Viewing archives for Cherise Regier

From Formal Rights to Capabilities: Employee Voice and Well-being under Right-to-Disconnect Legislation

Cherise Regier

Abstract

The expansion of digitally mediated work has intensified concerns about employee availability and working time, particularly in contexts where workers have limited capacity to shape their working conditions. In response, several European countries have introduced right-to-disconnect (R2D) legislation to formally recognize employees’ right to disengage from work-related digital communications outside working hours. Rather than functioning as a prescriptive and uniformly enforced statutory right, R2D legislation often relies on workplace interpretation, negotiation, and implementation. This institutional openness provides a useful opportunity to examine how employee voice operates under conditions of digital connectivity, conceptualizing voice as a capability that enables workers to translate formal rights into meaningful control over their time. Using a difference-in-differences design and focusing on European workers in teleworkable occupations with high exposure to R2D provisions, the analysis shows that well-being improvements following the introduction of R2D legislation are concentrated among workers with greater employee voice.

Who Benefits From Right-to-Disconnect Legislation in Europe? Cross-National and Gendered Effects on Employee Wellbeing

Cherise Regier

Abstract

The effectiveness of labour regulation depends not only on the formal articulation of rights, but on the institutional arrangements through which those rights are enforced and distributed across workers. This is particularly salient for regulations governing working time and employee availability, where outcomes are shaped by power relations in the workplace and persistent gendered divisions of paid and unpaid labour. The introduction of right-to-disconnect (R2D) legislation in several European countries provides a valuable opportunity to examine how procedural labour rights operate across different industrial relations systems and how they generate gender-differentiated outcomes. Rather than constituting a single policy model, R2D provisions vary substantially in their reliance on collective bargaining, firm-level discretion and individual characteristics. Using data from the European Social Survey between 2010 and 2022 and exploiting the staggered introduction of R2D policies in France, Belgium, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, this study estimates effects on subjective wellbeing among employees in teleworkable occupations. Applying a dynamic difference-in-differences approach, the analysis identifies modest average improvements in wellbeing in countries where R2D provisions are embedded within stronger industrial relations systems. Gendered analyses show that these benefits accrue more consistently to men than to women, highlighting how digital labour regulation may interact with unequal distributions of paid and unpaid work.

Work Wellbeing Playbook: A Systematic Review of Evidence-Based Interventions to Improve Employee Wellbeing

Sarah Cunningham, William Fleming, Cherise Regier, Micah Kaats, and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve

Abstract

The Work Wellbeing Playbook is a concise guide that distils insights from a large-scale systematic literature review of workplace wellbeing interventions. It presents high level insights in an accessible, and plain English format for ease-of use.

With support from Indeed, and in collaboration with our academic partner at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, the World Wellbeing Movement has curated this Playbook of evidence-based interventions categorised by 12 key drivers of workplace wellbeing.

The researchers reviewed more than 3,000 academic studies of workplace wellbeing interventions to identify strategies proven to increase the wellbeing of employees across diverse work environments. Recognising that business leaders often face time constraints, we have condensed the key insights into this open-access resource and distilled them into an accessible, high-level summary to support busy professionals.

This playbook builds upon the World Wellbeing Movement’s science-based recommendations for how to measure both how employees are feeling at work, and why they are feeling that way – just like the Indeed Work Wellbeing Score, also created alongside experts from the Wellbeing Research Centre, does. Once you have collected the data, you can then use this Playbook to address the areas for improvement within your organisation.

Business leaders are recommended to keep diversity top of mind when leveraging the playbook to craft a holistic employee wellbeing strategy for their organisation. When choosing interventions, employers should consider factors such as their workplace environment, industry, geographical location, and the unique needs of their employees.

Although there is no magic formula, and all interventions have their limitations, many companies start to affect positive change when they combine multiple interventions (organisational-level interventions, group-level interventions and individual-level interventions) across multiple drivers of employee wellbeing.

Labour Law, Employees’ Capability for Voice, and Wellbeing: A Framework for Evaluation

Cherise Regier

Labour power has significantly declined across affluent democracies in recent decades, resulting in a widening scale of power inequality within the contemporary employment relationship. Employee voice is a key component of labour power that represents a human capability according to Amartya Sen’s conceptualisation: a real freedom to achieve states of being that one has reason to value. Employees deficient in the capability for voice lack sufficient bargaining power to influence workplace decision-making, which threatens their wellbeing by increasing their risk of exposure to work-related stressors and limiting their opportunities to improve their welfare. In this article, employee voice legislation is argued to be a necessary social conversion factor of employees’ capability for voice that can promote further advantage. However, research assessing its effectiveness at enhancing wellbeing is greatly limited due to an over reliance on neoliberal and new institutional forms of economic analysis that reveal little about the quality of employees’ lives. A comprehensive framework for evaluation based on Sen’s capability approach is proposed that when operationalised for empirical analysis, can advance our understanding of employee wellbeing in the twenty-first century.

Dr. Cherise Regier

Cherise Regier is a PhD candidate in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis examines the impact of labour market policies on worker wellbeing using quantitative methods, with a focus on interventions that aim to promote employee voice in the workplace. She is particularly interested in the political economy of worker wellbeing across high-income countries and wellbeing public policy theory.

Before commencing her doctoral studies, Cherise studied at the University of Toronto, where she earned a Master of Public Policy from the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy and a Master of Industrial Relations and Human Resources from the Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management. Alongside her academic endeavours, Cherise worked as a Policy Analyst for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat.