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Health lifestyles at work: availability, barriers and participation in workplace wellness


William Fleming

Abstract

The workplace is an ever more popular site for health promotion, but remains an underexplored factor in health lifestyles theory; whereas, sociological accounts of workplace wellness typically view it critically as managerial control. These perspectives both miss that participation in workplace wellness may constitute socially structured health lifestyles. Addressing this gap, I extend a theoretical model to bring together health lifestyles theory and critical wellbeing studies. To support the model, I provide an empirical account of the availability of, participation in, and barriers to workplace wellness. I analyse a multi-organisation sample of British workers (N = 27,919 individuals; 143 organisations) to reveal that engagement with wellness has distinct associations with multiple social factors (class, race and gender), job factors (level, contract, working hours and commute), and organisational context. Theories of health lifestyles ought to include work characteristics and managerial regimes, and critiques of wellness must analyse how social position affects workers’ experiences of wellness.

Oxford MBA students explore the science behind wellbeing in a pioneering new elective

2024 UK Wellbeing Report

Maria Cotofan, Richard Layard, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, and Sarah Cunningham

Abstract

Understanding the levels, the distribution, and the evolution of wellbeing across places is of paramount importance to the individuals living in them, to their broader communities, and to policymakers looking to improve the wellbeing of people. In this report we investigate how wellbeing has evolved across the UK over the last decade and show that positive trends in the first part of our time series have been partly reversed following Contents Context  Data and Methods Descriptive Statistics the Covid-19 Pandemic. We show this in terms of both Life Satisfaction and the share of people experiencing particularly low levels of wellbeing. We refer to the latter as the share living below the Happiness Poverty Line, a group making up roughly 1 in 8 people across the UK. We find that there is significant variation in both these measures across areas, with some places becoming happier over time but many still lagging behind.

2025 UK Wellbeing Report

Maria Cotofan, Richard Layard, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Sarah Cunningham, and Ben Wealthy

Abstract

Using new data and building on last year’s report we investigate how three measures of wellbeing, namely (1) average life satisfaction, the (2) share of people living with low levels of wellbeing, and the (3) share of people living with high levels of wellbeing, have evolved across UK areas and over the past decade. Using 11 waves of data from the Annual Population Survey we show how these trends have changed across the four countries, across Local Authority Districts, in major cities, and in rural and urban areas. We find that while wellbeing has broadly stagnated at the national level, there is substantial inequality across places and the communities that live there, with some areas flourishing while others increasingly lag behind. The implications for policymakers are substantial.

The impact of employee volunteering

Dr Florencio Portocarrero (LSE) presented findings from a field experiment on employee volunteering at the latest of the Wellbeing Research Centre’s Seminar Series.

He examined the knock-on effects of an employee volunteering intervention on both levels of wellbeing as well as other indicators of company performance, including levels of employee engagement and retention.

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

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.

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.