Irene Tracey 0:00 Welcome to our second edition of fire and wire. And I'm absolutely delighted that as we've come to the end of our recent thrive at Oxford period where we've been thinking about how we can improve wellbeing in the workplace and what we could do better, it is appropriate that today we have Professor Jan-Emannuel De Neve, who is vice principal at Harris Manchester College. He is also professor of economics and behavioural science at the Saïd Business School. And he's the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre, which is based at Harris Manchester, but as a platform for the university, Jan, welcome. And thank you so much for joining me today on fire & wire conversation to share a little bit about your fabulous research. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 0:42 Thank you, Professor Tracey, for inviting us and for the opportunity to present some of our research and and applaud all the great work that's being done at the University. Irene Tracey 0:50 Wonderful. Well, there's so much being done. And I met Jan just a couple of weeks ago, when we were opening the thriving at Oxford launch. And I was so struck by the data you were presenting, I just felt it was really important for colleagues and the wider world just to hear a little bit about the actual fundamental research that's going into why wellbeing matters at the workplace. Because quite often people question whether this is just a nice to have? And does it really make a difference? So we're gonna get into that. But before we do, tell us a little bit about you, where are you from? What brought you to Oxford? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 1:20 Oh, well, I'm from Belgium, and grew up there. And then did part of my economic studies in Belgium, but then quite quickly, actually left for the United States, part of the graduate studies at Harvard University at the Kennedy School to be more precise, and that's where I got really the academic bug. And ever since haven't looked back and went straight for an academic career, ultimately ending with a PhD at the London School of Economics. And that finished I think, about 2009, or 2010, to be more precise, and then on to UCL, University College London, for a lecture position, and in 2015, the great privilege of being invited to come to Oxford as an associate professor at the Saïd Business School. And it's been a wonderful ride ever since. Irene Tracey 2:02 So a great set of experiences to draw from. So tell me a little bit about sort of how you then got into the whole wellbeing aspect of of economics. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 2:12 Ah, well thank you. It was really the beginnings of my PhD was about something quite different as political economy, the median voter theorum and all that kind of interesting welfare, state analysis type of stuff. And at some point, I bumped into dataset and had a question on a scale of one to 10. How satisfied are you with your life these days? And I sort of had a eureka moment thinking, Wait a second, this is. isn't this the most important thing is this? Isn't this the ultimate outcome? And sure, that could be sounding a bit like utilitarian. But it felt really important and something that we had overlooked. And especially sort of when you look at welfare states, there's always the question arises, but what is the better way of shaping up a society? Is it a coordinated market economy, liberal market economy, state capitalism? And in a way, the answer to the question of life satisfaction on a population wide basis can give us answers to that. And so once I discovered that item, it became sort of my workhorse. And this is back in around 2010. And in addition to that, I discovered a wonderful community of mostly labour economists and people in psychology and positive psychology to be more precise, and they just welcomed me into the family wellbeing scholars. I have just been focused on on those items and building out that community myself ever since it's been wonderful. Irene Tracey 3:26 Well as ever, it's a it's a salient point you make about the serendipity, often of what you end up spending your life's research career in is just a moment or chance encounter or chance question that then you realise, wow, how come we don't know about that? And then off you go. So tell us a little bit more about being direcor of the Wellbeing Research Centre and the types of people that are there? I mean, are there many economists now in the space? Have you been a sort of lightning rod around which people have sort of been attracted to it? Or is it very interdisciplinary, just tell us a little bit about that as a platform for the University. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 3:57 It's very interdisciplinary. So the Wellbeing Research Centres is sort of an interdisciplinary group of now about about 15 scholars, mostly postdocs. And we do the empirical science of wellbeing so it has a slight economic bent. That being said, it is interdisciplinary. So we have people from doing their PhDs in social policy, in sociology, and philosophy. They're all with us. I think one of the reasons why it is so important to build that platform for the University. So we have fortnightly seminars, and we drag in a lot of people from different departments, because wellbeing and mental health, as you well know, sort of cuts across a number of departments. And what you'll typically find in most universities around the world is that you'll have people taking an interest in wellbeing, how we feel about life or subs or domains of like job satisfaction, but they said sort of relatively isolated in their departments. And so hence the need I think, and frankly, that the latent demand for sort of a platform also here at the University because of some amazing work being done in the philosophy department, global priorities Institute, obviously psychiatry and experimental techology and economics and I was at the business school. And so the college became a great place, thanks to a founding donation to set up sort of an institute, holding environment to do this. And it's been wonderful ever since. So we really became that platform, I think, for the University. And we found it in 2019. And ever since, frankly, we haven't looked back and it has grown in influence, and now it's not just a platform for scholars across the University, but also, frankly, around the world. And so people zoom in every other week into our seminars, they contribute to our seminars, we've hosted a massive conference from the CEO of Unilever to Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner to the prime minister of Iceland. So we've really become quite something. Irene Tracey 5:45 Fantastic. Well, I encourage our listeners to get on the website and check it out and turn up at some of the seminars there. And as you say, you know, the melting pot that you can create in terms of interdisciplinarity, you know, within the collegiate environment is just fantastic here. And it's wonderful to see a really great example, you know, of that working so well. Now, a lot of colleagues will say, you know, work is good for your wellbeing, you know, and I know that you're doing a lot of research to sort of measure that. Tell us a little bit about some of the recent work that you've been doing, where we can better understand what contributes to our wellbeing, and the impact it has, I know, you've been doing some amazing work with various platforms. So it'd be really great. I think, for our listeners, just to hear about some of the sort of as a, as a sort of physical scientist, myself, the sort of hard core physical data that supports that this thing really does matter. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 6:32 It matters greatly. But let me take a step back, and just emphasises the importance of work to begin with. So if we, and I mean, we spent a lot of time of our waking hours at work. So typically about eight hours a day, five days out of out of a week. And so it should not come as a surprise, then that the quality of work or having work in the first place is incredibly important. And our general wellbeing, as measured through, say, life satisfaction. And the way we've picked up on that as simply sort of looking at life satisfaction, splitting it between people with jobs and without jobs. And we find there's about a point difference on a scale from zero to 10. between having a job and not having a job. Slightly actually, slighlty bigger differences for men actually, interestingly. And the reason why it's not just the pecuniary element, it's not just a paycheck attached to a job is because the job brings you social identity, ties and connections, learning on the job, and it brings a structure to your week. And we kind of knew that. Irene Tracey 7:30 We lost that during the pandemic didn't we. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 7:33 Exactly, and that came to bite us to some extent as the pandemic went on. So I cannot emphasise enough the importance of work to begin with and feeding our general well being. But then you're quite right. Most of my researches then sort of went into the workplace, and looked at the qualitative elements of work and the importance of how you feel at work. Irene Tracey 7:53 Tell us a little bit about that. I know you've used a particular recruitment website, so maybe just explain that if folks don't know what that is, and how you've then you managed to piggyback on top of that brilliantly, to get extraordinary amounts of data. So give us a little bit on that. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 8:07 Yes, well, as academics, we tend to find our jobs on a platform like jobs,ac.uk. But most of the jobs around the University as well. In fact, I think there's about 250 jobs currently advertised on a platform called indeed.com, which is I think, the world's largest job search buffer, think of it as the Google for jobs. And they have traffic about 250 million people a month, coming to the website, people in jobs, without jobs, etc, just looking for opportunities more generally, or scouting out if you will. And we've been able to piggyback on that huge traffic to essentially develop and integrate and nudge people towards answering some questions around their current or past employers. And Professor Tracy, it's just been extraordinary. So this started late 2019. So just pre pandemic, which we can leverage in the data set as well. And we now have, when I presented two weeks ago, I put down the number of 50 million people have reviewed their companies and how they felt working at those places and why by now it's actually 70 million I checked the data again. So the data are coming in with the 1000s and 1000s a day, most in the US but also the UK and Canada and about 18 other major international markets. And so it's become frankly, the the world's largest study on workplace wellbeing and it's giving us a unique insight into how people feel at work. And so the way we measure it, and I really insist that this is super important to get is ultimately workplace wellbeing is about how we feel at work and about our work. So there's an effective component and the experience, whether you are experiencing happiness at work or experiencing stress or worry, somebody who says colour of pain, these the experience of negative emotions obviously is very important that we capture that through a stress item. And then there's more evaluative items. Are you satisfied with your job are you, do you find it's worthwhile and meaningful the job you do? And it's those sort of four items to evaluative into effect of our experience so that we put together and a score or an index, if you will, we also look at them separately, because there's some interesting ways that they sometimes deviate from each other. They don't always correlate perfectly. And that's our outcome measure. Irene Tracey 10:12 It's extraordinary, I mean 17 million, yes, it's unbelievable. How difficult was it to get them to, you know, agree to do this research project? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 10:21 Well, that's a good question. It's yes, and no, it took some time to really get them on board with a highend academic approach to this, and the, the benefits of doing it academically, which they're now actually over time I have learned the benefits that are, it gives them more credibility and independence, and academic papers are coming out based off of this work. And the international media picks up on it a lot easier, if it's academic, independent academics working with these data. And so the Financial Times is a big spread on it just two weeks ago, they wouldn't get that attention, I think if it was just a company doing their own thing. Irene Tracey 10:53 So it's a good sort of platform for them to advertise, what they're doing. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 10:57 It's a win win. Okay, then there was also latent demand, I think just they were a bit visionary in terms of doing this pre-COVID. But I've seen a lot of companies during COVID, and now beyond thinking a lot more about workplace wellbeing, in part because they need to retain their talent, or attract talent. So they know just paychecks won't, won't cut it. And so they need to think more holistically about.. Irene Tracey 11:21 what they're offering. Well, it's, you know, really relevant, you know, as we think about, you know, the the pay and conditions aspect, the, the report that I'm, you know, hoping to receive, you know, towards the end of this year, where we can think again, more holistically about what we're able to do to make people's quality of life better. So tell us a little bit some of the top surprising findings for you. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 11:40 Well the top line insights are, one and somewhat surprising is the huge variation between industries, even within industries. So an industry that is very similar in common would be hamburgers, flipping burgers, and you'll find huge differences between say McDonald's or and an In and Out Burger, which is on the west coast of the United States. And so there are there is a lot of variation between how people experience work even very similar in this similar firms. It's the same for higher education, we find that higher education typically does quite well, in terms of workplace wellbeing. It's one of the industries that has a much higher score than than average in general, we, as a university do quite well, actually. Irene Tracey 12:24 Pleased to hear that, it's good. Are we top of the list? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 12:27 We are near the very top of the list amoungst higher education. It's, the data are still coming in. I think there's already about 70 or so reviews come back from colleagues around staff around the university. And we do slightly better than Cambridge, which which might please some of the people on this podcast, and do better than actually most other higher education. But there's definitely a higher education element to high workplace wellbeing. Irene Tracey 12:50 Does that just by some of those more effective purpose, sense of purpose? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 12:53 Exactly. Irene Tracey 12:54 Okay, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 12:54 Yeah. So we as a university did particularly well on that front, but all other higher education also does quite well, I think people realise that they're contributing to something larger than life, and to advancing research and wisdom and knowledge and our collective sort of understanding of things. And they're proud of that. And that does that gets revealed, if you will, through the more demonic or evaluative items. That being said, yes, there's other industries that don't do quite as well. And where you then find sort of interesting elements, for example, if we look at the Thames Valley Police or the NHS in Oxfordshire, you'll find that the the effective items, stress and happiness are not going very well. But then they do quite well on again, on the purpose item. So it's fascinating. Irene Tracey 13:46 It really helps, doesn't it? Employers can sort of think about which elements maybe, you know, to be data led, you know, so that you can see where you've got the gaps. And then it can help you, as an employer start to think about where to focus some of the efforts. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 13:57 Exactly. And I want to raise that as well, because we don't just ask these outcome measures we also ask about, so what might explain why you feel the way you do? And then we get into items such as flexibility, are you being compensated fairly? Do you have a sense of belonging, trusts, and so on, and so forth, and supportive managers, you name it. And what we find there is that we ask people what they think matters most. And we typically have sort of compensation come out on the top, which pleases the neoclassical economists. But the reality is, if you don't actually run the analysis to see what actually is most correlated with people's wellbeing, whether measured through effect, or evaluations, you find that a sense of belonging, the more social elements shine through and come to the very top. Irene Tracey 14:42 Interesting, interesting, I mean, that doesn't really surprise me as a neuroscientist. You know, I think, you know, there's so many ways that we can appreciate that that sense of being together the creativity that comes with you know, belonging to something that again, is, you know, got a common purpose and that you're all pulling in the same direction brings rewards that are hard to capture. So that's really interesting that that's come to the top and particularly in light of the pandemic, and the fact that we're sort of still got this hybrid working model, you know, how would you say that result relates to some of the decisions around the return to work? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 15:14 it's a very important issue you raise, and I think it's under appreciate in part because people generally under appreciate the importance of a sense of belonging as a key driver of how you evaluate the quality of work. And so as we move in the pandemic, to fully remote, in many instances, we sort of relied on a stock of social capital we had. But over the months, I think we all felt that we were starting to miss things to sort of be ran down or stuck or social capital, we're lacking for social interactions, and the ideas that flow from it. And then also just the human element, the human touch element. And so I think the first studies didn't pick up on this, but to the second generation studies coming back from the working from, analysing working from home, really started pointing in a direction that, that if you work remotely fully, then after about six months or so these things really come to hurt you. Both the individual as well as the organisation and undermines the sense of belonging, which then means that people will leave much more quicker. So a lot of people will never actually seen their colleagues before they resign. And it also plays out actually on creativity, intellectual capital, as well. Irene Tracey 16:25 Really interesting, really interesting. So tell us a little bit about sort of what data you've got that shows that this carries over to productivity. You know, say the private sector. Money, I know, you have some really interesting data about track of the stock market. But where does this sort of produce quantifiable metrics that really can persuade an employer that this really does matter. And you got to take this really seriously. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 16:47 It wasn't top of mind in this discussion, because within the university, we think less about in our return on assets, or firm value, or stock, market performance, and all that kind of stuff. But you bet out there in industry, they've really, really taken to our research sort of showing the objective benefits of subjective wellbeing. And while we should all care about workplace really for the good reasons, because it really it really matters, it has helped a lot to be able to show causal evidence for the first time in the field, that how people feel at work has a measurable, causal impact on how productive they are. And so we've done this in two major studies, the first one was actually a massive partnership with British Telecom, where we took six years to get to causal inference. And we essentially post every Thursday afternoon all of their call centre employees for a whole long period every week, and we ask them, How are you feeling this week? And then we were able to tie that to their performance metrics. Now. Some extent quite scarily is people are really measured down to the second. So how many seconds are call the customer satisfaction coming back? How many sales are they do a week. And what we found is after a whole lot of looking at metrics and trying to nail causality, and that will be for a whole other podcast is that we found that essentially one point difference in how you feel on a scale from zero to 10 to 12%, increase the weekly sales. And that is a causal estimate. And so it's so that really resonated out there in the field of industry. Irene Tracey 18:15 And that's the first time we've had causal field evidence that wellbeing produces a measurable impact, economic impact on the private sector. Wow. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 18:24 It's always been intuitive. So everybody will say, Irene Tracey 18:26 Congratulations on that result, that is awresome. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 18:28 It got published two weeks, or sorry, two months ago, in management science, which is a top journal in our field. And it's just it's important, this kind of material, because people have already always intuitively felt, oh, happy workers are more productive work, or you should care because it matters. But they've never actually been able to nail it. Because there's a lot of variable bias, risks of endogeneity or heavier. So that's exciting. But I know you're hinting at an even larger study. Because even if I make the case that improving somebody's wellbeing will make a better worker, more productive worker, that doesn't necessarily give you a business case, because it could come at a certain cost to try and raise people's wellbeing. And so the really hard nosed chief financial officers will still I've really got this question I kid you not. And so I'm so pleased to say that in that massive partnership with Indeed where we're learning so much about workplace wellbeing around the world. What we've now done is, given that we have all these company reviews coming back, we've pulled them all together for the those companies that were traded on the stock market in the United States. So all the companies that we have data for, that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. And the reason why is that one, we've got a lot of data because these are big companies. So we got 1000s and 1000s of reviews a lot more than for the University of Oxford at the moment. And what we do is, we then tie that to their systematically produced financial data. So both their corporate financial data so they have to report them this every quarter. And there we see huge, very strong positive correlation. In between how people feel at work through our crowdsource measures, and the actual objective metrics of these companies as they report on them every quarter. And there is a predictive element to this as well. So we then go one step farther and we use our measures to see well, how would they do in the stock market. So we then use say, the 2020, crowdsource data on all the stock market listed companies that we have. And we put that into a portfolio on January 1 2021. And we let it run throughout the year. And then what we find is, at the end of the year, these metrics help you outperform the s&p 500. And all the other indices, and then we and then we do it again, the next year and again, outperformed, or was more resilient in 2020, which was a down bear market. And now 2023 has been a very volatile year on the stock market. And again, we're outperforming based off of the 2022 data. So you will not be surprised. Irene Tracey 20:55 This is causing a stir. I'd imagine. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 20:57 Yes, so I was speaking to Blackrock yesterday, so they are taking a real interest in these data as you can imagine. Irene Tracey 21:02 Wow. I mean, again, it doesn't surprise, at, well, a sort of intuitive level. But you wouldn't think it would translate and scale up at such, you know, in something so sort of, as you say, tough as the stock market where you think other pressures will dominate. How extraordinary, Well, if ever, we needed persuading that this matters, and we should do more. So tell us about where maybe, you know, this goes in terms of rating companies for now, you know, these these criteria being important for rating, employability and the attractiveness of a place? And how do you sort of translate that into policy? When you get this data? How easy is it to sort of change employers? I know you've been, you know, the editor of the happiness, the World Happiness Report. So tell us a little bit about sort of how this how this has translated, you know, rating agencies for companies and a little bit where you're going to take your research. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 21:55 we are taking the study and directions that are now really impact focused. And I think the first impact is making these data publicly available. And that's being done on the on the website itself. So when jobseekers now go to look at job ads, they'll find the description of the organisation will have right next to the name of the organisation, the average workplace wellbeing there. And this now also holds for the University of Oxford and all the other higher education institutions. Irene Tracey 22:22 Right, well, I'm glad that we're a high score, but we got to maintain it, guys, we got to be number one. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 22:27 I think the University of Oxford, I think were top 20% were in the high categories, but we could do better. Irene Tracey 22:35 We can do better. We can always do better. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 22:35 We're off to a good start. Let's put it that way. But so to make those public and what we're finding is we're now running a massive randomised control trial to see what our jobseekers are responsive to seeing, and getting that transparency around what it is like to work at these places from, from the workers self reported from the workers themselves, current and past. And we find that they do. And so all the more reason to think that these data matter that workers wellbeing matters. And the other front that we're working on is not on sort of, you know, creating transparency around this and helping job seekers find the best places for for them. But it's also trying to feed in these new for the first time massively massive crowdsource data that that allows us to compare organisations, that is of real interest to say, the rating agencies and you hinted at it. So for example, one of our partners is s&p Global, and they do a corporate sustainability assessment, since 2009, of all these big corporates around the world that are listed, and then that informs their ratings and sort of give them sort of a rating on how well they do on sustainability, as measured through environmental, social and governance standards. And I'm so pleased to say and hoping this might be a rough impact case study that in April, the CSA, the corporate sustainability assessment by s&p global incorporated the notion of Okay, are you measuring workplace wellbeing? And if so, are you measuring the four items that we discussed? Irene Tracey 23:59 That's well, that's great to have that translation that quick. I know how tough it is to sort of impact into policy and changes, so great to hear. Yeah. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 24:07 And that will that will then inform ESG and sustainability ratings. And you see where this is heading this that means that pension funds, backrocks, and all the other big organisations that sort of move money around and function of sustainability, while it means that workplace wellbeing will matter, and these ratings. And in turn will shift money around and that in turn, will lead CEOs that may not have been fully on board with caring and walking the walk in terms of workforce wellbeing is to now their cost of capital will be dependent on it. So they will listen. Yep, fantastic. Irene Tracey 24:41 Great to hear just says a little bit of a World Happiness Report because that sounds sounds like a fun article. I have to read that. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 24:48 Well it's a little bit more than article. We've been doing this since 2012. It was launched by editors Jeffrey Sachs, John Halliwell, and Richard Layard, and I joined them in 2017 as one of the editors. And it was launched at the United Nations. And we do it every every year on March 20th, which is International Day of Happiness. And it's a big report, essentially an edited volume that we produce each year with the first chapter being the ranking. And there, we rely on the Gallup world poll data. And we've got data on life satisfaction from 156 countries, and the only thing we do there is really pull the data and show the average life satisfaction across countries. And that then becomes the ranking that the newspapers write about. So Finland is number one, and they took over from Denmark. Irene Tracey 25:32 what is it the Finns are doing? Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 25:33 We dig into these kinds of things. And what you find is that they have enormous amounts of social capital. So they trust each other, they trust the institutions. And there's cool ways that you can figure this out. I'm sure you might be familiar with this particular experiment, but we call it the wallet experiment, to gather up social trust in society. So people will drop wallets around and see how many out of that 100 wallets actually get returned to the original owner. So around the world, you see massive variation and and sort of how society works in returning a loss wallet. And can you trust others and institutions, including the police helping on this front, and you'll find that in places like Denmark, and Finland and Norway, 95, or 99, out of the 100 wallets get returned, but in other places, it's not quite there. And that is just one of many sort of indicators, but but they have a wonderful welfare state, needless to say, and all the Scandinavians do particularly well, and that helps them I think, do pretty well. So the average life satisfaction places like Denmark and Finland, it's close to eight out of 10. In the UK, it's sort of seven, 7.1. We are we're typically I think, sort of 18th or so and they're ranking. Irene Tracey 26:41 Okay, so room for improvement. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 26:43 Always room for improvement, but we're off to a good basis, because if you look at the place at the bottom of the world happens support ranking as places like Afghanistan, are war torn. And I mean, really, we should I mean, standstill for a moment, because the average wellbeing that comes back, the average self reported life satisfaction is like two. So imagine going into a place and you ask a representative sample of people, how happy are you with your life these days, on a scale from zero to 10, and the average, average response, is sort of two, that means there's a whole host of zeros and ones, because if one gives a five and you already need not attend, that gives zero. Irene Tracey 27:17 But it's, it's really interesting to sort of hear the data. Well Jan, this has been just amazing, and so enlightening, you know, to spend this time with you and to hear about the fantastic research that you and your colleagues are doing at the Wellbeing Research Centre. So I'm just thrilled that we're able to lure you here into Oxford and hold on to you. I'm glad that we've got a good rating so that we're a happy place to work for you and that we hopefully will keep will keep you here forever and a day. But all the very best to you for your research. And thank you so much for joining me on Fire & Wire today and sharing some of your exciting research. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve 27:53 Thank you Professor Tracey. It's such a pleasure to be here.