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Author Talks: Are your employees happy at work?

McKinsey & Company

In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey’s Vanessa Burke chats with Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, about Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance (Harvard Business Review Press, Spring 2025), coauthored with INSEAD assistant professor George Ward. De Neve shares data analysis on the feelings and motivations of millions of job seekers and identifies key drivers that influence their workplace well-being. He explains why workplace well-being varies across companies and provides evidence-based ideas for business leaders who seek to improve productivity, recruitment, and retention.

Acts of kindness can make you happier and healthier, researchers say

CNBC

“People consistently and universally underestimate the kindness of others,” says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, editor of the report and director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. But the truth is, it happens more often than people realize.

“In the United States, only 30% of people think the wallet will be returned when lost,” says De Neve. “The reality is about 60% of wallets get returned when lost.”

Are young people today really the saddest generation of the modern era?

Daily Telegraph

One of those studies is the World Happiness Report, produced by a team that includes Prof Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. He agrees with Prof Duffy. Across the western world, the happiness benefit that comes with youth “has really disappeared in today’s generation,” he says. The extent of the change is the most obvious in children currently at school, where “that first leg of the U-curve where people report being happiest in their teens is literally gone”. People in their 20s, meanwhile, are “living their midlife crises right now”. Someone my age is about as happy as the average 45-year-old was in the year 2000, Prof De Neve estimates.

Money Can Buy Happiness — This Oxford Philosopher Says Charities Should Pay Attention

Inside Philanthropy

Foundations and nonprofits measure impact and effectiveness in various ways, but happiness per dollar isn’t typically one of the metrics used.

Maybe it should be.

That’s the argument being put forth by Michael Plant, founder and research director of Happier Lives Institute (HLI), a nonprofit that promises to help donors “convert your cash into a happiness multiplier.” It does this by identifying the most cost effective charities — as measured by their ability to increase the happiness and wellbeing of those they reach.

Wellbeing in small-scale societies

Prof Victoria Reyes García (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) shared findings on subjective wellbeing among small-scale societies at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series.

Her work examines the levels of, and factors to support, life satisfaction and other measures of subjective wellbeing among indigenous peoples and local communities across 19 globally distributed sites.

Watch the full presentation on the Centre’s YouTube channel.

Longitudinal Relationships Across Bullying Victimization, Friendship and Social Support, and Internalizing Symptoms in Early-to-Middle Adolescence: A Developmental Cascades Investigation

Qiqi Cheng, Kathryn Mills-Webb, Jose Marquez, and Neil Humphrey

Abstract

Current understanding of the longitudinal relationships between different aspects of peer relationships and mental health problems in early- to mid-adolescence is limited. In particular, the role played by gender in these developmental cascades processes is unclear, little is known about within-person effects between bullying victimization and internalizing symptoms, and the theorized benefits of friendship and social support are largely untested. Addressing these important research gaps, this study tested a number of theory-driven hypotheses (e.g., interpersonal risk model, transactional model) regarding longitudinal relationships between bullying victimization, friendship and social support, and internalizing symptoms. The study sample was N = 26,458 adolescents (50.6% girls, average age 12 years 8 months (SD = 3.58 months) at baseline) attending k = 176 schools in Greater Manchester, England. Separating within-person effects from between-person effects, a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) was applied to three annual waves of data. Analyses revealed that developmental cascade pathways varied across gender, as follows: higher rates of bullying victimization led to increased internalizing symptoms (partially for girls, fully for boys) and lower levels of friendship and social support (for girls only); higher levels of friendship and social support did not confer any protection against future bullying victimization (for girls or boys) but did lead to reduced internalizing symptoms (partially for girls, but not for boys); and, higher levels of internalizing symptoms led to increased rates of bullying victimization (for boys only) and lower levels of friendship and social support (partially for girls, fully for boys). Evidence of reciprocal relationships between bullying victimization and internalizing symptoms (for boys only) and between internalizing symptoms and friendship and social support (for girls only) was also found. Effect sizes of developmental cascade pathways varied but were mostly in the moderate-to-large range relative to the empirical distribution of cross-lagged effects in existing studies (i.e., 50th to 75th percentile). Sensitivity analyses indicated that findings were largely robust to a number of researcher-led analytic choices. The current study indicates that approaches to prevent or reduce the effects of bullying victimization should be prioritized, given the consistent evidence of its substantial role in increasing internalizing symptoms for both genders, in addition to its deleterious impact on girls’ friendship and social support. Preregistration: This study was preregistered at https://osf.io/xrwfq. The study design, hypotheses, and target analyses were registered.

Longitudinal relationships across sleep, physical activity, and mental wellbeing in early-to-mid-adolescence: a developmental cascades investigation

Jose Marquez, Margarita Panayiotou, Reihaneh Farzinnia, Qiqi Cheng, and Neil Humphrey

Abstract

Purpose Sleep (SL), physical activity (PA), and wellbeing (WB) are three factors linked to positive development in adolescence. Despite theoretical support and some empirical evidence of developmental associations between these factors, few studies have rigorously investigated reciprocal associations over time separating between-person and within-person effects, and none have investigated all three in concert. Thus, it remains unclear how the interplay between SL, PA and WB unfolds across time within individuals. This study examines this question in the crucial early-to-mid-adolescence developmental transition.

Method Separating between- and within-person effects, a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model was fitted to a dataset of N = 27,949 adolescents (age 12/13 at first timepoint) from Greater Manchester, England, using a three-by-three design (three annual timepoints: T1, T2, T3; three variables: SL, PA, WB).

Results Analyses revealed gender-specific developmental cascade pathways. Specifically, we found positive reciprocal associations between SL and WB for girls (at T1→T2), whereas for boys, SL positively predicted WB (at both T1→T2 and T2→Τ3) but WB did not predict SL. We also found that WB predicted PA for boys (at T2→T3) but this finding was sensitive to model specification and yielded a smaller effect than other cross-lagged pathways.

Conclusion Our results highlight the importance of sleep as a driver of adolescent wellbeing, and the role of gender in developmental cascade processes. Study strengths, limitations, and implications are discussed.

Physical pain as a component of subjective wellbeing

Lucía Macchia, Micah Kaats, Byron Johnson, and Tyler J. VanderWeele

Abstract

Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is a self-reported construct of wellbeing including components like life satisfaction, and positive and negative affect. We explore the role of physical pain in the construct of SWB using data from the Global Flourishing Study (22 countries, N = 187,160) and the Gallup World Poll (163 countries, N = 2,048,494). Consistent with the existing understanding of physical pain, we document that people can experience negative affect-related pain in the absence of physical health problems, and with near perfect physical health. We also find that the current components of SWB are not perfect proxies for pain and that physical pain and other components of negative affect like stress, worry, anxiety, anger, and sadness load on the same factor in principal component factor analysis. Based on this empirical evidence, we suggest that physical pain can be included in the construct of SWB as a component of negative affect. This proposition has the potential to advance the field in the coming decades by providing a better understanding of people’s wellbeing, presenting alternative methods to measure SWB, and informing the design of wellbeing interventions.

Money and happiness

Rémy Bellaunay, Alberto Prati, and Christian Krekel

Abstract

Many people believe that earning more money would bring more happiness into their lives (Aknin et al, 2009). However, despite massive improvements in material living conditions in most Western countries, average population happiness has stagnated for decades (Layard et al, 2010). This raises an evident question: does money bring about happiness?

The answer is ‘yes’, but far less than most people would think, and with strings attached. Herein, we review the state of the literature after half a century of empirical research on income and happiness. We will use the term “happiness” to refer to the evaluative component of subjective wellbeing, in particular measured as self-reported life satisfaction, and explicitly state whenever we are referring to the affective component.

36-year-old happiness researcher shares what it means—and what it takes—to be happy: ‘Don’t just worry about yourself’

CNBC

At just 16, Michael Plant became interested in what people could do to maximize happiness, so he started studying philosophy.

Two decades later, Plant, 36, is a global happiness researcher at the Happier Lives Institute. As the founder and research director of HLI and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, which publishes the annual World Happiness Report, Plant knows a lot about what makes people happier.

Happiness, Plant says, is “the experience of feeling good overall. I think it’s that simple.”

Here’s what he does every day to maximize his own happiness and overall wellbeing. Plus, his biggest takeaways from the research he’s conducted about what it means to be happy — and what it takes.