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Welcome to our second edition of Fire and Wire.

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And I'm absolutely delighted that as we've come to the end of our recent three days at Oxford period where

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we've been thinking about how we can improve wellbeing in the workplace and what we could do better,

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It is appropriate that today we have Professor John Emmanuel.

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Janette, who is vice principal at Harris Manchester College.

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He is also Professor of Economics and behavioural Science at the City Business School and he's the director of the Well-Being Research Centre,

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which is based at Harris Manchester, but is a platform for the university.

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Young, Welcome and thank you so much for joining me today on Far Wide Conversation to share a little bit about your fabulous research.

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Well, thank you, Professor Tracy,

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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.

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Wonderful. Well, there's so much being done.

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And I met John 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,

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I just felt it was really important for colleagues and the wider world just to hear a little bit

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about the actual fundamental research that's going into why wellbeing matters at the workplace.

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Because quite often people question whether this is just a nice to have and does it really make a difference.

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So we're going to get into that. But before we do, tell us a little bit about you.

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Where are you from? Will put you to Oxford. Oh well, I'm from Belgium and I grew up there and then that part of my economic studies in Belgium,

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but I quite quickly actually left for the United States.

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Did part of the graduate studies at Harvard University, the Kennedy School, to be more precise.

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And that's where I got really the academic bug and ever since haven't looked back and went straight for an academic career,

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ultimately ending the Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. And I finished, I think about 2009 or 2000 tend to be more precise.

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And then onto UCL University College, London for a lecture position.

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And in 2015, the great privilege of being invited to come to Oxford as an associate professor at the Site Business School.

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And it's been a wonderful ride ever since. So great set of experiences to draw from.

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So tell me a little bit about sort of how you then got into the whole wellbeing aspect of, of economics.

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Oh well, thank you. It was really the beginnings of my Ph.D. was about something quite different was political economy,

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the median voter theorem, all that kind of interesting welfare state analysis type of stuff.

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And at some point I bumped into a dataset and had a question On a scale from 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your lives these days?

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And I sort of had a eureka moment thinking, wait a second, this is isn't this the most important thing?

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Is this isn't this the ultimate outcome?

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And sure, that could be sounding a bit like utilitarian, but it felt really important and something that we had overlooked,

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especially so when you look at welfare states, always the question arises, but what is the better way of shaping up a society?

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Is a coordinated market economy, a liberal market economy, state capitalism, and in a way,

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the answer to the question of life satisfaction on a population wide basis can give us answers to that.

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And so once I discovered that item, it became sort of my workhorse.

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And this is back in around 2010. And in addition to that,

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I discovered a wonderful community of mostly labour economists and people of psychology and positive psychology, to be more precise.

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And they just welcomed me into the family of wellbeing scholars.

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And I've just been focussed on on those items and building out that community myself ever since.

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And it's been wonderful. Well, as ever it's a, it's a,

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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,

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a chance encounter or a chance question that then you realise, Wow, how come we don't know about that?

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And then off you go. So tell us a little bit more about being direct to the Wellbeing Research Centre and the types of people that are there.

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I mean, are there many economists now in the space?

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If you've been a sort of lightning rod around which people have sort of been attracted to it or is it very interdisciplinary,

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just tell us a little bit about that as a platform for the interesting story, Interdisciplinary.

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So the Wellbeing Research Centre is a sort of an interdisciplinary group of now about about 15 scholars,

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mostly postdocs, and we do the empirical science of well-being.

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So it has a slightly economic bent. That being said, it is interdisciplinary.

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So if people from doing their pieces in social policy and sociology and philosophy, they're all with us.

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I think one of the reasons why it is so important to build a platform for the university.

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So we have fortnightly seminars and we drag in a lot of it from different departments because wellbeing and mental health,

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as you well know, sort of cuts across a number of departments.

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And what you'll typically find most universities around the world is that you'll have people taking an interest in wellbeing,

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how we feel about life or substance or domains of it, like job satisfaction, but it's sort of relatively isolated in their departments.

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And so hence the need, I think, and frankly,

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that the latent demand for sort of a platform also here at the university because of some amazing work being done and the philosophy department,

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Global Priorities Institute, obviously psychiatry and experimental.

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Psychology and economics. And of course, I was at the business school and so college became a great place thanks to a

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founding donation to set up sort of an in a holding environment to do this.

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And it's been wonderful ever since. So we really became that platform, I think, for the university, and we found it in 2019.

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And ever since, frankly, we haven't looked back and has grown an influence.

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And now it's not just a platform for scholars across the university, but also frankly, around the world.

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And so people zoom in every other week into our seminars.

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They contribute to our seminars.

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We've hosted a massive conference that had from the CEO of Unilever to an economist, the Nobel Prize winner to the prime minister of Iceland.

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So we've really become quite something fantastic.

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Well, I encourage our listeners to get on the website and check it out and turn up at some of the seminars there.

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And as you say, you know, the melting pot that you can create in terms of interdisciplinarity,

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you know, within the collegiate environment is is just fantastic here.

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And it's wonderful to see a really great example, you know, of that working so well.

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Now, a lot of colleagues will say, you know, work is good for your wellbeing, you know,

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and I know that you're doing a little research to sort of measure that and tell us a little bit about some of the recent work that you've been doing,

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where we can better understand what contributes to our wellbeing and the impact it has.

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I know you've been doing some amazing work with various platforms, so be really great.

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I think for our listeners just to hear about some of the the sort of as a, as a sort of physical scientist myself,

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the sort of hard core physical data that supports that this thing really does matter.

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It matters greatly. But let me take a step back and just emphasises the importance of work to begin with.

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So if we and I mean we spend a lot of time of our waking hours at work, so typically about 8 hours a day, five days out of out of the week.

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And so it should not come as a surprise then that the quality of work or having it work in the first place is incredibly important.

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And our general well-being, as measured through, say, life satisfaction and the way we've picked up on that,

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is simply sort of looking at life satisfaction, splitting it between people with jobs and without jobs.

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And we find there's about a point difference on a scale from 0 to 10 between having a job and not having a job slightly,

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actually slighter slightly bigger differences for men.

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Actually, interestingly, and the reason why is not just a pecuniary element, it's not just a paycheque attached to a job.

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It's because a job brings you social identity, ties and connections, learning on the job and it brings a structure to your week.

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And we kind of need that. You know, I lost that during the pandemic, didn't resign, and that came to bite us to some extent as the pandemic went on.

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So I cannot emphasise enough the importance of work to begin with and feeding our general well-being.

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But then you're quite right, most of my research has then sort of went into the workplace and looked at

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the qualitative elements of work and the importance of how you feel at work.

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So tell us a little bit about that.

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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,

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you know, managed to piggyback on top of that brilliantly to get extraordinary amounts of data.

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So give us a little. Yes.

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Well, as academics, we tend to find our jobs on a platform like shops, jobs or at Duke, but most of the jobs around the university as well.

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In fact, I think there's about 250 jobs currently advertised on a platform called indeed NOLA.com,

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which is, I think, the world's largest job search platform. Think of it as the Google for jobs.

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And they have traffic of about 250 million people a month coming to the website, people in jobs without jobs,

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etc., just looking for opportunities more generally or scouting out, if you will.

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And we've been able to piggyback on that huge traffic to essentially develop and integrate

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and push people towards answering some questions around their current or past employers.

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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.

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And we now have we when I presented two weeks ago,

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I put down the number of 50 million people have reviewed their companies and

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how they felt working at those places and why by now it's actually 70 million.

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I checked the data again. So they are coming in with the thousands of thousands a day, most of the U.S.,

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but also the UK and Canada and about 18 other major international markets.

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And so it's become, frankly, the the world's largest study on workplace wellbeing and is giving us a unique insight into how people feel at work.

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And so the way we measure it and I really insist that this is super important to get

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is ultimately workplace wellbeing is about how we feel at work and about our work.

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So there's an effective component to experience whether you are experiencing happiness at work or experiencing stress or worry,

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somebody who is this colour of pain. These the experience of negative emotions obviously is very important.

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We capture that through a stress item and then there's more evaluative items, you know, are you satisfied with your job?

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Are you do you find it's worthwhile a meaningful the job you do?

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And it's those sort of four items to evaluative and to. A fact of our experience so that we put together an A score or an index, if you will.

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We also look at them separately because there's some interesting ways that they sometimes deviate from each other.

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They don't always correlate perfectly, and that's our outcome measure.

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So it's extraordinary in 17 million, this is unbelievable.

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How difficult was it to get them to, you know, agree to do this research project?

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Well, it's a good question. It's yes or no. It took some time to really get them on board with a high end academic approach to this.

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And yeah, and the benefits of doing it academically,

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which are now actually over time have learned the benefits done, it gives it more credibility and independence.

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And academic papers are coming out based off of this work on the international media

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fix up a lot easier if it's academic independent academics working with these data.

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And so the Financial Times with a big spread on it just two weeks ago, they wouldn't get that attention.

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I think, if it was just a company doing their own thing. So it's a good sort of platform for them to advertise exactly what they're doing.

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It is a win win. Yeah, okay. But there was also latent demand.

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I think just they were a bit visionary in terms of doing this pre-COVID,

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but I've seen a lot of companies during COVID and now beyond thinking a lot more about workplace wellbeing,

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in part because they need to retain their talent or attract talent, and so they know just paycheques won't do it, won't cut it.

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And so they need to think more holistically about what they're offering.

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Well, it's, you know, really relevant, you know, as we think about, you know,

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the pay and conditions aspect, the the report that I'm, you know, hoping to receive,

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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.

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So tell us a little bit some of the top surprising findings for you all.

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The top line insights, one, and somewhat surprising is that the huge variation between industries, you know, within industries.

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So an industry that is very similar in kind would be the hamburgers flipping burgers and you'll find huge differences between say,

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a McDonald's or on an An in and out burger, which is on the West coast of the United States.

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And so there there is a lot of variation between how people experience work, even very similar in similar firms.

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It's the same for higher education. We find that higher education typically does quite well in terms of workplace,

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while being one of the industries that has a much higher school than than average.

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On general, we as a university are quite well actually pleased to hear that is good.

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Are we top of the list? We are near the very top of the list amongst higher education.

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It's the data are still coming in. I think there's already about 70 or so reviews come back from colleagues around,

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staff around the university, and we do slightly better than Cambridge,

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which which might please some of the people on this fall test and do better than actually most other higher education.

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But there's definitely a higher education element to the two, too.

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How is that different by some of those more effective purpose sense of paid sacrifice that Okay, yeah.

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So we as a university particularly well on that front, but all other higher education also does quite well.

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I think people realise that they're contributing to something larger than life and to advancing

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research and wisdom and knowledge and our collective sort of understanding of things.

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And they're proud of that. And that just gets revealed, if you will, through the more demonic or evaluative items.

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That being said, yes, there's other industries that don't do quite as well and where you then find sort of interesting elements,

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for example, if we look at the Thames Valley Police or the NHS here in Oxfordshire,

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and you'll find that the effect of item stress and happiness are not going very well, but that they do quite well on again on the purpose item.

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So fascinating insights on the processes that employers sort of think about which elements maybe, you know, it's good to be data led, you know,

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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.

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Exactly. And I want to raise that as well, because we don't just ask these outcome measures.

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We also ask about. So what might explain why you feel the way you do.

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And then we get into items such as flexibility.

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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.

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And what we find there is, is that we ask people what they think matters most,

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and we typically have sort of compensation come out on the top, which pleases the neoclassical economists.

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But the reality is if you don't actually run the analysis to see what actually is most correlated with people's wellbeing,

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but what are measured through fact or evaluations, you find a sense of belonging.

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The more social elements shine through and come to the very top.

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Interesting, interesting. I mean, that doesn't really surprised me as a neuroscientist.

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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,

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you know, belonging to something that again, is, you know, got a common purpose and that you're all pulling in the same direction.

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Brings rewards at all. Hard to capture. So that's really interesting.

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Allows 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,

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you know, how would you say that result relates to some of the decisions around the return to work?

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It's a very important issue you raise, and I think it's under appreciate in part because people generally under appreciate the

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importance of a sense of belonging as a key driver of how you evaluate the quality of work.

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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.

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But over the months, I think we all felt that we were starting to miss things as we ran down our stock,

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our social capital, and were lacking for social interactions and the ideas that flow from it.

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And then also just a human element, the human touch element.

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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,

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working from home really started pointing a direction that, that if you work remotely fully,

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then after about say six months or so, these things really come to how you both,

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the individual as well as the organisation and it undermines the sense of belonging, which that means that people also leave much more quicker.

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So a lot of people will never actually seen their colleagues before that resigned.

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And it also plays out actually on creativity, intellectual capital as well.

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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.

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You know, say, in the private sector money. I know you have some really interesting data about track of the stock market,

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but what does this sort of produce quantifiable metrics that really can persuade an

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employer that this really does matter And you got to take this really seriously.

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It wasn't top of mind in this discussion because the university we think less about in

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our return on assets or firm value or stock market performance and that kind of stuff,

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But you bought out the industry. They've really, really taken to our research sort of showing the objective benefits of subjective well-being.

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And while we should all care about workplace solely for the good reasons, because it really, really matters,

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it has helps a lot to be able to show causal evidence for the first time in the field

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that how people feel at work has a measurable causal impact on how productive they are.

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And so we've done this in two major studies.

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The first one was actually a massive partnership with British Telecom, where we took a six years to get to causal inference,

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and we essentially pulsed every Thursday afternoon all of their calls centre employees for a whole long period every week.

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And we asked them, how are you feeling this week? And then we were able to tie that to the performance metrics now.

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So makes them quite scarily these people are really measured down to the second.

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So how many seconds are call the customer satisfaction coming back, how many sales A they do a week.

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And what we found is after a whole lot of econometrics and trying to nail causality and that will be for a whole other podcast is that we found

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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.

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And so it's so that really resonated out there in the field of industry.

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And that's the first time we've had causal field evidence.

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The wellbeing produces a measurable impact, economic impact on the private sector.

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It's always been intuitive. So everybody will see regulations on that result.

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That is well, it got published two weeks sorry, two months ago and Management Science,

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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,

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oh, happy workers are more productive work or you should care because it matters.

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But they've never actually been able to nail it because there's a lot of variable bias risks of androgyny, idea, what have you.

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So that's exciting. But I know you're hinting at an even larger study because even if I make the case that

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improving somebody's well-being will make them a better worker or more productive worker,

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that doesn't necessarily give you a business case because it could come at a certain cost to try and raise people's wellbeing.

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And so the really hard nosed chief financial officers will still I've really got this question.

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I could, you know,

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and so I'm so pleased to say that in that massive partnership with indeed where we're learning so much about workplace well-being around the world,

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what we've now done is given that we have all these company reviews coming back,

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we've pulled them all together for the the those companies that were traded on the stock market in the United States.

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So all the companies that we have data for that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq.

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And the reason why is that, one, we've got lots of data because these are big companies.

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So we've got thousands and thousands of reviews, a lot more than from the University of Oxford at the moment.

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And what we do is we then tie that to their systematically produced financial data,

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so both their corporate financial data, so they have to report them this every quarter.

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And there we see a huge, very strong. Positive correlation between how people feel at work through our crowdsource measures and

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the actual objective metrics of these companies as they report on them every quarter.

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And there is a predictive element to this as well.

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So we then go one step further and we use our measures to see, well, how would they do in the stock market?

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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 1st,

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2021, and we let it run throughout the year.

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And then what we find is at the end, the these metrics help you outperform the S&P 500 and all the other indices.

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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.

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And now 2023 has been a very volatile year on the stock market.

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And and again, we're outperforming based off of the 2022 data.

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And so you will not be surprised this is causing a stir, I guess.

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I was speaking to BlackRock yesterday, so they are taking a real interest in these data, as you can imagine.

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Well, I mean, again, it doesn't surprise one sort of intuitive level, but you wouldn't think it would translate and scale up at such,

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you know, in something so sort of, as you say, tough as the stock market where you think other pressures would dominate.

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How extraordinary. Well, if ever that we needed persuading that this matters and we should do more.

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So tell us about where maybe this goes in terms of rating companies for now.

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You know, these these criteria being important for rating employability and the attractiveness of a place.

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And how do you sort of translate that into policy when you get this data?

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How easy is it to sort of change employers? I know you've been, you know, an editor of the Happiness the World Happiness Report.

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So tell us a little bit about sort of how this how this is translated.

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You know, rating agencies for companies and and a little bit where are you going to take your research?

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We are taking the study and their actions that are now really impact focussed.

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And I think the first impact is making these data publicly available and that's being done on the on the website itself.

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So when jobseekers now go to look at job ads,

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they'll find the two description of the organisation will have right next to the name of the organisation,

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the average workplace, while being the same. And this now also holds for the University of Oxford and all the other higher education institutions.

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Right. Well, I'm glad that we're high school, but we've got to maintain it. Guys have got to be number one.

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I think the inverse of because I think we're top 20%, we're in the high category.

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So we can do better, we can do better, we can do better, and we will get off to a good start.

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Well, let's put it that way. But so to make those public and what we finding is we're now running a massive randomised controlled trial to see, well,

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are jobseekers responsive to seeing and getting that transparency around what it is like to work at these places from from the workers,

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you know, self-reported from the workers themselves, current and past. And we find that they do.

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And so all the more reason to think that these data matter, that workers well-being matters.

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And the other front that we're working on is not on sort of, you know,

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creating transparency around this and helping jobseekers find the best places for for them,

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but is also trying to feed in these new for the first time,

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massively massive crowdsourced data that allows us to compare organisations that is of real interest to say the rating agencies and you hinted at it.

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So for example, one of our partners is S&P Global and they do a corporate sustainability assessment since 2009 of

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all these big corporates around the world that are listed and then that informs their ratings.

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So it gives them sort of a rating on how well they do on sustainability as measured through environmental, social and governance standards.

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And I'm so pleased to say, and I'm hoping this might be a rough impact case study, that in April the CSA,

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the Corporate Sustainability assessment assessment by S&P Global Incorporated, the notion of, okay, are you measuring workplace well-being?

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And if so, are you measuring the four items that we discussed at the beginning?

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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.

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So great to hear. Yeah. And that will that will then inform ESG and sustainability ratings and you see where this is heading.

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This that means that pension funds,

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BlackRock's and all the other big organisations that sort of move money around and function of sustainability well,

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it means that their workplace well-being will matter and these ratings and in turn will shift money around and that in turn will eat CEOs that may not

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have been fully on board with caring and walking the walk in terms of workforce well-being is to know their cost of capital will be dependent on it.

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So they will listen. Yeah. Fantastic.

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Was great to hear just a little bit about World Happiness Report because that sounds it sounds like a full article.

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I have to read that. Well, it's it's a little bit more than Article A.

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We've been doing this since 2012. It was launched by EDS, Jeffrey Sachs, John Helliwell and Richard.

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They and I joined them in 2017 as a. As one of the editors, and it was launched at the United Nations.

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And we do it every every year on March 20th, which is International Day of Happiness.

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And it's a big report, essentially an edited volume that we produce each year, with the first chapter being the ranking.

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And there we rely on the Gallup World poll data, and we've got data on license action from 156 countries.

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And the only thing we do there is really pull the data and show the average license function across countries,

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and that then becomes the ranking that the newspapers write about.

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So Finland is number one and they took over from Denmark. What is it the Finns are doing?

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We dig in to these kind of things and what you find is that they have enormous amounts of social capital.

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So they trust each other, they trust the institutions, and there's cool ways that you can figure this out.

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I'm sure you might be familiar with this particular experiment, but we call it the wallet experiment, too,

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to gather social trust in society so people will drop wallets around and see

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how many out of the 100 wallets actually get returned to the original owner.

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And so around the world, you see massive variation in and sort of how society works and returning a lost wallet.

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And can you trust others and institutions, including the police, helping on this front?

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And you'll find that in places like Denmark and Finland and Norway.

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95 or 99 out of the 100 wallets get returned.

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But in other places it's not quite there. And that is just one of many sort of and the indicators.

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But they have a wonderful welfare state, needless to say, and all the Scandinavians do particularly well.

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And that helps them, I think, do pretty well.

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So the average life satisfaction in places like Denmark and Finland is close to eight out of ten and the UK is sort of seven, 7.1.

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And we are we are typically, I think sort of 18 or so in the UK.

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Okay, so room for improvement was always in.

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But, but we're off the good basis because if you look at the place at the bottom of the world,

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happiness support ranking as places like Afghanistan are more torn and I mean really we should,

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I mean, stand still for a moment because the average well-being that comes back, the average self-reported life satisfaction is like two.

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So imagine going into a place and you ask a representative sample of people,

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how happy are you with your life these days on a scale from 0 to 10 and the average

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average responds sort of to that means there's a whole host of zeros and ones.

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Because if one gives a five, then you'll need another ten that gives zero.

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But it's it's really interesting to sort of yet hear the data well beyond this has been just amazing and so enlightening, you know,

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to 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.

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I'm just thrilled that we're able to lure you here into Oxford and hold on to.

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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 you here forever in a day.

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But all the very best to you for your research and thank you so much for joining me on Far and Wide today and sharing some of your exciting research.

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Thank you, Professor Tracy. It's such a pleasure to be here.