:12
So how to generate more sense of belonging, how to improve the impact of people feeling they're being paid fairly, etc. etc. etc. And there's a lot there.
48:22
We've got a whole playbook that we've put out where we summarize and highlight about five or six studies for each driver workplace well-being out of about 4,000 papers that we've analyzed.
48:34
And right we've call it the playbook the interventions playbook and it's published by the World Well-being Movement in partnership with Indeed.
48:42
And so that's out there no charge free free to use for everybody.
48:47
But I think you're going to be asking me so what actually works? Like give me examples.
48:51
And here I'm going to I want to give you one because as an economist I do feel obliged incentives do matter.
48:57
So how much you pay people does matter especially at the bottom of the pay scale.
49:03
And so pay people living wage for crying out loud and particularly so in context reference context dependent places like Los Angeles or New York where the cost of living is so high.
49:13
But and here this is really important.
49:15
It's not just how much you pay people.
49:17
It's also how you pay people.
49:19
Like it make a difference in terms of how they're made to feel while at work which is definition of workplace well-being.
49:25
And so if you look at just we've compared actually colleagues of mine Andrew Clark and others have looked at similar pay packages overall on an annual basis but those that were just be straightforward salaries versus those that are combination of salary plus variable pay that is for example a group bonus or joint equity schemes where you become so however small it might be like co-owner of the company and organization.
49:50
And it helps raise purpose.
49:54
It helps raise a number of elements around how you feel engaged and a sense of agency and whether the organization cares about you as a person.
50:01
And if you're a part, however small, owner of the organization, that's a real change in the way you view it the organization to begin with.
50:09
Then it no longer becomes a transactional thing, but much more one where you're all in the same boat.
50:13
And we are not just a stakeholder, we're also a shareholder.
50:17
And that's really, really quite critical.
50:19
So, the first thing to really urge people is think beyond just the individual.
50:22
If If there's a workplace well-being problem in your organization, don't put the responsibility all on the individual.
50:30
It's probably, if not more than half of the variance in workplace well-being, is probably due to the environment of the organization. And work on that.
50:35
And that could range from pay to setting a culture of belonging and so on and so forth.
50:41
And there's ample evidence for the types of interventions that work on each front. I love that.
50:46
I'm so glad that that's available.
50:47
We should link to that in the resources as well.
50:49
It would be great for people to dive into that. >> Absolutely.
50:53
And it's easy accessible.
50:53
It's just like bullet points, suggestions.
50:56
And a lot of these interventions will already already been Some of them you'll have in your workplace already.
51:02
Some might inspire you to do better.
51:04
And so, it's it's a real a real resource.
51:06
I wanted to ask you a question about page 124 of your book, figure 6. 2.
51:11
You talk about the determinants of work well-being, what people think versus reality.
51:15
Walk us through what we think makes a workplace have better well-being versus what actually makes a difference.
51:23
This is one of the big insights generally in the study of workplace well-being, but also coming through the big crowdsource study with Indeed, where we've got over 25 million workers, 250 million data points by now, and counting.
51:37
Where we've looked at how people feel at work and why they feel the way they do at work.
51:42
And we've done a little cute test, which is we we ran a survey where we asked people, so what do you think makes you happy at work?
51:47
What drives your workplace well-being?
51:48
And what comes through is pay and flexibility is what people would put on top in terms of what they think makes them happy at work.
51:57
>> [snorts] >> But when you actually run the analyses of what actually explains differences in job satisfaction, for example, work well-being more generally, you find that people hugely underestimate the social elements.
52:09
A sense of belonging, feeling like you're being treated uh as a person in your organization, having friends at work.
52:15
In the Gallup engagement survey, there's an item called do you have a best friend at work?
52:18
People laugh at it when they have to answer it.
52:20
The reality is is the answer to that question is most predictive of job satisfaction >> Wow.
52:25
Do you have a best friend at work? Exactly. >> That's so good. It is. It absolutely is.
52:31
And so if we've now picked up in the Indeed data and the Gallup engagement survey data, but other more academic data sets, people always and consistently underestimate the importance of our social capital in the workspace as the thing that is actually most All things matter, but some things matter more than others.
52:48
And so there's social capital in the workplace that is way more predictive of how we end up feeling generally at work compared to other things.
52:56
Now, that's not to say that pay doesn't matter or flexibility don't matter.
52:59
In fact, it's sort of more like half of the middle of the pack in terms of the relative importance in driving workplace well-being, but people underestimate feeling like they belong, having friends at work, and feeling like the company cares about them as a person.
53:14
And I think that's really important.
53:14
In the HR space, there's an old saying, people don't quit their jobs, they leave their bosses.
53:22
Or you could reframe it as they don't leave their jobs, they quit their teams. And that's true. Think about it.
53:28
For whomever's listening, think about this yourself.
53:31
When would you make the decision to leave the company?
53:32
When are When are you sick and tired and no longer sticking it out?
53:37
It's when you're not getting along with people, when your line manager is not treating you like a human being, when you know all your friends at work, that's when you actually start making the move to start thinking about going somewhere else.
53:49
More so than when the job isn't all that interesting it to you anymore or you feel like pay isn't all that fair, but you can still live with it.
53:55
It's the social elements that trigger people's workplace well-being and their behaviors more than anything else.
54:01
There's two things there that stood out to me.
54:03
One is when you realize that you need a best friend at work. Mhm.
54:08
One of the biggest challenges I find is versus uh you said flexibility and money, which are both important as you said.
54:15
Flexibility means working from home.
54:18
Friendship generally means being in person.
54:23
And now with more people working from home versus being in person, it's harder to have a best friend on Zoom.
54:30
What's that looking like for workplace well-being?
54:33
Do you believe that companies and people should want to be in person or the flexibility of being at home is actually outweighing having a best friend at work?
54:42
That's a classic economic answer.
54:44
On the one hand, on the other hand.
54:46
But Jay, I feel very strongly and passionately about precisely this question.
54:52
And I came out very strongly at the start of COVID, which was March 2020 when it really hit.
54:56
Uh and the lockdown started.
54:59
Two, three months in, so we're talking mid-2020, the likes of Facebook and Twitter were saying, "Brilliant.
55:05
People are working from home.
55:07
We don't see a drop in productivity.
55:08
That's the end of the office. Everybody remotely."
55:13
And I came out strongly in the the UK newspapers uh coming out saying, "Careful, careful.
55:16
Yes, there's short-term benefits of the fully remote working from home uh approach.
55:21
Uh no commute, no cost of commute, more flexibility.
55:26
You can take care of XYZ and and you can sort of work-life balance and job craft a bit more."
55:32
But I said, "Careful, careful what you wish for because your social capital and your intellectual capital are capitals.
55:39
They need inflows because there's outflows all the time.
55:41
So, you need to restock that stock of um a capital stock of intellectual and social capital.
55:47
And so, people were relying on the existing social intellectual capital they had, but essentially that got undermined.
55:54
And about 6 months in or a year into the pandemic, these calls for fully working remotely were starting to be dialed back and talk came around hybrid working.
56:07
And truth be told, we owe a lot of this work, by the way, to to um Nick Bloom at Stanford, colleague in the economics department, who's done most research on this.
56:16
It's now clear that we can have the best of both worlds.
56:19
We need to have a hybrid way of working where people can work part-time at home, part-time in the office.
56:25
Set It's looking like the best is 3 days office, 2 days home, but we need to do this cleverly.
56:31
It needs to be a coordinated/smart hybrid.
56:34
The worst thing that can happen, Jay, is half of your team in on Monday, Tuesday, and the other half on Thursday, Friday, cuz you're not building that social capital and that sense of belonging that we know is so important.
56:44
Same thing for intellectual capital, you need to be having these sort of water cooler moments.
56:48
There's no point coming into the office if it's to be doing emails, report writing, or Zoom calls again.
56:55
And so, what does this mean?
56:55
It means that we need to have conversations within teams or units.
57:02
Okay, are we going to coordinate on being in most at the beginning of the week or midweek or at the end of the week? And what kind of tasks?
57:06
So, we need to think throughout the week, what are our tasks?
57:10
What are the synchronous and the asynchronous tasks?
57:12
What do we do What What do we do together? What do we do solo?
57:15
And to separate the tasks and to do the asynchronous tasks, email writing, report writing, Zoom calls at home.
57:23
And whereas it's the client meetings, the engagements, the brainstorming sessions, the interviews that happens together.
57:29
And so, I think if we can nail hybrid working, then we'll have the best of both worlds.
57:36
We'll see improvements in productivity and improvements in well-being. I agree with that.
57:40
We've done that, too, where we have flexibility in the sense, I mean, I'm ours is easy.
57:45
When I'm traveling, the team works from home.
57:48
When I'm in LA, the team is in the office.
57:50
And that works exceptionally well for us because we get enough together community time and the team has enough time to be productive at home or have flexibility.
57:59
And and I couldn't imagine Mhm.
58:01
being on a Zoom call every day with my whole team.
58:04
Like, I just couldn't imagine it.
58:06
And the amount of social capital you lose, the connection, the the best friend at work.
58:10
That ideas Some of these ideas that you've shared today, the the eating meals, you know, taking that from 50% up to 75% of our meals every week to be with people.
58:23
The big advice right now of having a best friend at work, I think for so long we've started to think work is work and life is life.
58:30
And I always like to remind people you spend at least eight to nine hours a day at work.
58:35
You're basically saying that a third of your life it doesn't matter if I don't feel good there.
58:40
No, and how satisfied we are with our job feeds into how satisfied we are with our lives.
58:45
So, job satisfaction is a huge predictor of, you've guessed it, life satisfaction.
58:51
You don't check in to the office leaving your home life behind, and you don't check out of the office leaving your work life behind.
58:57
And so, the two are interreally connected.
58:59
That puts a lot of responsibility on the organization because how you treat people, their workplace well-being feeds into the larger society.
59:10
And there's a degree of separation of even three people away will have been touched by how you're made to feel coming back from the office. >> Mhm.
59:17
There's amazing studies by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler.
59:19
Their book Connected is a real a real recommendation, where they essentially show that the way you drive home from the office, the mood that you're in, No.
59:29
>> will impact your wife, your children, and they'll pick up sentiment changes with the school friends of your children.
59:38
So, now we're three degrees of separation out will be impacted indirectly.
59:42
So, people you don't even know, their well-being will be marginally impacted by the how about how you're feeling.
59:49
So, if you're driving home from work in a bad mood because bullying, for example, in the office, that's impacting not just a person who gets bullied, the victim.
59:57
It impacts three degrees of separation out.
1:00:00
So, when we're actually goes back to the fact that if only about a quarter of people actually feel good at work, there's so much room for improvement within the workplace.
1:00:09
But, this feeds into our societies and our communities big time.
1:00:14
Did you find anything about what the factors were around a toxic work culture or toxic workplace?
1:00:20
You've mentioned bullying a few times, but did you Have you done any research on that?
1:00:26
Not specifically in in toxic workplaces as as such.
1:00:29
What we have done, obviously, it's it's a reversal.
1:00:31
Like, all the drivers of workplace well-being then go into reverse.
1:00:35
People are stressed out, not satisfied with their job, find little purpose and meaning in the work they do, if and they're not happy day-to-day, if there's no belonging, if there's no flexibility and there's no room for job crafting, if they're poorly paid, etc. etc. etc.
1:00:48
Is it possible to find meaning and purpose in a job that is purely functional and repetitive?
1:00:58
You're raising a good question because we started by saying, "God, there's so much room for improvement here."
1:01:06
But, what's the upper limits?
1:01:06
Is what the Is what you're really after is like, can we make everybody happy at work all the time?
1:01:11
Can we go to 100% of people saying four or five out of five in terms of, say, job satisfaction? I think yes and no.
1:01:20
I think yes, we can do frankly, can do a lot better still.
1:01:25
And the way we notice is thanks to the the large crowdsource data with Indeed, we know that even in tough industries, in tough areas of the US for example, in companies that are not necessarily known to be good workplaces, we'll still find examples of warehouses, units where people feel good.
1:01:44
E- even within industries that are difficult, say hamburger industry, flipping burgers, selling them.
1:01:50
You'll find big differences.
1:01:50
Uh no naming and shaming, but applauding our friends at In-N-Out Burger, and I know we're in in Los Angeles, so that's that's that's a real shout-out.
1:01:57
And so, they're doing the same job as other hamburger chains, and somehow, and we've put in the book, um somehow workers at In-N-Out are reporting about 20% higher workplace well-being than in other hamburger joints. >> that's cool. And and it shows.
1:02:13
It shows in the way they connect to people, the smiles on their faces, etc. So, it is possible.
1:02:20
So, we can do a lot better than we're currently doing.
1:02:22
Now, back to the question at hand, can we raise everybody to like 100% all the time?
1:02:29
Your original question was a bit more profound is like can we raise levels of purpose and meaning?
1:02:32
Can we And there I think it's a that's a higher bar to clear.
1:02:36
In-N-Out does an amazing job at raising workplace well-being in a job that is difficult otherwise.
1:02:41
So, they connect with clients, there's camaraderie between workers, etc.
1:02:45
They do whole thing whole lots of things right.
1:02:49
right. But when when you say actual high purpose and meaning, I think of the notion of being in flow, so consumed and within the work you're doing you're losing track of time, you don't even think about being happy or not, you're sort of obsessed with what you're doing and so, the kind of people like you and me, or musicians, or mathematicians get into
1:03:07
a state of flow, but I think that's not a given for everybody, and we're very fortunate to found our niche where we can unleash our talents and be in a state of flow because we're so engaged in in the significance of what we're doing and we find it purposeful and meaningful that we think about nothing else and the whole notion of work in life become yeah. That I think is not realistic for the
1:03:29
That I think is not realistic for the majority or the vast majority of people.
1:03:33
Yeah, and I really appreciate your In-N-Out example because that's that's great.
1:03:37
That And also I've I've always loved Amy Wrzesniewski's study from Yale of the hospital cleaners and how half of them saw themselves as cleaners and the other saw themselves as healers because of job crafting. >> Exactly.
1:03:49
That they really believed that a clean hospital was integral to the healing journey of the patient.
1:03:53
So so I think you are right. It is possible.
1:03:55
Of course flow state and everything else you know, there's certain careers and and maybe not everyone wants that needs that is searching for that. >> Exactly.
1:04:04
>> But it is good to know that we can do so much better. We can.
1:04:06
And there are jobs that externally seem repetitive and functional.
1:04:12
And yet there are places that have made them enjoyable.
1:04:14
Because I think a lot of people think, "Oh yeah, well I'm an X and I don't need my job to be meaningful.
1:04:22
It will never be meaningful."
1:04:23
And the truth is it'll be better for your health Mhm. if it is.
1:04:27
It'll be better for your well-being Absolutely.
1:04:29
>> feel that work is a little bit meaningful even if you're not in flow. Exactly. That's the goal. Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.
1:04:35
I wanted to ask you about what work-life balance actually is because I think lots of the time we think when we hear the word work-life balance, the word balance in and of itself makes us feel equal.
1:04:48
And we all spend at least 5 days at work and only have 2 days off a week.
1:04:51
So it's already not equal.
1:04:53
So that with the evenings, the work And the [laughter] evenings, yeah. The work and evenings. Yeah.
1:04:59
This you're asking a tough question and I know lots of people There's people out there who will behemently go after oh work-life balance overrated what have you.
1:05:07
Jeff Bezos for For Amazon.
1:05:10
I remember seeing a clip of him saying, "Oh, work-life balance.
1:05:12
If you're in a state of flow at work, it will feed positively into life and it should also flow over into one another."
1:05:21
And I agree with them in a sense for entrepreneurs like him, like you, like me, really loving what I'm doing with that the two flow into one another.
1:05:29
But I think for the vast majority, reflecting to the discussion we just had, it is a bit more transactional.
1:05:36
And we do have to respect work-life balance and we cannot expect as leaders, as managers, as entrepreneurs that everybody, the staff, the team members are necessarily looking to be fully engaged all day, all night, weekends included, uh engaged with work.
1:05:52
Um and and I think we got to be honest about this and we cannot expect the same of of everybody.
1:05:59
And so I I I actually feel strongly that most people do care a lot about work-life balance and being able to check out and not have to think about work like you and I will typically do after say 5:00 or 6:00 p. m.
1:06:11
Um and I think we got to respect that. Yeah.
1:06:13
I think we have to respect that an employee should never have to work as hard as the entrepreneur. Exactly.
1:06:20
And that the member of staff will never have to be as strategic as the founder. It just isn't fair. It doesn't work. No.
1:06:27
And yet founders or senior leaders expect no less of their team.
1:06:33
And as we referred to earlier, they themselves have given up on a number of trade off trade off a whole host of things, possibly their own health, mis- mental and physical, to be where they are and taking the risks that they are taking as entrepreneurs or senior leaders.
1:06:47
And so it's hard for them to raise the empathy to realize that a majority of people are not CEOs and are not meant to be CEOs.
1:06:59
I think again, we we have to respect that and have the the wisdom to take a bit of distance and out of our own mental frames and understand that we're all a bit different.
1:07:07
Yeah, and it's been so illuminating talking to you.
1:07:08
I'm wondering what have I not asked you that you wish I had?
1:07:12
Well, maybe one last thing.
1:07:14
Our workplace well-being.
1:07:14
Sadly, I've George and I have spent and teams have spent a lot of time developing up the business case.
1:07:22
And I think that's obviously what the book then ultimately works its way towards is giving the best evidence today on how we feel at work matters for how you perform at work, whether you stay at work, or whether workplace well-being will attract in the first place.
1:07:37
And those are all the benefits of workplace well-being.
1:07:41
But if you then actually look at the organizational level and you look at whatever it might cost organizations to raise well-being or do the right thing.
1:07:49
And by the way, some of these interventions don't cost the earth at all.
1:07:51
Being a good boss, opening up about mental health, culture and a sense of belonging and and developing a caring community doesn't need to cost anything.
1:08:00
It's about setting the right example and right leadership.
1:08:02
Whatever companies can do to improve workplace well-being, it pays.
1:08:06
And so we've then shown, leveraging the Indeed crowdsource data for all the US listed companies on the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange, that we link their work well-being score cuz we have data from behind the back of their CHROs.
1:08:19
We've we've pulsed and crowdsourced 25 million workers around the US.
1:08:26
And so we know that the levels of workplace well-being in these companies correlate and predict very strongly their quarterly financials.
1:08:35
And if you were to invest solely based on workplace well-being, you'd find that you outperform the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq and so on and so forth.
1:08:44
We've now been doing this since 2020.
1:08:47
And so that's obviously that's gotten the attention of the of the business world.
1:08:49
And that's the business case right there for you. I love it.
1:08:51
Yeah, and thank you so much.
1:08:53
We end every On Purpose episode with a final five.
1:08:55
Each question has to be answered in one word to one sentence okay, So, Jan, these are your final five.
1:09:05
The first question is, what is the best well-being advice you've ever heard or received?
1:09:09
If you want to move from ill-being to well-being, change focus from I to we. Mhm. I like that.
1:09:15
Literally and empirically. That's great.
1:09:18
Uh question number two, what's the worst well-being advice you've ever heard or received?
1:09:25
I'm going to have some of my colleagues flow.
1:09:27
I think it's it's it's only a few people who will actually achieve the state of flow, and I find it annoying and disrespectful of majority people to think that that is to be aspired to, whereas they may not wish it and will never achieve it.
1:09:39
Question number three, if you were speaking to a room of a hundred CEOs and leaders right now, what would be your number one piece of advice for them?
1:09:49
Read Why Workplace Well-being Matters, please. Seriously.
1:09:54
Question number four, if you were speaking to a group of employees, team members, standing in front of you right now, what would be your advice to them?
1:10:03
Slam Why Workplace Well-being Matters on your CEO's desk today.
1:10:08
>> [laughter] >> Anonymously. Yeah.
1:10:11
Fifth and final question, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
1:10:19
If there's a law that I would love to really implement, which I would think have short-term and positive consequences immediately, a four-day workweek.
1:10:28
It's been since Henry Ford, almost a hundred years ago, that we've made the weekend from uh into two days, from a Sunday to also include a Saturday.
1:10:38
It's high time to try and think about giving us off another half a day or a day, but we would have to do it all together, the entire US or the entire world would have to come together and coordinate on this.
1:10:49
And doing so will make the future work more exciting uh for for youngsters to know that um the gains of productivity will also be given back in time.
1:10:59
So, you're saying just 100 years ago we were working 6-day weeks.
1:11:04
>> Yeah, so it's Henry Ford who realized that caring for their people, for his employees, and their health, and their well-being meant that he couldn't keep squeezing them 6 days a week.
1:11:14
And so, he's the one So, obviously Sunday was Sunday because of religious reasons, and even that was a hard-fought fight.
1:11:19
And then so, the Saturday came up.
1:11:21
In fact, uh the Saturday was Henry Ford, but you know, for example, my grandparents uh still had to work the Saturday mornings.
1:11:27
And so, it's only in the 1950s that that we extended the weekend to not just be the Sunday and the Saturday afternoon, but also the Saturday morning included.
1:11:37
But, we're talking the 1930s, '40s, '50s when we got the weekend.
1:11:40
And yet, we've become five times more productive in the century that followed.
1:11:44
And yet, we're still working the old-fashioned 5-day workweek.
1:11:48
But, our brains are still the old monkey brains or the hunter-gatherer brains, I should say.
1:11:52
And yet, they're having to process so much more.
1:11:53
So, people are surprised that we're having all these burnouts, and people are unhappy and stressed out.
1:11:59
And so, I think I've lost faith in the fact that these gains in productivity get redistributed to people cuz most of the gains of productivity go to shareholders and and the happy few.
1:12:12
I've now started to think that one week we can make the future work more exciting and have the gains of productivity redistributed in terms not just of trying to give back money and redistribute, but also give back time, which ultimately is our most precious commodity.
1:12:26
And so, I do think it's high time, frankly, to start thinking about a shorter workweek.
1:12:29
And if we do that, then it will make the future work less anxious, less wor- worrisome for um for youth today. Really great answer.
1:12:41
Everyone, the book is called Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve.
1:12:48
Jan, honestly, this has been such an illuminating conversation.
1:12:51
I find it so insightful to sit and talk to you about these things.
1:12:56
I love the way you think about them and I'm so glad you're doing this work.
1:13:00
It's massively needed and I know I'll be giving this to every leader I know for sure.
1:13:06
So thank you so much for coming all the way from Oxford to be here with us and I'm really grateful for you and your work. Thank you so much. Thank you Jay.
1:13:14
Thank you for everything you do disseminating your own nuggets of wisdom and and help spread those of others. Thank you. Thank you.
1:13:19
If you love this episode, you'll love my conversation with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to tap into your creative potential and the number one thing people get wrong about success.
1:13:34
>> The best people in your life will be people who see potential in you that you didn't see in yourself. And I often wonder