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How volunteering boosts employee morale and productivity

Fortune

A recent large-scale systematic review, in fact, found that a range of workplace wellness offerings had no positive effect on employees’ well-being. But there was one clear exception: volunteering.

“My study analyzed data from about 50,000 employees over 250 companies in the U.K. Volunteering was the only one of these interventions which showed…improved well-being,” says study author William Fleming, a sociologist and research fellow at the University of Oxford. “It instills a bit more social meaning…into people’s jobs, especially if you’re working for a big corporate global organization [where] it can feel like you’re just making money for the man and spinning paper sheets around.”

Workplace wellbeing: Stop focusing on individual ‘fixes’ and address the elephant in the room

HR Zone

Before employers throw their hands up in the air and cancel their subscriptions to digital wellbeing apps and mental health platforms, let’s be clear on one thing: wellbeing is a crucial investment in the workplace.

According to a recent study by the Wellbeing Research Centre, organisations with higher subjective wellbeing outperform the stock market. And not just by a small margin. They saw an 11% greater return than the S&P 500 in the first half of 2024.

Given that investing in wellbeing is a business and people imperative, that still leaves us with the question of how to make workplace wellbeing work for your organisation. Earlier this year, a new study by Oxford University’s William Fleming examined the impact of various wellbeing interventions such as mindfulness classes and wellbeing apps. It found that almost none of these solutions had any statistically significant impact on employee wellbeing.

Why Workplace Well-Being Programs Don’t Achieve Better Outcomes

Harvard Business Review

An Oxford University study of 46,336 workers in 233 organizations compared employees who did and did not engage in a range of common individual-level well-being interventions, including resilience training, mindfulness, and well-being apps. Across multiple subjective well-being indicators, intervention participants were no better off after engaging in these interventions.

Productive Doesn’t Always Mean Present, But It Helps

Forbes

Research from the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford found that the most productive employees are happy ones. Its study of workers at a contact center over a six-month period found that when workers were happier, they made more calls per hour, and converted more of those calls into sales. The researchers also found that happy workers do not work more hours than their discontented colleagues – they are simply more productive during their time at work.

Habits that kill productivity

Business Daily

Incorporating additional insights from a study by Clement Bellet, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, and George Ward, it is evident that happiness substantially increases productivity within workplaces.

Conducted within a large telecommunications company, the study leverages natural variations in employee mood influenced by weather exposure at work, revealing that happier employees show significantly higher sales performance.

What happened to Bhutan’s ‘kingdom of happiness’?

The Guardian

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, professor of economics and behavioural science at Oxford and one of the authors of the annual World Happiness Report, says that without a certain level of economic development, people don’t tend to rate themselves as happy. Bhutan’s own figures show this – those its surveys find happiest are those who are wealthiest, according to the Asia Development Bank.

“We can’t get around economic development,” says De Neve. It is an important part of people’s wellbeing, and Bhutan is “quite right” to focus more on per capita GDP, he says.

Work-related stress tops employers’ health and wellbeing concerns

HR Magazine

Additionally, HR should involve leaders in reforming their organisation’s approach to stress, explained William Fleming, Unilever research fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford.

Speaking to HR magazine, he said: “There might be some systems that HR can influence, like performance review or learning and development. But unfortunately, structural change can be beyond the reach for most HR personnel.

“They need to be empowered to help reform the major stressors at work, or have serious buy-in from senior leaders to make big changes happen. There are reactive systems like EAPs, with variable quality, but it’s important we’re moving towards a preventative approach by identifying and solving the big problems.”

What does work wellbeing have to do with business success? Everything, pretty much.

Business Insider

Since 2019, Indeed has partnered with leading experts at the University of Oxford to collect data on how employees feel at work, resulting in defined criteria for measuring work wellbeing: happiness, purpose, stress, and satisfaction.

Additionally, Indeed measures what influences wellbeing, including foundational, social, and growth needs. Wellbeing data collection spans 19 countries and is publicly available on company pages in the US, Canada, and the UK, where Indeed’s Work Wellbeing Score has launched.

Building upon this massive dataset — the world’s largest study of work wellbeing — Indeed has collaborated with the University of Oxford to create The Work Wellbeing 100, an index of the top 100 publicly traded companies ranked by the Work Wellbeing Score. These companies consistently outperformed leading stock indices, including the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite, and Russell 3000, showing that prioritizing wellbeing benefits people and business.

Beyond the obvious, here are the business benefits of investing in employee wellbeing

Business Insider

Oxford recently analyzed Indeed’s work wellbeing dataset and highlighted a strong correlation between company wellbeing and business performance. The findings featured in the 2024 Global Work Wellbeing Report reveal that higher levels of employee wellbeing are associated with improved firm valuation, return on assets, and gross profits. Moreover, companies with higher levels of employee wellbeing collectively outperformed the stock market.

The Indeed-Oxford research also looked into whether happier employees today means better business results later. Based on data from before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the findings show that companies with happier workers before COVID-19 performed better afterward in all three performance indicators (valuation, return on assets, and gross profits).

Moreover, the Indeed-Oxford research reveals the long-term business benefits of prioritizing employee wellbeing. Indeed further strengthened the business case for work wellbeing with the launch of the Work Wellbeing 100, an index ranking the top 100 publicly traded companies by their Indeed Work Wellbeing Score.

Indeed Introduces the 2024 Work Wellbeing 100, Ranking the Top Publicly-Traded Companies for Work Wellbeing in the U.S.

Business Wire

“Research consistently shows that how we feel at work matters. It deeply impacts our general wellbeing as well as company financial performance,” said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Professor of Economics at Saïd Business School and Director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University. “For employers, the wellbeing of their workforce cannot be underestimated as our research shows that those who prioritize wellbeing reap the rewards of higher productivity and improved employee retention and attraction. This is something we’ve now shown to be the case in both hard financial metrics as well as stock market performance.”