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 three days 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 John Emmanuel.
Janette, who is vice principal at Harris Manchester College.
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,
which is based at Harris Manchester, but is a platform for the university.
Young, Welcome and thank you so much for joining me today on Far Wide Conversation to share a little bit about your fabulous research.
Well, thank you, Professor Tracy,
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.
Wonderful. Well, there's so much being done.
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,
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 going to get into that. But before we do, tell us a little bit about you.
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,
but I quite quickly actually left for the United States.
Did part of the graduate studies at Harvard University, 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 the Ph.D. at the London School of Economics. And I finished, I think about 2009 or 2000 tend to be more precise.
And then onto 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 Site Business School.
And it's been a wonderful ride ever since. So 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.
Oh well, thank you. It was really the beginnings of my Ph.D. was about something quite different was political economy,
the median voter theorem, all that kind of interesting welfare state analysis type of stuff.
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?
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,
especially so when you look at welfare states, always the question arises, but what is the better way of shaping up a society?
Is a coordinated market economy, a 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 of psychology and positive psychology, to be more precise.
And they just welcomed me into the family of wellbeing scholars.
And I've just been focussed on on those items and building out that community myself ever since.
And it's been wonderful. Well, as ever it's a, 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,
a chance encounter or a 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 direct to the Wellbeing Research Centre and the types of people that are there.
I mean, are there many economists now in the space?
If you've 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 interesting story, Interdisciplinary.
So the Wellbeing Research Centre is a sort of an interdisciplinary group of now about about 15 scholars,
mostly postdocs, and we do the empirical science of well-being.
So it has a slightly economic bent. That being said, it is interdisciplinary.
So if people from doing their pieces in social policy and sociology and philosophy, they're all with us.
I think one of the reasons why it is so important to build a platform for the university.
So we have fortnightly seminars and we drag in a lot of it 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 most universities around the world is that you'll have people taking an interest in wellbeing,
how we feel about life or substance or domains of it, like job satisfaction, but it's 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 and the philosophy department,
Global Priorities Institute, obviously psychiatry and experimental.
Psychology and economics. And of course, I was at the business school and so college became a great place thanks to a
founding donation to set up sort of an in a 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 has grown an 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 that had from the CEO of Unilever to an economist, the Nobel Prize winner to the prime minister of Iceland.
So we've really become quite something 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 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 little research to sort of measure that and 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 be really great.
I think for our listeners just to hear about some of the 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.
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 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.
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.
And our general well-being, as measured through, say, life satisfaction and the way we've picked up on that,
is 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 0 to 10 between having a job and not having a job slightly,
actually slighter slightly bigger differences for men.
Actually, interestingly, and the reason why is not just a pecuniary element, it's not just a paycheque attached to a job.
It's because a job brings you social identity, ties and connections, learning on the job and it brings a structure to your week.
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.
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 research has then sort of went into the workplace and looked at
the qualitative elements of work and the importance of how you feel at work.
So 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 know, managed to piggyback on top of that brilliantly to get extraordinary amounts of data.
So give us a little. Yes.
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.
In fact, I think there's about 250 jobs currently advertised on a platform called indeed NOLA.com,
which is, I think, the world's largest job search platform. Think of it as the Google for jobs.
And they have traffic of 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 push 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 we 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 they are coming in with the thousands of thousands a day, most of the U.S.,
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 is 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 to experience whether you are experiencing happiness at work or experiencing stress or worry,
somebody who is this colour of pain. These the experience of negative emotions obviously is very important.
We capture that through a stress item and then there's more evaluative items, you know, are you satisfied with your job?
Are you do you find it's worthwhile a meaningful the job you do?
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.
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.
So it's extraordinary in 17 million, this is unbelievable.
How difficult was it to get them to, you know, agree to do this research project?
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.
And yeah, and the benefits of doing it academically,
which are now actually over time have learned the benefits done, it gives it more credibility and independence.
And academic papers are coming out based off of this work on the international media
fix up a lot easier if it's academic independent academics working with these data.
And so the Financial Times with 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. So it's a good sort of platform for them to advertise exactly what they're doing.
It is a win win. Yeah, okay. But 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, and so they know just paycheques won't do it, won't cut it.
And so they need to think more holistically about what they're offering.
Well, it's, you know, really relevant, you know, as we think about, you know,
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 all.
The top line insights, one, and somewhat surprising is that the huge variation between industries, you know, within industries.
So an industry that is very similar in kind would be the hamburgers flipping burgers and you'll find huge differences between say,
a McDonald's or on an An in and out burger, which is on the West coast of the United States.
And so there there is a lot of variation between how people experience work, even very similar in similar firms.
It's the same for higher education. We find that higher education typically does quite well in terms of workplace,
while being one of the industries that has a much higher school than than average.
On general, we as a university are quite well actually pleased to hear that is good.
Are we top of the list? We are near the very top of the list amongst 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 fall test and do better than actually most other higher education.
But there's definitely a higher education element to the two, too.
How is that different by some of those more effective purpose sense of paid sacrifice that Okay, yeah.
So we as a university 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 just 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 here in Oxfordshire,
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.
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,
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.
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, 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,
but what are measured through fact or evaluations, you find a sense of belonging.
The more social elements shine through and come to the very top.
Interesting, interesting. I mean, that doesn't really surprised 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 at all. Hard to capture. So that's really interesting.
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,
you know, how would you say that result relates to some of the decisions around the return to work?
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 as we ran down our stock,
our social capital, and were lacking for social interactions and the ideas that flow from it.
And then also just a 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 a direction that, that if you work remotely fully,
then after about say six months or so, these things really come to how you both,
the individual as well as the organisation and it undermines the sense of belonging, which that means that people also leave much more quicker.
So a lot of people will never actually seen their colleagues before that resigned.
And it also plays out actually on creativity, intellectual capital as well.
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, in the private sector money. I know you have some really interesting data about track of the stock market,
but what 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.
It wasn't top of mind in this discussion because the university we think less about in
our return on assets or firm value or stock market performance and that kind of stuff,
But you bought out the industry. They've really, really taken to our research sort of showing the objective benefits of subjective well-being.
And while we should all care about workplace solely for the good reasons, because it really, really matters,
it has helps 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 a six years to get to causal inference,
and we essentially pulsed every Thursday afternoon all of their calls centre employees for a whole long period every week.
And we asked them, how are you feeling this week? And then we were able to tie that to the performance metrics now.
So makes them quite scarily these people are really measured down to the second.
So how many seconds are call the customer satisfaction coming back, how many sales A they do a week.
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
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.
And that's the first time we've had causal field evidence.
The wellbeing produces a measurable impact, economic impact on the private sector.
It's always been intuitive. So everybody will see regulations on that result.
That is well, it got published two weeks sorry, two months ago and 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 androgyny, idea, what have you.
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 well-being will make them a better worker or 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 could, you know,
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,
what we've now done is given that we have all these company reviews coming back,
we've pulled them all together for the 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 lots of data because these are big companies.
So we've got thousands and thousands of reviews, a lot more than from 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 a huge, very strong. Positive correlation 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 further 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 1st,
2021, and we let it run throughout the year.
And then what we find is at the end, the 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 and again, we're outperforming based off of the 2022 data.
And so you will not be surprised this is causing a stir, I guess.
I was speaking to BlackRock yesterday, so they are taking a real interest in these data, as you can imagine.
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,
you know, in something so sort of, as you say, tough as the stock market where you think other pressures would dominate.
How extraordinary. Well, if ever that we needed persuading that this matters and we should do more.
So tell us about where maybe 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, an editor of the Happiness the World Happiness Report.
So tell us a little bit about sort of how this how this is translated.
You know, rating agencies for companies and and a little bit where are you going to take your research?
We are taking the study and their actions that are now really impact focussed.
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 two description of the organisation will have right next to the name of the organisation,
the average workplace, while being the same. And this now also holds for the University of Oxford and all the other higher education institutions.
Right. Well, I'm glad that we're high school, but we've got to maintain it. Guys have got to be number one.
I think the inverse of because I think we're top 20%, we're in the high category.
So we can do better, we can do better, we can do better, and we will get off to a good start.
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,
are jobseekers responsive to seeing and getting that transparency around what it is like to work at these places from from the workers,
you know, 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 well-being matters.
And the other front that we're working on is not on sort of, you know,
creating transparency around this and helping jobseekers find the best places for for them,
but is also trying to feed in these new for the first time,
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.
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.
So it gives 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 I'm hoping this might be a rough impact case study, that in April the CSA,
the Corporate Sustainability assessment assessment by S&P Global Incorporated, the notion of, okay, are you measuring workplace well-being?
And if so, are you measuring the four items that we discussed at the beginning?
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. And that will that will then inform ESG and sustainability ratings and you see where this is heading.
This that means that pension funds,
BlackRock's and all the other big organisations that sort of move money around and function of sustainability well,
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
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.
So they will listen. Yeah. Fantastic.
Was great to hear just a little bit about World Happiness Report because that sounds it sounds like a full article.
I have to read that. Well, it's it's a little bit more than Article A.
We've been doing this since 2012. It was launched by EDS, Jeffrey Sachs, John Helliwell and Richard.
They and I joined them in 2017 as a. 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 license action from 156 countries.
And the only thing we do there is really pull the data and show the average license function across countries,
and that then becomes the ranking that the newspapers write about.
So Finland is number one and they took over from Denmark. What is it the Finns are doing?
We dig in to these kind 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, too,
to gather social trust in society so people will drop wallets around and see
how many out of the 100 wallets actually get returned to the original owner.
And so around the world, you see massive variation in and sort of how society works and returning a lost 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 and the indicators.
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 in places like Denmark and Finland is close to eight out of ten and the UK is sort of seven, 7.1.
And we are we are typically, I think sort of 18 or so in the UK.
Okay, so room for improvement was always in.
But, but we're off the good basis because if you look at the place at the bottom of the world,
happiness support ranking as places like Afghanistan are more torn and I mean really we should,
I mean, stand still for a moment because the average well-being 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 0 to 10 and the average
average responds sort of to that means there's a whole host of zeros and ones.
Because if one gives a five, then you'll need another ten that gives zero.
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,
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.
I'm just thrilled that we're able to lure you here into Oxford and hold on to.
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.
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.
Thank you, Professor Tracy. It's such a pleasure to be here.