George Ward: The Business Case for Wellbeing

Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, the co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the penultimate episode in this series of Thinkers 50 Radar webinars where we’re celebrating the most exciting new voices in the world of management thinking. Back in January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar List for 2025, 30 rising stars in management thinking, and we’ll be hearing from another one of them today. But we’d also like to hear from you. We like to make these sessions as interactive as possible, so please do let us know where you are joining us from, and put your questions and your comments in the chat box.

This year’s Radar List is brought to you in partnership with ATD, the Association of Talent Development, and developing talent is a topic we will be exploring today and over the coming weeks, including of course the implications of AI in the workplace, and many other challenges and opportunities facing leaders and organisations. My co-host today is John Coné. John has worked in talent development for more than 50 years he tells me, it’s hard to believe. During that time he’s served as a chief learning officer, a vice president of HR, and on the boards of nonprofit and for-profit learning companies and organisations, including ATD. He currently serves as the catalyst of ATD’s Chief Talent Development Officer Group. John, great to see you.

John Coné:

Thank you, Des. It’s great to be here, and I’m excited to introduce our guest today. Dr. George Ward is the Persol Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, and a Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College, University of Oxford. He will be joining INSEAD as an assistant professor in June. His research focuses on various markers of employee wellbeing, such as happiness, satisfaction, stress and purpose. He studies how these aspects of workplace wellbeing are influenced, for better or worse, by different management and organisational practices, as well as how they ultimately affect outcomes for firms like productivity, turnover, and recruitment. George is particularly interested in the future of work and how we can design jobs that work for people’s wellbeing. He is the co-author with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve of Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance. Welcome, George.

George Ward:

Hi, thanks for having me.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, George, welcome and congratulations on the Thinkers50 Radar recognition. 

George Ward:

Thank you very much.

What is workplace wellbeing?

Des Dearlove:

This topic we’re talking about today is very, very important. We know that, and we fully support your view on it, I think. But let’s start with a definition. I mean, what exactly is workplace wellbeing?

George Ward:

Yeah, it’s a good place to start. I think whenever you’re talking about almost anything, it’s good to start with trying to be clear on what we’re talking about, but I think in this particular case it’s even more important given that over the last few years there’s been a lot written about workplace wellbeing, a lot spoken about workplace wellbeing, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm and interest, which is great. But I think from speaking to people, what happens is people try and find out more, and research more and see what’s happening, but can get a little lost in the cacophony of voices in this space.

People have different definitions, different approaches and so on. So, we wanted to be, in this book, extremely clear on what we think workplace wellbeing is, and as John said, what influences and how it affects worker and firm outcomes. So, we see it quite simply as how people think about their work and how they feel at work. So, it has multiple components, so you can think of an evaluative component, which is more of a cognitive overall judgment about how things are going in your job, so that’s usually measured by something like job satisfaction. That’s how you think about your work.

On the other hand, there’s also the day-to-day experience of work, the positive and negative emotions that people feel while they’re at work. So, that’s the how we feel at work. And then there’s also a final piece, which is what’s usually referred to as a eudaimonic component, which goes back to Aristotle, and it’s more to do with the sense of purpose and meaning that we derive from work. So, you have evaluative experiential, or hedonic, or emotional, however you want to call it, and then there’s this eudaimonic piece as well.

John Coné:

I’m interested in how you got started thinking about this. What drew you to this area of research? What’s the backstory?

George Ward:

It depends how far you want to go back really, but as I’ve always been interested in wellbeing. So I did a master’s degree many years ago in public policy, which isn’t overly related to this. But I remember when I was scratching around for a dissertation topic at the end of the year, I was looking at what to do and I read a few papers, and stumbled across a few that were in the space of the economics of happiness, if you like. And I was just amazed that you can quantify these things, you can get data on them and you can study them. No one had really ever told me that before, they’d never come across it. And I thought, “That’s very interesting, let’s have a look at that.”

And then I ended up doing the dissertation, actually with Jan as the thesis advisor, that’s how we got to know each other, on the relationship between economic growth and happiness. And then I went on to work in that space. I originally worked mostly on things like public policy and political behaviour in particular. So, in my earlier career I had a few papers looking at the extent to which you can predict voting behavior and election results using happiness and other emotional data. But over time got more and more interested in the workplace, jobs, and workers and firms, and that led me to then go on and do a PhD in a business school. I went to the Sloan School of Management at MIT in their Institute for Work and Employment Research, where you really dig down into workplace issues. And most of that PhD was essentially on the downstream effects of happiness and other aspects of wellbeing on worker and firm outcomes. So, things like recruitment, productivity and so on. And that, I guess, brings us up to the present day.

Proving the link between happiness and productivity

Des Dearlove:

Well, one of the things I love about the book, let’s stay with happiness, I mean, it’s a good place to be, one of the things I love about the book is the rigour. I mean, I think this is a subject, as you suggested, that people can get a bit lost in and people haven’t always had the data. I mean, we’d like to think that there’s cause and effect, and correlation sometimes, but we haven’t always had the data. I mean, in your research, as I understand it, shows a strong link between happiness and productivity, which I think is good news, but how did you go about proving the link?

George Ward:

So, it’s tough. I mean, clearly these things can work in both directions. So, that gives you this problem of reverse causality, so if I’m being very productive I may enjoy that and I may get happy-

Des Dearlove:

That’ll make you happy, yeah.

George Ward:

… on the other hand, you may have just what you might call omitted variable bias, it’s just that your happiness is correlated with a bunch of other stuff that may also be correlated with how productive you are. So, it’s a very tricky one to isolate and people have been doing this, I mean, we look in the book and I discussed in a few other papers, that there’s work on happiness and productivity broadly understood going back to the 1910s, 1920s. So, this has long been something that people have been interested in, and I think it makes sense because it has such profound implications for how firms should treat their workers and the extent to which they should see them as an asset that can give them a competitive advantage.

And so, there’s a lot of correlational work over the years. And then, better than that you get longitudinal work, which is looking at repeated measures of wellbeing and productivity over time. So, you’re looking within a person over time, so you’re not comparing one person with another, you’re comparing me today versus me next week. And then there’s also, starting in about the 1980s, 1990s, some really great work where they went into the lab. So, there you can be much more careful about productivity, about causality because you can run experiments, but it’s tricky to do. What those experiments tended to do was to split respondents into two groups randomly chosen. So, you’ve got a causal experiment on your hands.

And then, the challenge then is to try and make one group happier, and some of the most famous experiments in this space have tended to use things like comedy clips. So, you get one group to watch a comedy clip, the other group watches a fairly neutral video for five minutes. So, one group is in a good mood, one’s in a neutral mood, and then you get them to do some sort of productivity task. Of course, this is quite an artificial setting, but the key is to try and drill down and get to the causal effect. In those studies, you tend to find that the people who have been randomly chosen to be put into a good mood tend to be more productive on these stylised tasks. The problem is that’s nice, but does it translate to the real world where there’s all sorts of other things happening and productivity is much more multifaceted, and so on.

So, what Jan and I did with a colleague, Clement Bellet, who’s at Erasmus University, we actually studied call centre workers at BT – British Telecom here in the UK. And we had the data on all the call centres up and down the UK, so quite a few call centres with very different –  and I’ll say in a second a bit more about why that’s important – and we sent a weekly email survey to try and gauge people’s mood over a six-month period. So, that already gets you to this longitudinal piece so you can study their moods as they go up and down over time. And the nice thing about studying call centre workers is that you can measure all sorts of things that are happening, length of call, customer satisfaction, how many calls they’re taking. And in particular in that paper we look at sales performance, which is a hard-nosed outcome that you can measure.

And we find that as workers are in better moods they do sell more, the challenge is trying to nail down that causality again. And there’s two things that are important there, one is that when we went to visit one of these call centres we noticed that they’re very different in architecture, which sounds like a slightly irrelevant factor, but they go all the way from warehouse-style buildings which have no windows on the side, to big, tall, almost all glass towers. And the other thing about the UK, I don’t know if you’ve spent much time here, is that the weather is famously bad but it’s also very variable week to week, but also place to place even within the same week. So, even when we’re looking in the same week it can be miserable in one region and quite nice in another region.

This is what you call, like, a quasi experiment, so it gives you some variation to play with, that you’re trying to get it randomly or quasi randomly induced moods to see what happens to their productivity. And the nice thing that we find there is that when on very sunny days people are happier than when they’re not on sunny days. And the neat thing is that you can really nail down whether this is causal or not because that only really works when people are in buildings with windows. In these buildings with no windows, there’s just no effective weather – kind of sunniness – on productivity at all, which gives you confidence it’s not as tight, if you like, as a pure experiment in the lab, but you’re working in the real world trying to get a field causal statement.

And there you really find that on sunnier days people report being happier, they sell more, but that’s only when there’s windows. It was a long study, it took years to do, and it’s published in Management Science, we’re very happy to say, and that was a chapter of my dissertation at MIT, but I think it gets us closer to really showing that in the real world that these lab-based causal effects do translate.

John Coné:

Well George, since we can’t control the sunshine, I know we’re anxious to get to talking about the things that we can do, but before we do, there’s a phrase that’s in vogue in the United States right now. Is the juice worth the squeeze? The question that it begs is how significant is the boost that you can get in productivity from happiness?

George Ward:

Yeah, and I think it’s a hugely important question. So as I say, there’s been decades of work on the relationship between happiness and other measures of wellbeing and productivity. There’s also been work on wellbeing and turnover. And I myself also have a paper on wellbeing and recruitment, so happier companies may be more likely to be able to attract workers in the first place. And these three things we talk about as pathways to performance for the firm. So, you have productivity effects, recruitment effects and retention effects. And there’s been work, including our own, on each of those three, but by themselves they don’t really constitute what you might call a business case for wellbeing. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re good for the firm, because there’s a huge issue of costs.

And this often gets overlooked because what we often do in academia is do quite tight studies on one thing without thinking of the bigger picture. And really to get at this business case, what you have to do is look at the more macro level at the level of either business units or of firms. So, you want to be comparing at a much greater level, because implicit in that you’re taking care of the cost issue. And what we do is we look in the book at the relationship between workplace wellbeing, measured in the way that I discussed earlier, the evaluative, hedonic and eudaimonic, and firm profitability and stock market performance. We’re able to do that by measuring wellbeing using a large scale crowdsourced survey together, we collaborated with indeed.com, the extremely large jobs website, to collect data over multiple years on job satisfaction, happiness, stress, and purpose.

And we have about, I think, I don’t want to get the number wrong, but certainly more than 15 million, maybe more by now, surveys. And the really neat thing about that is that it allows you to measure at the company level these things, which usually are only ever measured at the individual level. And when we compared it across companies, you find that happier companies are more profitable and they do tend to have higher stock market valuations over time. So that gets us, I think closer to this business case, taking into account the issue of costs.

Des Dearlove:

So in the book, and let’s just remind ourselves the book is Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance. And in the book, I mean, it’s great we’re talking about this, hopefully making this correlation between happiness and productivity, but you do highlight, and I think a lot of us are aware of it, that a sizable portion, proportion of employees are not happy at work. I mean, how big a problem, how sizable is that?

George Ward:

So it’s difficult to measure, first of all. The large scale crowdsourced data is great for comparing across companies, not as good for measuring the absolute level. For that you want to use a more standard traditional survey using a nationally representative sample. And the answer is boring actually, it’s not drastically low and it’s not drastically high. I think there’s a lot of people who like to get a headline of saying, “Everyone is miserable at work.” And we do find there is a sizable portion of people who are really struggling at work, but it’s not this gigantic horror story. There’s a full distribution of people who are doing well at work, people who are struggling, and people who are in the middle, and that’s true at the individual level but also at the company level.

So, you get this distribution of firms, it’s not the case that everyone is miserable and all firms are miserable. And this is actually I think quite an interesting thing that even within industries, so as I say, we can measure wellbeing for I think 90 or 100,000 firms in the U.S. for example, and you might think that why some firms are happier than others is going to be largely down to things like industry. So, tech workers are going to be much happier than food prep and retail workers, and we do find that’s the case for theoretically sensible reasons. But I think what’s much more interesting is that a huge amount of the variation, so a lot of the differences, are actually within industry.

So, even within pretty tightly defined sectors of the economy you have firms doing well and you have firms doing badly on wellbeing. So, even in tough industries there are still quite a few companies doing quite well on job satisfaction, purpose, happiness and stress. And in the much more generally high wellbeing industries, there are some firms getting it horribly wrong. So, there’s a lot of differences across firms which point to the direction of this being an organisationally influenced thing, and by extension, potentially strategically important thing for firms to think about.

Wellbeing is not just “an HR problem”

John Coné:

George, I was looking at the chat and there’ve been some comments from Jeanette and Koro, and others saying, “Well, happiness is very personal, very individual.” And at a certain level I know that’s undeniable, but in your book you suggest that there are structural aspects of the workplace, like organisational culture or job design, that are actually more influential on employee wellbeing than anything that you would do at an individual level. Can you talk some more about that?

George Ward:

Yeah, and when we’re pointing towards structural issues like that, we’re not saying that there’s no personal aspect to wellbeing, of course there is, and we actually asked people in a survey at one stage, “Who is responsible for your wellbeing at work?” And I want to get the question waiting round, but we essentially gave people 100 points to distribute across the individual, line manager, HR, C-suite and CEO, and for who’s responsible? And about I think about 45, something like that, percent, went to the individual. So, people do themselves recognise that “part of my wellbeing is me.” But then there’s also this other piece which is organisational. “It matters how my job is designed, how I’m managed on a day-to-day basis, how much I’m paid, what the hours are, what my scheduling is, how predictable that scheduling is,” and so on and so forth.

And those things also matter. One of the interesting things there was that I think we often think about when we look, think about the organisational piece of this, instinctively think, “Oh, that’s an HR problem,” but actually HR people have a lot of stuff to be getting on with and play a hugely important role in firms. And I think it’s a mistake to think of it entirely as an HR problem. Really, when you’re thinking about it as related to structural issues of work, how it’s managed and organised, you have to think much more broadly about who’s responsible at the firm. So, line managers have a huge influence on people’s wellbeing as do the leadership of the firm who set the tone and can set organisational policies on a broader scale. And so, it’s responsibility is distributed across multiple stakeholders.

How can we influence wellbeing at work?

Des Dearlove:

And I mean, you mentioned the role of leaders and managers. Have you found certain management and leadership styles and practices are more effective in boosting employee wellbeing and performance? Are there any patterns to this stuff?

George Ward:

Yeah. So in the book, so I guess just as a helpful piece of background, just as the general structure of the book, if you like. So, it’s split into, get it right, four main parts. The first is what is workplace wellbeing, how do we measure it, and what’s the current state of things? The second piece is then we think, “Okay, we know what wellbeing is and we can measure it, what influences it?” And then, Part 3 we think, “What are the downstream effects of wellbeing on workers and then also on firms?” And then, Part 4 is about the future of work, and perhaps we’ll get there later on.

So, what we’re talking here about is this Part 2 piece, which is what influences wellbeing at work? And there’s I think two pieces to it. One is just how do we explain differences across people and across firms, what is it? And then, there’s the “can we change those things”? Can we change it? Can we intervene in the workplace with different policies and practices? And that’s I think what you’re asking here. And we think there’s broadly two ways of thinking about this. One is that you can try to intervene directly to improve wellbeing, and that’s usually wellness programs, you might think of mindfulness apps, free gym membership, whatever else it might be. And these things are all good and are helpful to people.

But then there’s the indirect route which is to think, “Okay, we have the drivers of wellbeing,” things like relationships at work, earnings and benefits, scheduling, risk, health, safety, employee development, training, whatever else, these things that are driving wellbeing, “Can we intervene instead on them?” Which is a bit of a mindset shift in how we think about wellbeing. It’s not thinking directly, “Okay, let’s go straight to wellbeing,” it’s, “Can we change what is influencing wellbeing in order to try and improve it?” And we think that you can get a bit more mileage out of that.

And I think we have to start taking more seriously these more structural issues, because the wellness programs, as I say, I have nothing against wellness programs at all. There’s a lot of good evidence that mindfulness or doing exercise are undeniably good for your wellbeing. One of the issues is that when wellness programs are particularly given, usually given to people within firms, it’s often the people who need them the least that take them. So, huge selection issue. And there’ve been several large scale experiments in companies that have shown this, is that you offer free gym membership to people, it’s usually the people who will go to the gym anyway get their gym paid for and other people don’t go.

So, I think if you’re going to go down this route you have to think quite carefully about how to design these programs. And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with subsidising people’s gym membership, that can be great. It can be a retention device and so on. But when we’re really trying to think seriously about how do we boost wellbeing for the whole company, you are better off trying to take seriously how work is managed and organised. So, that’s what we’re trying to argue in the book. And it’s a slightly glib example if you like, but you could imagine a firm that has a problem with stress, they have highly stressed workers, largely because of scheduling issues, deadlines, the way that line managers treat their workers and so on.

In order to deal with that, do you want to try and think about the scheduling and the deadlines, and how work’s being managed? Or do you want to add a stress reduction app on the side but keep everything the same? There’s nothing wrong with the stress reduction app in conjunction with dealing with these other things, it probably would be the best thing to do overall. But I think just offering the piece on the side whilst ignoring the more structural issues is not going to be particularly helpful, and it actually can just annoy people. It can even backfire. So, what we’re trying to argue in the book is that we should be thinking much more about this indirect route and we have what’s called, we go through the academic and practitioner literature on each of these drivers to try and think, “Okay, what’s the best evidence for the kinds of interventions, policies and changes that can influence each?”

Introducing the D-R-I-V-E-R framework

And we looked through I think several thousand papers in a systematic literature review, and we summarised some of the best ones in the book, but there’s also freely downloadable elsewhere as part of the World Wellbeing Movement, what’s called the Workplace Wellbeing Playbook, where we try and bring together the best evidence on each of these things. I should say that they’re grouped by driver, and this is a little bit cheesy but we think in the book of the drivers, there’s the D-R-I-V-E-R, there’s development and training, there’s relationships, independence and flexibility, variety and fulfillment, earnings and benefits, and risk, health and safety. So of course, you can try and characterise a job or a workplace across hundreds or thousands of parameters, it’s tricky to distill things down, and of course there are different ways of doing it.

But that, broadly speaking, gets us to be able to think about something a little bit more analytically. If we’re going to think about how to improve wellbeing at work, you have to first of all try to think about what it is that’s influencing wellbeing in a relative sense. So, you’re not just saying, “Earnings are important,” or, “Flexibility is important,” or, “Belonging, feeling of belonging and inclusion is important.” You really want to know the relative importance, because only then can you think about, “Okay, if I spend this much of my budget trying to improve it, how much am I going to improve wellbeing?” So, if you’re going to start thinking analytically about costs and benefits, we really need to know what’s driving wellbeing and how much is it going to cost to improve. And so to that, you do have to start to think a little bit more abstractly about trying to quantify aspects of the workplace and then go from there.

Des Dearlove:

I think your point about tackling problems at source rather than trying to fix them afterwards, I mean, it’s the great lesson of, I think healthcare is that we understand that we’re better off encouraging people to have healthy lives rather than trying to fix them or cure them. If we can create healthy cultures and healthy workplaces, it’s that much easier.

John Coné:

You mentioned that a lot of the things that drive happiness, or the lack thereof, are systemic and organisational, and not the purview of HR. Having said that, and knowing that a lot of people on this session are HR people, it seems to fall to the HR function to point these things out to the organisation. So, given that that’s what we need to do, and your comment that you really need to understand the relative impact of various things that you can do, what in your experience are – based on your research – are those that have the highest impact? What are the most effective ways for companies to improve employee wellbeing, and therefore happiness?

George Ward:

Yeah, and I think you’re quite right on the HR issue. I think one overlooked function of HR professionals is this what we might call the bridging function, is bringing together stakeholders in other parts of the company to try and solve issues as opposed to just things just getting shunted onto them and then forgotten. So, I think that’s hugely important and we should be thinking more about that. On your second question, there’s the two issues. There’s what is it that explains differences in happiness of these driver things, these six drivers? And when we do that, when we run those analyses, what we call a driver analysis, we find that feelings of relationships at work, including things like belonging relationships with coworkers, relationships with management tend to be the most important thing in influencing people’s wellbeing.

That’s not to say other things aren’t important. Earnings and benefits, so income and happiness is a huge academic literature going back decades on that, that’s important. It is generally true that people who have higher income, higher wages are happier and more satisfied at work. The thing is that’s true, but it’s just not as strong an effect as some of these other aspects. So with income, there’s often two camps I often hear, one is income doesn’t matter and it has nothing to do with happiness. And there’s the more economics campaign, where more where I come from, which is … just equates them to be the same thing.

And the truth is somewhere in the middle. Income is important, particularly at the lower end of the income distribution. So, raising wages of low wage workers even a little bit can have quite a strong effect, but giving an extra small raise to someone who’s already making 100, 200 grand is not going to have much of an effect on their job satisfaction. So income is important, but much more important is people’s relationships at work, which tends to come out as the most important driver from this driver analysis. But that’s more conceptual, that’s things like belonging or earnings and benefits generally, or autonomy at work are a little bit more abstract, but they’re interesting to think about in terms of what drives wellbeing. But then you can think about how do we intervene on each of those drivers, and that’s where you get into slightly more concrete policies and practices.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, I was going to ask you, can we get concrete? Have you seen successful examples of policies or company initiatives that have really made an improved worker wellbeing? I mean, it’s always dangerous to point to best practice because you put someone on a pedestal and they fall off, but are there examples that you can talk about, companies perhaps or organisations where you see some of these best practices at work?

George Ward:

Yeah. One thing I’ll say before that is that there isn’t a best fit. So, I think it’s important to, in your organisation, measure and then do some sort of driver analysis to try and work out what it is that’s causing low levels of wellbeing, and then go from there. So, the solution for one company is not going to be the same for another, so there isn’t one fantastic culture or one set of management practices, but nevertheless we … One example, for example, comes from a really nice paper from, actually from my PhD supervisor, Erin Kelly, and some of her co-authors a few years ago, where they had this thing called the STAR program at a large tech company that had a lot of issues to do with work-life balance, scheduling and flexibility.

And that was relatively simple, a series of collaborative workshops with management and workers together, essentially here’s a problem, here’s what’s gone wrong, how can we come up with a plan together and stick to it going forward? And it’s a little more complicated than that, but the STAR program, which worked to improve wellbeing and reduce burnout, and also had some positive effects on productivity. There were some other programs, a really nice paper from a firm in Turkey I think it was, where again, a collaborative workshop on relational culture within the firm, how people are really relating to each other, both co-workers, and co-workers and management. And I think one of the themes of these, the more workshop-y kinds of intervention is that they tend to have a point to them and they tend to be collaborative with both workers and management, and they’re trying to solve a problem.

They’re not, “We’re going to sit here and listen to an outside speaker tell us about what we should be doing, or giving us a lecture on some more abstract construct.” They tend to be more focused and bring everyone together, and it’s about making a plan, “How do we go forwards and improve work life?” Of course, not everything’s going to be solved by these one two day workshops and no one would ever think that. A lot of other things are also important, and are much more the purview of management, scheduling is hugely important. You’d be amazed, particularly in the U.S., at how work is scheduled, particularly for low wage workers, that you don’t know your … You have these huge long shifts, you don’t know how many hours you’re going to get this week, you don’t even know how many hours or what time you’re going to start two days in advance, and it’s just hugely damaging for people’s wellbeing.

You can’t plan your private life around that, you can’t plan childcare, you sometimes get sent home halfway through a shift if demand isn’t high enough. Amazing practices, which are technically beneficial for firms in terms of productivity, so these scheduling systems have been designed entirely with efficiency as the main outcome. So, they’ve been designed by engineers somewhere in quite an abstract way is how do we maximise their efficiency with entirely forgetting that if it makes your workers miserable in the process, that’s also going to feed into the system, but they don’t build that into their model.

And so, that’s a surprising one that is hugely important. A lot of these things are not. I know sometimes when I say we need to think more indirectly about and take seriously structural aspects of how work is managed and organised, and that sounds scary because you think, “Okay, we’d prefer just to have a workshop for a day.” But it’s actually, a lot of these things are not gigantic. They’re not hugely costly. We’re not talking about completely changing the structure of work, but giving workers more of a say in how they do their jobs for example, can be hugely important. Just involving people in the process of management.

You’d be amazed also the effects of just communication. So, even if you’re not actually directly consulting on every issue, just keeping people in the loop about what’s happening can have quite strong effects on worker wellbeing, even when things are going badly. They know what’s going on and they know that things may be going south in some situations, keeping people in the loop and with just basic communication can go a long way. So, we talk about many more things in the book and I’m scattergunning a little bit here, but a lot of these things can go a long way to improve wellbeing.

John Coné:

George, let’s take it in the other direction. You’ve already talked a lot about the fact that many organisations are focused on treating the symptoms of unhappiness rather than looking at prevention. Are there other common mistakes that companies make when they say, “Hey, we need to do something about this, we need to act”?

George Ward:

Yeah. So as I say, one common mistake is just not really thinking clearly enough at the start about what workplace wellbeing is. So, when Jan and I have gone in and spoken to managers in firms in the past, what tends to happen is, even this is in firms that are interested in wellbeing and are rightly doing things, and they’re engaged, which is fantastic, and they’ll often show us a dashboard of measures in their firm which they consider to be workplace wellbeing, and they have all sorts of things in there. So, it can include things like job satisfaction and happiness, which is great, but then you also have work-life balance, wages, flexibility, autonomy, whatever else it might be. And these things are all just lumped in, into this huge wellbeing index. Basically anything good you can think about, about a job or a workplace, and then we’ll measure that.

I think a really, it’s subtle but hugely important mindset shift is to think about wellbeing as an outcome tightly defined as how we think about and feel at work, and then thinking about all these other aspects of work as the drivers of wellbeing. And only then can you start to think about, “Okay, what can I intervene on in a cost-effective way that might influence wellbeing?” Otherwise, you’re just lost, staring at a dashboard, trying to improve anything we can in any direction. So, I think taking a step back, measuring wellbeing in a thoughtful way where we’re actually thinking about what’s the construct we’re trying to measure and how can we do it, using a survey or whatever else, and then doing some sort of driver analysis to try and get to the root cause of what’s going wrong and then thinking about interventions on that particular thing that’s going wrong.

So, I think it’s not racing into just thinking, “What can we do? There’s a problem, let’s change things.” You’ve got to think about, “What’s actually gone wrong here, how can we change it in a cost-effective way?” And then when you do that, measuring whether it’s worked or not, which I mean, it sounds crazy to say it but a lot of people don’t, is that you then want to, preferably if you can, roll it out on a small part of the firm to begin with, see if it’s working before you then roll it out to the whole firm, and tweak it as you go. So, it’s trying to build an evidence base for what works essentially as opposed to just racing to change things.

How can we measure wellbeing?

John Coné:

This was going to be a later question, so forgive me Des, but you mentioned measurement. And at least here in the U.S., net promoter score has become the thing, the way that we decide we’re going to measure employee happiness. Is that the way to go, or are there other better ways to measure it?

George Ward:

In the book we suggest a very simple survey module, which people are very free to use, which measures job satisfaction, negative emotions, positive emotions and meaning and purpose at work, to try and get at a more academically-based definition of it. Net promoter score is an interesting one. So, I’ve said before that one major issue, one mistake that people make is lumping workplace wellbeing together with the drivers. So, we want to split wellbeing from what’s driving it. I think here the issue is splitting wellbeing from its downstream consequences. So, one consequence is productivity, another one is turnover, and another one is engagement and loyalty, which I think is more what net promoter score is getting at. It seems to be a downstream consequence of how much I’m enjoying my job and how satisfied I am, would I then recommend it to others? People sometimes then equate wellbeing with are you considering leaving within a year? Would you recommend it? These are all interesting and important things to measure, but I don’t think they’re wellbeing, I think they’re downstream consequences of it.

Des Dearlove:

George, you were just now you were talking about, you’re talking meaning and purpose at work. Can organisations retrofit that? Do you think an organisation can change its culture to become more purpose-driven, or does it have to be built that way from the start? We hear about these start-ups and they’re going to change the world, but a lot of people aren’t working for the exciting startups, but we should assume that they’re doing something important and valuable. So, perhaps it’s a case of uncovering the purpose and making it more easy for people to connect with it, but what do you say?

George Ward:

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it’s not just with meaning and purpose, people I think, when I say with friends and family and so on, say I study workplace wellbeing, their mind immediately goes to Google and ping-pong tables, and nice lattes for free, and whatever else. What we find in the book, as I said earlier, is that even within these tough industries like retail, restaurants and so on, which generally have lower levels of wellbeing, there are some firms that have much higher wellbeing than others, even facing the same business environment with the same kind of similar set of workers and so on. So, there’s something possible here. These things are not determined entirely from the outside, there are things that organisations can do.

And the fact that within these highly defined segments, that the fact that some people are doing well suggests that these things are possible and that you can change. We also find that workplace wellbeing at the company level is relatively stable over time, but does move. I mean, it’s not something that’s going to shift around month to month, but equally it’s not just flat. Things can change and cultures can change. I mean, that’s been shown I think in, I haven’t myself done as much work on culture, there are fantastic experts that are particularly interested in corporate culture, and one of the findings there I believe is that these things can and do change over time. So, it’s thinking about it in a way, but it’s not how can we change it next week? That’s my point.

It’s they take time and effort to change, but they are nevertheless changeable. And the fact that we see these differences across firms and across time is testament to that fact. And I think we often think, it’s an interesting cognitive thing, we often think, “Okay, can we improve this culture? I’ve never been in a place that’s improved, these things aren’t malleable.” But I think most people have worked in or known someone who’s worked in a place that’s good that’s deteriorated in terms of culture as new management have come in, or one new manager has come in and ruined things or whatever else it might be. So, I think that’s testament I think, again to the fact that these things can change.

Des Dearlove:

One question that stood out for me earlier is do you conflate worry with stress? Someone was asking specifically, did you in the book look at the impact of worry on wellbeing?

George Ward:

Yeah. So, in the book we use this large scale survey where we were able to measure only four questions, so job satisfaction, happiness, stress and purpose. So, there you’re constrained to have one question on positive emotions, one on negative emotions. That’s often the case, I think also for firms and HR professionals, that you don’t have infinite survey time so we wanted to try and distill things down. But of course, there are other positive and negative emotions, negative emotions in particular can be quite varied. So, we think about stress, which is different to anxiety, which is different to worry, which is different to frustration, boredom, anger. And in an ideal world, if you have more survey time, it would be great to measure those and think about the drivers of those separately. We’re not at all saying that stress is the same as worry, those things can be quite different.

The distinction between worry and anxiety is a little more fuzzy, but certainly stress, and worry, and anxiety can be quite different.

The impact of workplace wellbeing on employee retention

Des Dearlove:

Okay. Another question here is, I mean, you’ve mentioned retention a couple of times and the fact that you’ve done some research in that area. The question here is has there been any correlation in companies between wellbeing and when you measure retention?

George Ward:

Yeah. So again, using this large scale data set where we have tens of thousands of companies, we can … Look, there’s multiple ways of doing this. One interesting thing is it depends a little bit on the country you’re looking at. I was surprised years ago when I first found this out, that in the U.S. there isn’t company level data very well available on turnover, it’s not required to be reported. But if you look at publicly traded firms, a lot of them do report it in their company annual reports. So, we got together all the data that we could from company annual reports on voluntary turnover rates, and looked at the correlation with our measures of workplace wellbeing. And you find that companies with low levels of wellbeing have much higher voluntary turnover rates. That’s true in the cross-sectional comparison, but also in terms of predicting future turnover in one year to the next or one quarter to the next.

So, that’s at the company level, so yes. At the individual level, another interesting thing you can do is look. So, on indeed.com where we’re doing this survey, for example, you can look at people’s responses to the wellbeing questions, and then looking at their behaviour on the site in the next days. So, people with low wellbeing tend to be searching more intensely for doing more searches, spending more time on the site. They are applying for more jobs, looking at more jobs, which suggests again, gets to this wellbeing and turnover relationship. And that’s just using this platform data, there’s been studies over the years looking particularly within firms where you can actually get administrative data on who’s leaving and who’s not. And tends to be the case that job satisfaction in particular, but also more emotional and purpose measures do predict whether people are more likely to stay or not.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, thank you for that, and thank you for the question.

George Ward:

I’ll just say on that as well. So, I say we’ve talked a lot about productivity, we’ve talked about retention. There’s also this third potential pathway through which you might expect happier companies to have better financial performance, and that is recruitment. And that’s more and more important as you get more and more websites like Glassdoor, Indeed, and there’s various others now, that what it’s like to work at different companies, people got that information through social networks and through general reputation, but it wasn’t as well known. But now it’s much more well known what it’s like working at different companies. It’s much more easy to find.

I mean, it used be you’d have to dig around, ask people, and you weren’t sure whether it was true, or you got essentially a glossy brochure from the company where every company was a fantastic great employer, and that was information controlled by them. And increasingly wellbeing will become an issue of recruitment, trying to attract workers. And I was, again, one of my dissertation chapters for the PhD, was an experiment on Indeed. So, randomly essentially. So, on Indeed we measure wellbeing, and each company has a wellbeing score which gets displayed on the website so people can see, and they help them make decisions in their job search. But we can turn that on and off in an A/B test to see whether it has a behavioural effect on what people are doing on the site and whether they’re more likely to apply. And in particular for low wellbeing companies, when you reveal that information it can discourage people from applying. And when you reveal that a company is particularly happy or high satisfaction, high purpose, that does attract more applications. So, that’s a third channel I would get in there.

Workplace wellbeing in the future of work

John Coné:

I know we may have a couple of more questions from the group that we want to get to, but I would feel terrible if this ended and I didn’t get the chance to ask you, are there trends that you see that are shaping the future of workplace wellbeing?

George Ward:

Yeah. So, I’d say the final part of the book is all about wellbeing and the future of work, and we were particularly interested in technology for obvious reasons, and that part of that is generative AI, but part of it is also just software machine learning or more standard robotics. So, we can think about automotive technologies. So, one of the chapters we sat down, I remember this, to think about, okay, we have generative AI, how is that going to affect wellbeing? And of course, what we’re trying to say in the book is if you want to think about what’s affecting wellbeing, we have to think about the drivers of wellbeing. So, how is it going to affect relationships? How is it going to affect development and training? How is it going to affect risk, health and safety, or earnings and benefits?

So we go through, and the fascinating thing was we went through each of these and think, “Okay, is it going to have a positive effect or a negative effect?” And for each and every driver, you could argue it both ways. So, the key takeaway I think, is that technology isn’t deterministic, it doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It’s designed by humans and it’s implemented within firms by humans who make decisions about how we’re going to use this technology. And depending how it’s used, it could have positive or negative effects. So, you can think in terms of relationships, for example, the development of things like Zoom and other email, whatever else it might be, other technologies have allowed people to build relationships within firms even when they’re distributed across the world potentially.

But equally you could imagine that technologies could isolate workers and strip out any interaction with either customers or other coworkers. And so, it all depends how this technology is designed and how it’s implemented within firms. So, how do we adopt it within our situation? So, there is no particular answer, which I know is disappointing. We’d love to be able to say, “AI is going to improve wellbeing at work,” or, “AI is going to be a disaster for wellbeing.” Everything depends how we use the technology. And I think one of the issues is … At the moment I’m a little bit pessimistic, so I think most …

My sense is at the moment the people who are in the room when this is being decided are entirely engineers, who are fantastic, but they’re often not thinking, it’s not their fault, they’ve often been told just to optimise on efficiency. And not only is that a mistake, not only is it not good for workers, which we should care about in their own right, and I’ve said in the past, I should mention actually now, that we talk about the business case for wellbeing. We argue in the book we don’t necessarily need a business case for wellbeing. There’s also a very strong prior human case for wellbeing, but it’s also nice to have a business case as well. But it would be nice if we should also, for general societal reasons, be thinking about how can we use technology to make work better?

But also if we just try and design technology and adopt it within firms entirely trying to optimise on efficiency, you’re going to miss out on all these loops within the system where if you’re leading people to have miserable work lives that it’s going to cause productivity and retention issues in the meantime. So, I’m a little pessimistic at the moment, but not because I think AI will destroy workplace wellbeing. It doesn’t have to, there are ways of using this technology to improve people’s work lives. It’s going to be tough to do.

Challenging the trade-off between wellbeing and business results

Des Dearlove:

Yeah. I mean, you’re almost referring to the short-term versus the long-term here. Something I wanted to ask you is how can companies balance short-term productivity goals with long-term investments in employee health, wellbeing, growth? I mean, we hear about this epidemic of burnout, and I think we all have anecdotal evidence of that. We talk to people, we are experiencing it. Because burnout doesn’t necessarily happen overnight. Someone might appear to be functioning and be a high performer indeed for years, and then all of a sudden they hit a wall. But it’s because their wellbeing hasn’t been attended to, they haven’t been given the agency themselves. And there was a lot of chat in the chat box I noticed earlier people talking about it being a very personal thing. And of course, agency is so important, I think you mentioned earlier, people who don’t have power over their own shifts, it’s very stressful the less power you have. I think we know that from previous research that the lower down-

George Ward:

Absolutely.

Des Dearlove:

… the organisation, the more you feel it. So, how does an organisation get those two things to dance?

George Ward:

Yeah, it’s not straightforward, but I think one thing is that I don’t think it’s necessarily … It’s always framed as a trade-off, that either we can have productivity or we can have wellbeing. And I think it’s a mindset that isn’t quite right and doesn’t tally with the decades of research on the topic. And it’s an interesting thing that it hasn’t filtered through to management thinking on the ground, that attending to workers wellbeing doesn’t necessarily have to come at the sacrifice of productivity. That’s not to say that you don’t want to get too Pollyanna-ish about it, that spending all of your budget on making your workers as delighted as possible isn’t going to work. But in general, it’s trying to get people away from this zero-sum thinking that your happiness is … My workers are too happy, therefore I must be losing something in terms of productivity. And it’s ingrained unfortunately into quite a few people, and it’s not necessarily a trade-off.

Des Dearlove:

No, I think that’s a really important point, that binary thinking is often what gets us into these problems. I mean, you see that in lots of walks of life. John, I’m going to give you the last question because I know you have a last question that you want to ask.

John Coné:

My last question is, if an organisation had to focus on just one thing, one initiative to improve wellbeing, what would you tell the people in this session, “Go back and do this”?

George Ward:

That is tricky. I think, measure wellbeing in the first place. I know it’s not an exciting one, but you can only really start to think about issues of wellbeing in the organisation and what’s causing them if you measure it. If you’re not, you’re just guessing.

Des Dearlove:

Fantastic. Well, that’s a good place to end. We like hard empirical evidence, and that’s a good starting point. I’m afraid that’s all we have time for. Huge thanks to our special guest, Dr. George Ward, to you all for tuning in. This is the Thinkers 50 Radar webinar in collaboration with the Association of Talent Development, and we’ve been Des Dearlove and John Coné. Please join us again on the 4th of June, same time, same place for the final, sadly, the final episode in this series of Thinkers 50 Radar when our special guest will be communications expert Matt Abrahams, lecturer at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, and author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You Are Put On the Spot, and we’ll be putting him on the spot. So, please tune in and join us then.