Viewing archives for Policy And Interventions

How to be happy in 2025

The Telegraph

“Spend more time doing things you enjoy, and less doing what you won’t,” recommends Dr Michael Plant, the founder and director of the Happier Lives Institute and research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre.

It may sound obvious but many people are engaging in activities because they think they should enjoy them, when they, in fact, don’t, he says. “The trick is to pay attention to your experiences. Do you actually enjoy the opera?”

Apply the same principle to your work, where we spend around a third of our life, he says. “Find a job with tasks you enjoy, supportive colleagues and that does something you think is useful,” he says. “If you can’t find one with all three, look for one with two.”

The Rise of Mental Vulnerability at Work: A Socio-Historical and Cultural Analysis

William Fleming

In recent decades, mental health has grown into a fraught and explicit public issue with considerable public and corporate policy attention. Mental health problems are reported to be both very prevalent and increasing, no more so than in the rising rates of work-related mental illness like burnout. What explains the ubiquity of mental health discourse and the growth of work-related mental illness in contemporary society? There is a vast scholarship in the social and health sciences seeking to explain these trends with national and international datasets, but the full answer remains elusive. For Ari Väänänen in The Rise of Mental Vulnerability at Work: A Socio-Historical and Cultural Analysis (TRoMVaW), we must look to transformations in the dominant modes of production and employment, especially the changes in the subjective experiences of work and life.

Väänänen comprehensively reviews the currently dominant theories why work-related mental well-being is such a growing problem (Chapters 3 and 4). The first explanation comes from positivist research in labour sociology, economics and psychology, claiming work is just more cognitively demanding and intense than it used to be (e.g. Green, 2006). The second explanation, in a similar paradigm, suggests the standard employment relationship developed in the Fordist, post-war era has degraded to produce new forms of ‘precarity’ (e.g. Standing, 2011). The other group of dominant theories are from critical and constructivist sociologists, both generally developed from Foucauldian ideas of governmentality, that argue society and subjectivity has been psychologized (e.g. Rose, 1999) and medicalized (e.g. Armstrong, 1995). For Väänänen, all four positions have strengths, but omit personal, cultural and political explanations, while also relying on a ubiquity and universalism that is neither sufficiently substantiated, nor provides a complete explanation. Väänänen’s summaries of these research streams on the relationships between work and mental health are excellent; any reader, regardless of familiarity with the topic, will benefit from engagement. Yet Väänänen’s criticisms of these research approaches are the real theoretical hook for TRoMVaW, opening the door to proceed.

How Employee Wellbeing Became a Key Driver For Growth

The New York Times

While most managers Indeed surveyed stated they believe workplace wellbeing is important, they often fail to address it as an organizational goal. This disconnect is rooted in the fear of being viewed as someone who squanders resources on “fluffiness,” according to Prof. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the lead author of the Workplace Wellbeing and Firm Performance study.

“In the C-suite, they don’t like softness. They only want to look at KPIs that they consider objective,” says Professor De Neve, who is a longtime partner of Indeed who helped guide the methodology for the Work Wellbeing Score and survey in the 2023 article “New Research: Work Wellbeing Is Good for People — and Profits.”

Global mental health crisis hits workplaces

Financial Times

A recent study by Oxford university researchers, using data from the recruitment website Indeed, illustrated the business case for investing in improving workplace mental health.

Analysing responses from 1mn workers at 1,782 publicly listed US companies, it found a “strong positive relationship between employee wellbeing and the firm’s performance”, said Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Oxford economics professor and the project’s leader.

A simulated share portfolio of the 100 companies that scored highest in Indeed’s wellbeing surveys consistently outperformed the main stock market indices.

“We have found that how people feel at work is consistently a good leading indicator of future market and financial performance,” said De Neve. Since January 2021, the portfolio had performed 11 per cent better than the S&P 500, he added.

Teacher Wellbeing Framework and Key Considerations To Enhance Teacher Wellbeing

The School of Wellbeing

Are you ready to take teacher wellbeing to the next level?

In this episode, Dr Wanying Zhou and Leoni Boyle, researchers from the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, discuss their foundational literature review produced in collaboration with the International Baccalaureate: “Wellbeing For School Teachers”.

You’ll learn about the latest research into teacher wellbeing and its importance for teachers themselves, students and the school community.

Listen now and discover practical strategies to create a healthier, more supportive environment for the educators in your school.

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.

Book Review: Sarah Waters, Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France

William Fleming

Sociologists have long been concerned with the harm wage labour inflicts on workers. The causes of this harm are various: through working conditions set by law and managers, or bullying and exclusion from colleagues and coworkers. Its effects can be severe, even fatal. Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France details the epidemic of work suicide across French workplaces in recent decades, examining its causes, cultural depictions and contested narratives.

Work suicide is a highly controversial topic, often receiving significant mainstream media attention when it occurs. Readers may recall dark rumours of safety netting around Apple–Foxconn facilities in China, or in the UK more recently the Post Office Horizon scandal or Ofsted’s acknowledged contribution to Ruth Perry’s death. In France, where workplace suicide is legally classed as a workplace accident, rates are estimated to be far higher than elsewhere. Waters’ aim is to explain why, contextualising the deaths of hundreds of workers in a story of marketisation, work intensification and the erosion of labour resistance. For Waters, workplace suicide is, simultaneously, the most extreme instance of work-based harm caused by brutal marketisation of former public service companies, and a final act of resistance left to workers amid the decline of collective labour. Suicide Voices narrates the hopelessness of work exploitation in neoliberal corporations through suicide notes, written testimonies of deceased workers, as well as documentation from the legal and media fallout.

Explaining job variance

Prof Alex Bryson (UCL) shared research on the explanatory factors for job variance at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series.

His work, published alongside Dr John Forth (City), and Prof Francis Green (UCL) considers the role of the workplace in decomposing job variance among workers.

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

Childhood Origins of Social Mobility: findings from a report for the Social Mobility Commission

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