transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Only one in four people, less than a quarter in the States, report high workplace well-being. That's really, really worrying. The way you drive home from the office, the mood that you're in, will impact your wife, your children. This feeds into our societies and our communities big time. We should not have had to write a book on why workplace well-being matters. 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.

Speaker 2:
[00:31] Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier and more healed. Today's guest is someone who's going to help us do exactly that. I'm speaking about Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral scientist at the University of Oxford, and director of Wellbeing Research Centre. 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. His latest book, Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, explores how happiness at work shapes our lives, businesses and society. 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. I promise you, you won't regret it. Please welcome to the podcast Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. Jan, it is great to have you here.

Speaker 1:
[01:29] Jay, thank you for having me. It's so wonderful to get the opportunity to reconnect as well.

Speaker 2:
[01:33] First question I want to ask you is, you're part of the biggest study on happiness in the world. What's the most heartbreaking thing that you found?

Speaker 1:
[01:44] In the Western world, especially in the United States of America, a breakdown of our social tissue, 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 13th in the world. 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, self-rated life satisfaction, and what we're finding is huge inequality. So there's a very wide distribution in terms of well-being, and then there is inequalities also in terms of generational differences. 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. If you were to look just at youth in America by itself, they'd be 62nd or 63rd in the World Happiness Report ranking. Look at the 60-plusers, they'd still be in the top 10 of the World Happiness Report. And I think that's really telling. 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.

Speaker 2:
[03:11] Why are younger people becoming unhappier?

Speaker 1:
[03:14] There's a variety of things that play with youth. People are swift to point in the direction of social media, I think that's a little easy. It's easy to vilify the tech companies. But if you actually talk with youngsters and do qualitative focus groups, what you find is its affordability, first and foremost. Affordability of studies. The cost of studying has outpaced inflation by a long mile in the United States. So you find that that's the real worry. The second thing that comes to the fore when you really dig into why youth is off a cliff, is the fact that they're very worried about the future of work, and I cannot blame them. How in the world are you going to catch up with Chad GPT at this point, in terms of studying engineering or law or medicine or what have you? So there's real worries and concern about what they'll be doing. So there's 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. There's a lot of doubt around that at the moment. Then there's no way around it. There's also social media. 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. Now social media has done a lot of good and has the power to do a lot of good. I think your podcast and the nuggets of wisdom that you share through social media are extraordinary. But we really ought to be thinking hard, kids, parents, policymakers, all together to see, can we put the social back into social media somehow and do it together? So let's not cut corners and blame social media and ban social media. No, we ought to really work together. It's not something you're going to be putting back in the box anytime soon. It's here to stay social media. It's about making it work for everybody in a way that is positive for well-being. So the drop in youth is a combination of factors. It's uncertainty, anxiety, distraction, and affordability issues for youth at this point. So 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. We pick it up in their self-reported lives of dissection.

Speaker 2:
[05:31] Yeah, I really like the fact that when you've actually sat down and talked to individuals, you don't get this glazed overview of what the issue is, right? You get a very specific set of factors that are affecting well-being. When you talk about affordability, you mentioned education. What has shifted in the affordability of education? 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? What have been the biggest shifts in affordability?

Speaker 1:
[06:04] Everything has become more expensive, but if you look at the cost of education, the cost of tuition fees has risen quicker and faster than inflation. Because companies and organizations require you to have degrees, and so there's a monopoly, if you will, at a national scale around you have to have a degree in order to obtain a good job. Then obviously, there's a premium to be extracted in markets. That's the way economics tends to work. 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. If ChatGPT is so good, as we've all seen it in action and the other large language models, then the whole question around learning and how to use your skills can be very different. Maybe other types of jobs, nursing, plumbing, the kinds of stuff that ChatGPT 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 and not always feel the need to necessarily go into tertiary education of the liberal arts type.

Speaker 2:
[07:16] We hire a lot of people. And I can't remember the last time I looked at what college someone went to, because it's just not become an important factor because the skills that we need to grow are not the skills that people are learning in college. We are expecting them to be able to prove it on the job, to show experiments, to create work. And of course, we're not hiring at the scale of the largest companies in the world. So there's a different 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.

Speaker 1:
[07:50] I think so.

Speaker 2:
[07:51] Depending on what career path someone takes.

Speaker 1:
[07:53] And I think tertiary education universities and colleges in particular, they're in for a ride because they'll have to go substantively, the courses and what the skills are being taught cannot be outdated. And universities, they take a long time to change, but Chad GPT is really catching up.

Speaker 2:
[08:09] 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. That's what would be the ideal career. 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?

Speaker 1:
[08:33] No, and frankly, myself, the team, Chad GPT does all the coding at this point for us. 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, because tools and machinery and large-angle models will do that for us. But we still need to ask the right questions to prop the machines to do the job for us. So I think maybe we'll shift back to questions and the right questions, rather than the skills to make and build that answers to questions posed by somebody else. I'll be teaching for the first time at the University of Oxford, a class on the science of well-being and business policy and life. The fact that this new elective was oversubscribed from never having been taught. A bit like Laurie Santos at Yale, though in this case within the business school, with a third of the entire MBA court 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. That's exactly what we'll be doing in this class and speaks to the point we just raised. I will be asking in this class more questions and providing answers. We will debate it, we'll be asking questions around purpose and meaning and the role of income and well-being and how much is enough. What's the human case, not just the business case for investing in workplace well-being, and so on and so forth. Maybe that's a sign of the times that I'm starting to teach this class at Oxford and that students are signing up for it in droves. It's about asking the bigger questions rather than just looking for tools and tricks and skills.

Speaker 2:
[10:17] I agree with that approach, and we grew up at a time where answers made you smart. Today we're living at a time where questions make you smarter, because the answers are available. It's easy.

Speaker 1:
[10:29] Wikipedia, Google, chat to begin.

Speaker 2:
[10:31] Yeah, it's easy.

Speaker 1:
[10:33] The smartness comes through the right questions.

Speaker 2:
[10:35] Exactly. 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? I want to go off 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, it's pretty impossible that anyone else will. You just said there a question that you think people will debate is, how much is enough? I wanted to get the empirical take on how much is enough.

Speaker 1:
[11:16] So first and foremost, two Nobel Prize winners, Angus Deaton and Danny Kahneman. In 2010, they published a paper showing that, you may remember this figure, about $75,000 was the golden number. Now truth be told, it depends also on how you define well-being. If it's about sort of positive experiences in the moment, then yes, they were right, back in the days. Obviously, you would have to inflation adjust that today. It was about $75,000. But 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 $100,000, $120,000. Again, I would need to inflation adjust. The thing that all economists and all of the science agrees on is there's huge diminishing marginal returns to further income. As soon as you reach about $120,000, $150,000, then it becomes more and more difficult to pick up differences in well-being for further income. The relationship is logarithmic, as I say. To have the same impact on your well-being from moving from $20,000 to $40,000, you would need another $40,000. To then have the same impact again, you would need from $80,000 to $160,000. To then have the same impact on your well-being again, you would need to move from $160,000 to $320,000. That's how it creeps up. There continues to be increases, but it requires way more money to find the additional increase. Now, you asked the question why? The reason is, unless you're inheriting money or you're winning the lottery, you still have to work for it, and you're starting to make compromises. 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. And so there's trade-offs at that point. 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. 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. 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. They're real in terms of looking after your own health, physical and mental. And so, all in all, it weighs it back down, and you find little or no difference anymore in people's life satisfaction above a certain point. And so, there is a bit of an optimal point for well-being in terms of income.

Speaker 2:
[13:44] It's interesting because it's not that we don't all want and need more money. It's the fact that those roles and responsibilities come with more work, more sacrifices, more choices, more difficult options, could be more stress mentally and physically if you're not prioritizing that. 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. I think it can decrease some of your issues. But it's interesting to think about the proportion of happiness.

Speaker 1:
[14:17] You're absolutely right, but only up to a certain point. So the real issues that you're solving with money, the deeper issues like daily anxieties, paying off mortgage, paying off your loans, paying for the basic necessities, you're there after say 100 or $120,000.

Speaker 2:
[14:33] Unless you live in like New York or LA or London.

Speaker 1:
[14:35] Yeah, of course. But this is always a context dependent, and inflation needs to be inflation-adjusted, et cetera, et cetera. But the trade-offs starting to weigh in after that sort of satiation point, way more heavily than the benefits of further money at that point. And that's real. But the fact of the matter is, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the data is right there. I could show you right now, if I brought up my computer, that extraordinary line. So if you don't have much money, it matters a great deal because it solves real issues as you were alluding to. But after a certain point, obviously depending where you are, LA, New York will be a bit more. But after a certain point in the basic amenities, necessities, 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, and then that will start putting a real break on the opportunity for improving your well-being because your integrity might be out of the window. You'll be more responsible, stress, family, work-life balance, physical, mental health, everything we've just alluded to. The fact of the matter is people underestimate these other drivers of one's well-being. In our societies, and particularly in the United States, there's this real focus on wealth and income. And everything around us from marketing and so on and so forth pushes us to think in the direction of, okay, I've got to make more money, it'll make me happier. But we forego and underestimate the importance of something like a social connection. Running into people, having shared meals, and we can talk about this, we've got new data on this, it's just extraordinary. 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. We always knew social capital, the importance of social connections. In the field, we know that people underestimate the importance of social ties or social lives. I had no idea just how powerful and important our social lives were for our well-being until this. In the United States, we've got data on how many of your meals are being shared on a week-to-week basis. How many of your lunches, how many of your dinners? A variable that runs from 0 to 14, 7 lunches, 7 dinners. We don't have anything about breakfast, but anyway, lunches and dinners. In the US on average, people now have about 7 of the 14 meals together. That means half of your meals on average in the US are essentially dining alone. What we've seen is an increase of 53 percent, to be precise, in America over the last two decades and dining alone. If you slice and dice up by age groups, it's been an increase of an almost doubling for youth. Below 30-year-olds are now almost twice as likely to be dining alone on a day-to-day basis, as compared to two decades ago. Now, why does this matter? 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. You would obviously think that while your income and employment status matter more, that coefficient will come in more strongly. No. 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.

Speaker 2:
[17:57] No way.

Speaker 1:
[17:57] Yes way. It's really striking. Even for us, this was a real eye-opener. Oh my God, we knew social capital and social ties were important. Didn't quite realize just how important. We've been very lucky to be able to get information around sharing meals. 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-Rung Pole, which has just gone in for one year. My God, there's such variation in the extent to which people have social lives around the world. There's countries where at the 14 lunches and dinners in a week, there's countries where there's only three or four meals shared. 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. And in the US, it's about seven.

Speaker 2:
[18:46] Wow. Why is it that millennials are becoming unhappier and boomers are becoming happier?

Speaker 1:
[18:52] So first of all, you got to know, and I'm sure you noticed Jay, but what we thought was one of the universal facts in wellbeing science was the U-shape. The relationship between age and wellbeing is one that has the form of a U. People start higher in terms of wellbeing, so lose that happiness and wellbeing over the years, reach a midlife crisis, so everybody talks about midlife crisis, but you actually pick it up in the data, it exists. And then from there on, and the midlife crisis are like early 40s, the peak of the pressures, mortgages, small children, responsibilities at work and all of it coming together. And then from there on, on average, people go up again in terms of wellbeing as they measure through their satisfaction with life. And only at the very, very end, you see come down again when physical issues and disabilities come into play. What we're finding in the United States in particular, but generally in the West, is that first leg of the U, what is meant to be high levels of wellbeing for youth, that is gone. So I got in the news quite a bit with quotes along the lines of youth in America are experiencing their midlife crisis today. We find that that is empirically the case. There's this long thought, universal truth that we thought was the case around the U-shaped relationship between wellbeing and age is just gone. Now, the question of course is why? In the United States, we touched upon it earlier, there's a number of reasons why we believe youth are having their midlife crisis today. It's got to do with the affordability crisis. It has to do with absolute distress and anxiety, worry about the future of work for them and the questions that are about decisions around studies, for example, now. Then social media being a force for distraction, and not really social or as social as it should be. All of these things come together and you see it come together in the likes of people feeling more and more lonely. 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 day-to-day basis as compared to two decades ago.

Speaker 2:
[21:14] What does loneliness actually do to us? Because we talk about it a lot, but what does it actually do?

Speaker 1:
[21:18] A lot. So obviously, loneliness is the bigger concept, and the indicator that we have here is the extent to which we share meals and that's coming down. So in The World Happiness Report this year, we dig into precisely the question you're after. And what we're finding is if you are less social, so you have less social interactions, in other words, you're more lonely, you will have less social support, duh, needless to say. So if you're having less social connections, it means that in times of need, you'll have less people to call on. You also are less socially trusting of others. People, and Jay, this is important, and I owe this to Professor John Halliwell, the founding editor of The World Happiness Report, who while we did Chapter 3, he did Chapter 2, he found that, and he's always been very strong on this particular aspect, we underestimate the kindness of people by a factor of two. And so left to our own devices and by ourselves, lonely, we underestimate the kindness of others. We need to get in touch and in front of other people to find out that they're actually all right, other people. Left to our own devices and echo chambers within social media, we obviously polarise in our thinking. 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 sort of radicalisation of opinions. Because if you think about it, and I don't have strong empirical evidence for this, this is more sort of conjecture. But still, when you speak with other people, everybody has slightly different views on the world. There are frames of views of the world and other people. But the more you speak with people, the more you moderate your own views. You generate a sense of empathy necessarily, and you find that your views need to be moderated because not everybody thinks the same way. 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. It's because we're no longer moderating our views very much and are stuck in our echo chambers. The result of which is more polarized political behavior. 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.

Speaker 2:
[23:44] Interesting. In what sense? Talk to me about that.

Speaker 1:
[23:46] Well, think about it. If you're unhappy with the way life is going, you're not in favor of the incumbent, obvious. So you're way more likely to vote anti-system. 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. There's inequalities, people are happy, people are less happy. But generally speaking, decline in well-being in the US, particularly for youth, you find thus a more fertile ground for anti-system votes, populist votes. Now that can go towards 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. And that is most reasonable and most normal. But we're picking this up very strongly. And what's really important here to know is that this is really an advantage of our kind of data, subjective well-being data. 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. 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, it's a lot stronger in predicting how we vote. Quick example, GDP in the United States is growing, but well-being is dropping. So if you look at it from a traditional economics perspective, like an alien landing and you're a 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 because there's more growth and the GDP has grown as compared to last year. And it isn't. And yet you have these, and well-being is dropping. And as a result, you obviously have these anti-system votes. 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 owed this to John Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, was the Arab Spring. 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. They had almost double-digit growth, and yet well-being was dropping. Guess what happens? The next time in our textbook on well-being science, we read the analysis for the Hong Kong riots. Back in 2019, youth in Hong Kong really stood up, and there was real riots, and there was real concerns. If you look at the GDP of Hong Kong, it is through the roof in the decade before, it's like plus 60 percent in the space of a decade. Yet if you look at life of the sections, particularly that of youth, it's gone down. It was minus 10 or 12 percent over that same decade. So you're looking at it from the outside and saying like, wait, whoa, growth, fantastic. And you look at how people feel in that society, and it's actually come down. 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 discontent and possibly more.

Speaker 2:
[26:54] Yeah, it's incredible to see the connection between something like individual loneliness and then national outrage.

Speaker 1:
[27:02] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[27:02] Like that kind of, you don't necessarily put the two together.

Speaker 1:
[27:06] 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. And so that's sort of the linkages there. And this is where well-being science and actually capturing how we feel, which is what you're all about, is really capturing how we feel about our lives and how to improve that. If you can put numbers on this, like we do in the economics of well-being, you can capture this. And this is, I'm not new, 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. 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 of people's well-being. And so we urge so strongly to do a lot more in the measurement. You know, most countries actually do. The United Kingdom, we've been doing really well. Since 2012, the UK Office for National Statistics measures in the Annual Population Household Survey, well-being. How satisfied are you with your life these days? We have that data since 2012 in the UK, in the official national statistics. In the United States, it is not there. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the statistical agency in the US do not measure how people feel about their lives. Crazy, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[28:36] That's crazy.

Speaker 1:
[28:37] It's absolutely crazy.

Speaker 2:
[28:38] So they don't even ask.

Speaker 1:
[28:39] They don't even ask. We've been pushing. The entire field of well-being economists, we've been lobbying, we've been working in Washington, say like, hey, no, it's subjective.

Speaker 2:
[28:50] Why do you think that is?

Speaker 1:
[28:51] Because it's subjective is the argument. And then we make the case, but wait a second, subjective well-being, how you feel about life, isn't that what ultimately matters? 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, like productivity, how we can talk about it, or voting, like what we're seeing in the United States. And yeah, it's difficult.

Speaker 2:
[29:16] Yeah, I mean, it impacts whether people get married or not, impacts the amount of children you have, it impacts everything.

Speaker 1:
[29:22] Yeah, like our behaviors are, and again, Daniel Kahneman and others, the extraordinary Nobel Prize winner, like why we do the things we do is because it makes us feel a certain way. And the US government is not interested, or at least the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not interested in measuring people's subjective well-being.

Speaker 2:
[29:42] I want to dive into work, if we can, because I think that's the core of this book, Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organisational Performance. 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. 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. I don't know if close to my family, you're not that close to yours. And then you had work. Whereas now it feels like church, temple, community has gone. We're further away from our families. So all the pressure is on work to provide all of this. 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. But as you talk about it in the book, we're not getting it. We're not getting it there.

Speaker 1:
[30:42] No, no, only one in four people, less than a quarter in the states would report high workplace well-being. With high workplace well-being, I'd say it would mean a four or five out of five in terms of job satisfaction, for example. And so that's really, really, really worrying. 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, or being laid off as I guess they say in the States, is we see a huge drop in life satisfaction. But to your point, only about half of the drop in life satisfaction of being made unemployed is due to the loss of income. Most of the drop is actually spin by the loss of identity and social ties, which is exactly the point you're making. 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, and so it makes work all the more important.

Speaker 2:
[31:38] So this blew my mind on page 74 of your book, Figure 4-2, only feeling sick in bed is a more unhappy activity than working, 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. The only thing we'd rather not do than work is being sick in bed. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[32:10] So we owe this study to George McCarran, who developed mappiness, which is extraordinary, and looked at what people are 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. Now, truth be told, while in the workplace, you do a number of things. You're also socializing at work. You're having lunch together, one would hope, or you're also exchanging and being excited by projects and developments. Here, what George McCarran was after was really the work bit, and so that is not particularly liked. Whether it's the mappiness study that puts work so low in terms of emotional well-being, in terms of daily activities, whether you're looking at 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. But if 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. And so there's a lot of room for improvement.

Speaker 2:
[33:15] What can individuals do differently to find meaning at work?

Speaker 1:
[33:19] Can I start with leaders?

Speaker 2:
[33:20] Yeah, let's start with leaders. Let's go there.

Speaker 1:
[33:22] Don't just talk to talk, walk to walk. And I'll back this up. I feel kind of sad about this. And it took me a while, because I come out of a family of actual people managers. My dad ran business, and he was an actual people manager. And so that's what I thought good managers were. And starting in the study of workplace well-being 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. And lo and behold, it was only about a year or two ago, we were able to advise and set questions on an HBR survey of senior managers, HBR being Harvard Business Review. What we found is that 87%, to be precise, of senior managers would say, yes, I care about my people and they would give a competitive advantage and it's the right thing to do, blah, blah, blah. In that same survey, we actually started testing them to look for what they prioritize when it comes down to it. Only a third of people would actually prioritize their people over other stakeholders.

Speaker 2:
[34:15] How did you test them?

Speaker 1:
[34:16] Essentially, asking questions and in a situation, having to prioritize particular stakeholders. For example, it would be customers and clients would be prioritized over people, for example. But actually, Jay, the real point is only half of that third, 19 percent actually has actions against people, management, and well-being of your people being a strategic priority. Studied by my colleague, Stefan Meyer, Columbia Business School, great friend, great guy, sit tight. He studied with an army of research assistants, all the earnings calls of the big listed companies in the US. That's typically the CEO and the CFO talking about financial results every quarter. They speak to the investor community. What Stefan found was that the word customer, business development side came up eight times more than people, employee side of the business. Obviously, a business is essentially, you got to have clients and you got to people delivering. There are two main stakeholders here in delivering and running a business, obviously the clients and the people who make it possible. Yet, somehow, customers to business development is so much more prevalent in their minds as their own people who deliver on the business. But worse, when they then sent sentiment analysis around when the word customer was raised, it was in the context of positive words, opportunity. When the word employee was raised, it was in the context of challenge, problem, risk. The fact of the matter is, and this is the sound truth, is that, and again, I think only about 20 percent of senior leaders actually care, invest, act on the notion that take care of your people and they'll take care of business. Most leaders, about 80 percent, are willing to put that number out there, talk to talk, but don't walk to walk.

Speaker 2:
[36:13] What I find about that, having worked in the corporate world, is I found that a lot of leaders were never cared for themselves, so they don't know how to care for others.

Speaker 1:
[36:23] Possibly.

Speaker 2:
[36:24] 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, and now as that person's come up the ranks, they have never even known what it feels like to have someone say, how are you feeling? How are you doing? And because they don't give themselves that permission, they don't know how to do it for anyone else. 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. I'm like, yeah, but you realize people need a break, they need this, they need whatever it may be. Then they go, yeah, but I never did it.

Speaker 1:
[37:08] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[37:09] I don't take my vacation. So why do they need it? It's that.

Speaker 1:
[37:12] But it's these senior leaders, they're so driven, they're so ambitious. Going back straight back to where we started with this conversation, they make trade-offs with their health, with their humanity, the empathy for others who may not be in the same spirit of one thing to be at the very top of the organization. The partial reason why 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. They need to be reminded. One of the ways of reminding and speaking to that caliber, to that level in the organization, is to build out the business case. In a way, 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. When you think about it, Jay, as you know, the human case ought to be self-evident. I mean, we're human beings, we ought to care about each other. It's in the scriptures and our religions and our just our nature. We like being cared for and we ought to care for others. So 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, as we show through the crowdsource data indeed and many other places. So it's the business case that then tries to resonate with those senior leaders who have the power and the tools and the influence to try and raise workplace well-being for others. 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. But what does resonate with them is numbers, the business case. And so that's obviously what the book sets out is to show that investing in workplace well-being is actually good for the bottom line. It's good for the bottom line. 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. 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. And it took George and me a decade and a half to put it all together in different academic papers and large studies with major companies 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.

Speaker 2:
[39:59] Do you think it's possible for people to have work-life balance and be at the top of a company?

Speaker 1:
[40:05] That is such a good question. It's hard to, and every case is different. So one thing, one caveat that listeners need to know is that we study big samples and there's averages, and there's always, the case by case might be different. But on average, it is the way we find it. I'm afraid the answer is to your question is yes. I think people who make it all the way to the top have given up on a chunk of work-life balance. I think it goes back to right at the start when you ask the question about money. Does money make you happy? These high levels, these very big salaries, it's surprising how little extra happiness it buys them. That is because they've given up and trade off other things like work-life balance.

Speaker 2:
[40:43] Yeah. I think we need to change that as well. Because it won't change for everyone else unless it changes for someone at the top. Then you start to see that, someone at the top sleeps eight hours and therefore they're more effective. Someone at the top works out and so they're more productive. 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'd be more productive and effective. I'd say to her, no, you don't understand, got to work this hard. It was only when I started to listen to her that I started to see the value of that. 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. You just felt better. But my wife had to literally coach me to that.

Speaker 1:
[41:36] I'm very proud to be able to say that not only is your wife right, we have the causal field evidence to back her up. You'll know the company that we had, it took us 10 years to get to this point. The company with whom we worked 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. It was British Telecom BT, you'll know them, one of the largest employers in the UK. We tested all of their call center employees. This was back in 2015 when this project started, took us 10 years to finally get to causal inference. The way we did it, Jay, was by every week on Thursday at 4 PM, we pulsed these call center employees across all the BT call centers, see how they were feeling that week, and whether that was because they slept well, or whether they had been working out, or private, or work live, we had an extraordinary data set around how people felt from one week to another, and then we tied that to very granular levels of performance, 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 big headline performance number. What we find is a standard deviation change, significant change in how we feel from one week to another, just like you were experiencing, led to a 12% increase in weekly sales. 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 types of tasks they were doing, the effect of how they felt was greater on the performance. 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. But the higher order tasks, the types of tasks that you and your team and most companies these days will do, and the future of work will only be consisting of, which is 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. We're talking 20-25 percent impact on performance. So yes, to the point, your wife is 100 percent right. If you invest in yourself and you feel better in your skin, as they say in French, like feeling good, then you will be performing better. All of this is super intuitive because these tasks, dealing with customers, the social and activating your social and emotional intelligence is really only possible when you feel good yourself. If you're not in a good place and you're thinking about your worries or problems within your household or what have you, then it's very difficult to raise and 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. We picked this up in the data from one week to another. People would say, I'm feeling good, I'm feeling better, I'm also feeling so good. You see this picked up especially in a task that requires social and emotional intelligence. It's a long story to tell you how we actually nailed causality but it has to do with weather differences around the call centers. I'll spare you that story because it took us 10 years to nail the causal inference, but we got there in the end.

Speaker 2:
[44:42] No, I love that. I'm happy for you to share if you think it's important, but I love what you're saying because 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.

Speaker 1:
[44:53] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[44:53] Because AI will take away.

Speaker 1:
[44:55] So the routine task, the order taking task. Well, already by now, I think we started to study in 2015, 2016. I bet you if we were to rerun the study, these more menial tasks, order taking, probably are no longer there to begin with. By the way, on the causality issue, no need to go into technical details. But it's an important point to raise, which is that senior leaders, when their chief people officer, chief HR officer comes to them and says, oh, we found a study and happier workers are more productive. A typical response and not fully wrong would be, well, yeah, but 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 then making people feel good in the first place. That chicken and the egg problem, so there's what we call reverse causality. It's a dynamic relationship. If you feel good, you perform better. If performance is going good, it feeds back into you feeling better in the first place. It's a dynamic relationship, performance and well-being. We were able to disentangle the two arrows in that dynamic relationship by leveraging weather differences because long story, and I urge you to read the paper that came out in Management Science on this.

Speaker 2:
[46:05] What employee well-being programs actually helped? Because I think the challenge is there's so many well-being programs now. Every company is subscribed to a million of them. They're all available, but the actual take-up is low.

Speaker 1:
[46:17] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[46:18] Or people don't know what to do or people don't know what's available to them. What actually helped versus what people thought would help?

Speaker 1:
[46:25] Our well-being research centre is quite well-known now in the HR space for pushing a basic but very important argument. A lot of the benefits and programs that you're referring to are individual options, mindfulness apps, you name it. Those are good and by all means continue them. But you're right, there's typically a pick-up problem. A selection bias and it actually uses them. Typically, it's people who don't need them the most who actually use them. People who would benefit a lot from them are not using them. We find that there's mixed evidence on those more individualistic interventions. Then others like yoga and others are fantastic, but you cannot yoga your way out of more structural issues. If you're underpaying people, offering yoga classes is not going to help them. If there's bullying in a company, you're not going to yoga your way out of that. If the CEO is not setting the right tone or culture that generally cares about people, 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 of the yoga on top of it while they're stressed out, and then it's ways of working. We've made a lot of claims and evidence and research on the fact that we've got to look a bit more broadly. Then we've even done a huge systematic literature review around what interventions actually work the best by driver. How to generate more sense of belonging, how to improve the impact of people feeling they're being paid fairly, etc. There's a lot there. We've got a whole playbook that we've put out where we summarize and highlight about five or six studies for each driver of workplace well-being out of about 4,000 papers that we've analyzed. We've called it The Interventions Playbook, and it's published by The World Wellbeing Movement in Partnership with Indeed. That's out there and no charge, free to use for everybody. But I think you're going to be asking me, what actually works? Give me examples. I want to give you one because as an economist, I do feel obliged, incentives do matter. How much you pay people does matter, especially at the bottom of the pay scale. Pay people living wage for crying out loud, and particularly so in context-dependent places like Los Angeles or New York, where the cost of living is so high. But, and here, this is really important. It's not just how much you pay people, it's also how you pay people that can make a difference in terms of how they're made to feel while at work, which is the definition of workplace well-being. 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 would just be straightforward salaries versus those that are a combination of salary plus variable pay that is, for example, a group bonus or joint equity schemes where you become, however small it might be, co-owner of the company and the organization, and it helps raise the purpose, 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. 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. Then it no longer becomes a transactional thing, but much more one where you're all in the same boat, and we are not just a stakeholder, we're also the shareholder. That's really, really quite critical. It's the first thing to really urge people is think beyond just the individual. If there's a workplace well-being problem in the organization, don't put the responsibility all on the individual. 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. That could range from pay to setting a culture, belonging, and so on and so forth. There's ample evidence for types of interventions that work on each front.

Speaker 2:
[50:20] I love that. I'm so glad that that's available. We should link to that in the resources as well. It would be great for people to dive into that.

Speaker 1:
[50:27] Absolutely. It's easy, accessible. It's just like bullet points, suggestions. A lot of these interventions will already been, some of them you'll have in your workplace already, some might inspire to do better, and so it's a real resource.

Speaker 2:
[50:41] I wanted to ask you a question about page 124 of your book, Figure 6-2. You talk about the determinants of work well-being, what people think versus reality. Walk us through what we think makes a workplace have better well-being versus what actually makes a difference.

Speaker 1:
[50:59] 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, where we've looked at how people feel at work and why they feel the way to do at work. We've done a little cute test, which is we ran a survey where we asked people, so what do you think makes you happy at work? What drives your workplace well-being? 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. 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 underestimated the social elements, a sense of belonging, feeling like you're being treated as a person in the organization, having friends at work. In the Gallup Engagement Survey, there's an item called, do you have a best friend at work? People laugh at it when they have to answer it. The reality is, is the answer to that question is most predictive of job satisfaction more than anything else.

Speaker 2:
[52:01] Do you have a best friend at work?

Speaker 1:
[52:03] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[52:03] That's so good.

Speaker 1:
[52:04] It is. It absolutely is. We've now picked up in the Indeed data and the Gallup Engagement Survey data, but other more academic datasets, 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, and it's our social capital in the workplace that is way more predictive of how we end up feeling generally at work compared to other things. Now, that's not to say that pay doesn't matter or flexibility don't matter. In fact, it's more like half of the middle of the pack in terms of the relative importance in driving workplace well-being, that people underestimate feeling like they belong, having friends at work and feeling like the company cares about them as a person. And I think that's really important. In the HR space, there's an old saying, people don't quit their jobs, they leave their bosses. Or you could reframe this, they don't leave their jobs, they quit their teams. And that's true. Think about it. For whomever is listening, think about this yourself. When would you make the decision to leave the company? When are you sick and tired and no longer sticking it out? Is when you're not getting along with people, when your line manager is not treating you like a human being, when you're not her friends at work, that's when you actually start making the move to start thinking about going somewhere else. More so than when the job is not that interesting to you anymore, or you feel like pay isn't all that fair, but you can live with it. It's the social elements that trigger people's workplace well-being and their behaviors more than anything else.

Speaker 2:
[53:54] There's two things there that stood out to me. One is, when you realize that you need a best friend at work, one of the biggest challenges I find is versus, you said, flexibility and money, which are both important, as you said. Flexibility means working from home. Friendship generally means being in person. And now with more people working from home versus being in person, it's harder to have a best friend on Zoom. What's that looking like for workplace well-being? 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?

Speaker 1:
[54:34] That's a classic economic answer. On the one hand, on the other hand, but Jay, I feel very strongly and passionately about precisely this question. And I came out very strongly at the start of COVID, which was March 2020 when it really hit and the lockdown started. Two, three months in. So we're talking mid 2020. The likes of Facebook and Twitter were saying, brilliant, people are working from home. We don't see a drop of productivity. That's the end of the office. Everybody can work remotely. And I came out strongly in the UK newspapers, coming out saying, careful, careful. Yes, there's short-term benefits of the fully remote working from home approach. No commute, no cost of commute, more flexibility. You can take care of X, Y, Z, and you can sort of work-life balance and job craft a bit more. But I said, careful, careful what you wish for, because your social capital and your intellectual capital are capitals. They need inflows because there's outflows all the time. So, you need to restock that stock of capital, stock of intellectual and social capital. And so, people were relying on the existing social intellectual capital they had, but essentially that got undermined. About six months in or a year in to the pandemic, these calls for fully working remotely were starting to be dialed back, and talk came around hybrid working. And truth be told, we owe a lot of this work, by the way, to Nick Bloom at Stanford, a colleague in the economics department who's done most research on this. It's now clear that we can have the best of both worlds. We need to have a hybrid way of working where people can work part-time at home, part-time in the office. It's looking like the best is three days office, two days home. But we need to do this cleverly. It needs to be a coordinated slash smart hybrid. The worst thing that can happen, Jay, is half of your team in on Monday, Tuesday, and the other half on Thursday, Friday, because you're not building that social capital and that sense of belonging that we know is so important. Same thing for intellectual capital, you need to be having these sort of water cooler moments. There's no point coming into the office if it's to be doing emails, report writing, or Zoom calls again. What does this mean? It means that we need to have conversations within teams or units. Okay, are we going to coordinate on being in mostly the beginning of the week or midweek or the end of the week and what kind of tasks? We need to think throughout the week, what are our tasks? What are the synchronous and the asynchronous tasks? What do we do together? What do we do solo? To separate the tasks and to do the asynchronous tasks, email writing, report writing, Zoom calls at home, and whereas it's the client meetings, the engagements, the brainstorming sessions, the interviews, that happens together. And so I think if we can nail hybrid working, then we'll have the best of both worlds. We'll see improvements in productivity and improvements in well-being.

Speaker 2:
[57:31] I agree with that. We've done that too, where we have flexibility in the sense, I mean, ours is easy. When I'm travelling, the team works from home. When I'm in LA, the team is in the office. And that works exceptionally well for us because we get enough to gather community time and the team has enough time to be productive at home or have flexibility. And I couldn't imagine being on a Zoom call every day with my whole team. Like I just couldn't imagine it. And the amount of social capital you lose, the connection, the best friend at work, that idea is some of these ideas that you've shared today, the eating meals, you know, taking that from 50% up to 75% of our meals every week to be with people. 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. And I always like to remind people you spend at least eight to nine hours a day at work. You're basically saying that a third of your life, it doesn't matter if I don't feel good there.

Speaker 1:
[58:33] No, and how satisfied we are with our job feeds into how satisfied we are with our lives. So job satisfaction is a huge predictor of, you've guessed it, life satisfaction. 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. And so the two are integrally connected. That puts a lot of responsibility on the organization, because how you treat people, their workplace well-being feeds into the larger society. And there's a degree of separation of even three people away will have been touched by how you were made to feel coming back from the office. There's amazing studies by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. Their book Connected is a real recommendation, where they essentially show that the way you drive home from the office, the mood that you're in, will impact your wife, your children, and they'll pick up sentiment changes with the school friends of your children. So there were three degrees of separation now will be impacted indirectly. So people you don't even know, their well-being will be marginally impacted by how you're feeling. 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 impacts three degrees of separation out. 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. But this feeds into our societies and our communities big time.

Speaker 2:
[60:06] Did you find anything about what the factors were around a toxic work culture, a toxic workplace? You've mentioned bullying a few times, but have you done any research on that?

Speaker 1:
[60:17] Not specifically in toxic workplaces as such. What we have done obviously is to reversal, like all the drivers of workplace well-being then go into reverse. People are stressed out, not satisfied with their job, find little purpose and meaning in the work they do, if and are 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.

Speaker 2:
[60:41] Is it possible to find meaning and purpose in a job that is purely functional and repetitive?

Speaker 1:
[60:50] You're raising a good question. Because we started by saying, God, there's so much room for improvement here. But what's the upper limits? It's what you're really after. It's like, can we make everybody happy at work all the time? Can we go to 100 percent of people saying four or five out of five in terms of job satisfaction? I think yes and no. I think yes, frankly, we can do a lot better still. The way we notice is thanks to the large crowd-sourced 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. Even within industries that are difficult, say hamburger industry, flipping burgers, selling them, you'll find big differences. No naming and shaming, but applauding our friends at In-N-Out Burger. I know we're in Los Angeles, so that's a real shout out. They're doing the same job as other hamburger chains, and somehow, and we've put in the book, somehow workers at In-N-Out are reporting about 20 percent higher workplace well-being than another hamburger.

Speaker 2:
[62:04] No way, that's cool.

Speaker 1:
[62:05] And it shows. It shows in the way they connect to people, the smiles on their faces, etc. So it is possible. So we can do a lot better than we're currently doing. Now back to the question at hand, can we raise everybody to like 100 percent all the time? Your original question was a bit more profound, is like, can we raise levels of purpose and meaning? And there I think that's a higher bar to clear. In-n-out does an amazing job at raising workplace well-being in a job that is difficult otherwise. So they connect with clients, there's camaraderie between workers, etc. They do a whole thing, a whole host of things right. But 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. People like you and me, or musicians or mathematicians get into 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 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 and life become, that I think is not realistic for the majority or the vast majority of people.

Speaker 2:
[63:24] Yeah. I really appreciate your in and out example because that's great. Also, I've always loved Amy Rozniewski'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. They really believe that a clean hospital was integral to the healing journey of the patient. So I think you are right. It is possible. Of course, flow state and everything else, there's certain careers and maybe not everyone wants that, needs that, is searching for that.

Speaker 1:
[63:55] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[63:55] But it is good to know that we can do so much better. We can. There are jobs that externally seem repetitive and functional, and yet there are places that have made them enjoyable because I think a lot of people think, oh yeah, well, I'm NX and I don't need my job to be meaningful. It will never be meaningful. The truth is, it will be better for your health if it is. It could be better for your well-being.

Speaker 1:
[64:20] Absolutely.

Speaker 2:
[64:20] If you feel that work is a little bit meaningful.

Speaker 1:
[64:23] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[64:23] Even if you're not in flow. That's the goal.

Speaker 1:
[64:25] Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

Speaker 2:
[64:27] 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, what balance in and of itself makes us feel equal. We all spend at least five days at work and only have two days off a week. It's already not equal.

Speaker 1:
[64:46] So that would be the evenings. The work.

Speaker 2:
[64:48] And the evenings.

Speaker 1:
[64:49] The workday evenings. Yeah. You're asking a tough question. I know there's people out there who will vehemently go after work-life balance, overrated, what have you. Jeff Bezos, for example, Amazon, I remember seeing a clip of him saying, no work-life balance. 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. And I agree with him in a sense for entrepreneurs like him, like you, like me really loving what I'm doing, that the two flow into one another. But I think for the vast majority, reflecting to the discussion we just had, it is a bit more transactional. 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, engaged with work. And I think we got to be honest about this and we cannot expect the same of everybody. And so 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 or 6 PM. And I think we got to respect that.

Speaker 2:
[66:04] Yeah. I think we have to respect that an employee should never have to work as hard as the entrepreneur.

Speaker 1:
[66:11] Exactly.

Speaker 2:
[66:12] 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.

Speaker 1:
[66:20] No. And yet founders or senior leaders expect no less of their team. And as we referred to earlier, they themselves have given up on a number or trade it off, a whole host of things, possibly their own health, mental and physical, to be where they are and taking the risk that they are taking as entrepreneurs or senior leaders. 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. I think again, we have to respect that and have the wisdom to take a bit of distance. And out of our own mental frames and understand that we're all a bit different.

Speaker 2:
[66:59] Jan, it's been so illuminating talking to you. I'm wondering, what have I not asked you that you wish I had?

Speaker 1:
[67:04] Well, maybe one last thing, our workplace well-being. Sadly, George and I have spent, and teams, have spent a lot of time developing out the business case. And I think that's obviously what the book then ultimately works its way towards, is giving the best evidence to date on how we feel at work matters for how you perform at work, whether you stay at work or whether a workplace will attract talent in the first place. And those are all the benefits of workplace well-being. 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. And by the way, some of these interventions don't cost the earth at all. Being a good boss, opening up about mental health, culture, and sense of belonging, and developing a caring community doesn't need to cost anything. It's about setting the right example and the right leadership. Whatever companies can do to improve workless well-being, it pays. 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, because we have data from behind the back of their CHROs, we've pulsed and Crowdsource 25 million workers around the US. And so we know that the levels of workless well-being in these companies correlate and predict very strongly their quarterly financials. And if you were to invest solely based on workless well-being, you'd find that you outperform the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ and so on and so forth. We've now been doing this since 2020. And so that's obviously, that's gotten the attention of the business world. And that's the business case right there for you.

Speaker 2:
[68:43] I love it. Jan, thank you so much. We end every On Purpose episode with a final five. Each question has to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. So Jan, these are your final five. The first question is, what is the best well-being advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1:
[69:01] If you want to move from ill-being to well-being, change focus from I to we.

Speaker 2:
[69:05] I like that.

Speaker 1:
[69:07] Literally and empirically.

Speaker 2:
[69:10] That's great. Question number two, what's the worst well-being advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1:
[69:16] I'm going to upset some of my colleagues. Flow, I think it's only a few people who will actually achieve the state of flow, and I find it annoying and disrespectful of a majority of people to think that that is to be aspired to, whereas they may not wish it and will never achieve it.

Speaker 2:
[69:31] Question number three, if you were speaking to a room of 100 CEOs and leaders right now, what would be your number one piece of advice for them?

Speaker 1:
[69:41] Read Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, please. Seriously.

Speaker 2:
[69:45] 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?

Speaker 1:
[69:54] Slam Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters on your CEO's desk today.

Speaker 2:
[69:59] Anonymously. 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?

Speaker 1:
[70:11] 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 work week. It's been since Henry Ford almost a hundred years ago that we've made the weekend into two days, from a Sunday to also include a Saturday. 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, we have to come together and coordinate on this. Doing so will make the future work more exciting for youngsters to know that the gains of productivity will also be given back in time.

Speaker 2:
[70:52] You're saying just a hundred years ago, we were working six-day weeks.

Speaker 1:
[70:55] Yeah. 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 six days a week, and so he's the one. Obviously, Sunday was Sunday because of religious reasons, and even that was a hard fought fight. Then so the Saturday came up. In fact, the Saturday was Henry Ford. But for example, my grandparents still had to work the Saturday mornings. It's only the 1950s that we extended the weekend to not just be the Sunday and Saturday afternoon, but also the Saturday morning included. We were talking the 1930s, 40s, 50s when we got the weekend, and yet we've become five times more productive in the century that followed, and yet we're still working the old-fashioned five-day work week. But our brains are still the old monkey brains, or the hunter-gatherer brains, I should say, and yet they're having to process so much more. People are surprised that we're having all these burnouts, and people are unhappy and stressed out. I think I've lost faith in the fact that these gains in productivity get redistributed to people because mostly gains productivity go to shareholders and the happy few. 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. So I do think it's high time, frankly, to start thinking about a shorter work week. If we do that, then it will make the future work less anxious, less worrisome for youth today.

Speaker 2:
[72:30] Really great answer. Everyone, the book is called Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. Jan, honestly, this has been such an illuminating conversation. I find it so insightful to sit and talk to you about these things. I love the way you think about them, and I'm so glad you're doing this work. It's massively needed, and I know I'll be giving this to every leader I know for sure. So thank you so much for coming all the way from Oxford to be here with us. I'm really grateful for you and your work. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1:
[73:04] Thank you, Jay. Thank you for everything you do, disseminating your own nuggets of wisdom and help spread those of others.

Speaker 2:
[73:10] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[73:11] Thank you.

Speaker 2:
[73:11] 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.

Speaker 3:
[73:25] 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.