EVERY SPOKEN WORD
70 min read · 14,389 words- 0:00 – 1:33
Intro
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Only one in four people, less than a quarter in the States, report high workplace wellbeing. That's really, really worrying. The way you drive home from the office, the mood that you're in will impact your wife, your children. This feeds into our societies and our communities big time. We should not have had to write a book on why workplace wellbeing matters. The world of work in which God knows how much time we all spend, it ought to be naturally a positive place, and it isn't.
- JSJay Shetty
[instrumental music] Hey, everyone. Welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Today's guest is someone who's gonna help us do exactly that. I'm speaking about Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a Professor of Economics and Behavioral Scientist at the University of Oxford and Director of Wellbeing Research Centre. Jan is a leading expert on the economics of wellbeing and co-leads the world's largest study on how people feel at work. His latest book, Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, explores how happiness at work shapes our lives, businesses, and society. If you wanna lead better, if you wanna know how to have happiness in your teams, in your workplace, and in your life, go and grab a copy of this book. I promise you, you won't regret it. Please welcome to the podcast Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. Jan, it is great to have you here.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Jay, thank you for having me. It's so wonderful to get the opportunity to, to reconnect
- 1:33 – 3:11
What Actually Makes Us Happy?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
as well.
- JSJay Shetty
First question I wanna ask you is, you're part of the biggest study on happiness in the world. What's the most heartbreaking thing that you found?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
In the Western world, especially in the United States of America, a breakdown of our social tissue, and that underpins the decline of wellbeing as we pick it up, thanks to the Gallup World Poll metrics, the decline in the ranking of the United States in particular, which has now tumbled out of top 20 this year again, whereas about a decade ago, the US would've been 12th or 13th in the world. And that, I think, is a worrying decline given, um, how important the United States is, needless to say, and we've been digging into why there's this gradual decline in the US in terms of their wellbeing as measured through how people experience their lives themselves, so self-rated life satisfaction. And what we're finding is huge inequality, so there's a very wide distribution in terms of wellbeing, and then there is the inequalities also in terms of generational differences. So we find that youth, especially in the United States, have tumbled off a cliff in terms of their self-reported wellbeing, the way that they experience their lives. If you were to look just at youth in America by itself, they, they'd be 62nd or 63rd in the World Happiness Report ranking. Look at the 60 plussers, they still be in the top 10 of the World Happiness Report, and I think that's really telling. But I think if there's one thing that stood out r- in recent years looking at from the World Happiness Report general wellbeing perspective, it would have to be the precipitous decline in wellbeing in the US
- 3:11 – 5:40
Why Young People Are Struggling
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
in particular.
- JSJay Shetty
Why are younger people becoming unhappier?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
There's a variety of things at play with youth. Um, people are swift to point in the direction of social media, but I think that's a little, uh, a little easy. Uh, it's easy to vilify the tech companies, but, um, if you actually talk with youngsters and do qualitative focus groups, what you find is it's affordability first and foremost, uh, affordability of studies. Um, the cost of studying has outpaced inflation by a long mile in the United States, and so you find that that's a real worry. The second thing that comes to the fore when you really dig into why youth is, is off a cliff is the fact that they're very worried about the future of work, and I cannot blame them. How in the world are you gonna catch up with ChatGPT at this point in terms of studying engineering or law or medicine or what have you? Uh, and so there's real worries and concern about what they'll be doing. And so there's sort of social contract that's always been there about, okay, we'll always do better than our parents, and every generation will make its step forward. There's a lot of, um, doubt around that at the moment, and then there's no way around it. There's also social media. Um, so social media is an extraordinary tool, um, but that does distract us from a lot of the things that would otherwise be more productive or potentially more purposeful. And now social media has done a lot of good and has the power to do a lot of good, and I think your podcast and, and the wisdom, nuggets of wisdom that you share through social media are extraordinary. But we really ought to be thinking hard, kids, parents, policymakers all together to see, can we put the social back into social media somehow and do it together? So let's not cut corners and sort of blame social media and ban social media. No, we, we ought to really work together. It's not something you're gonna be putting back in the box anytime soon. It's here to stay, social media, but it's about making it work for everybody in a way, uh, that is positive for wellbeing. So the drop in youth is a combination of factors. It's, it's uncertainty, anxiety, uh, uh, distraction, um, and, uh, affordability issues, uh, for, for youth at, at this point. So they're real- they're really sort of an existentialist zeit- geist crisis that they're having to deal with, and that's not easy for them to grapple with, and we pick it up in their self-reported life satisfaction.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah, I really like the fact that when you've actually sat down and talked to individuals-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm
- JSJay Shetty
... you don't get this glazed-over view of what the issue
- 5:40 – 8:09
The Rising Cost of Education
- JSJay Shetty
is, right?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm.
- JSJay Shetty
You get a very specific set of factors that are affecting wellbeing. When you talk about affordability, you mentioned education.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
What has shifted in the affordability of education? How different is it in the last 30, 20, 10 years from when these 15 to 24-year-olds, their parents were growing up to where they are now? What have been the biggest shifts in affordability?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And everything has become more expensive, but if you look at the cost of education, the cost of tuition fees has, has risenQuicker and faster than, than inflation because companies and organizations require you to have degrees, and so there's sort of a monopoly, if you will, at a national scale around you have to have a degree in order to obtain a good job. And so then obviously there's a, a, a premium to be extracted, um, and, and, and in markets, that's the way economics tends to work. But now I think there's gonna be a lot of pressure being put on that now because it's not quite clear the extent to which learning [chuckles] through universities is going to happen and how that can be compared to learning through other means that might be less expensive. If ChatGPT is so good, as we've all seen it in action, and the other, um, uh, large language models, then the whole question around learning and how to use your skills is gonna be very different. Maybe other types of jobs, nursing, uh, uh, plumbing, uh, the kinds of stuff that Chat- ChatGPT is not very good at, as far as I can tell, maybe those kind of jobs will come to the fore and people will opt back into those kind of job and not always feel the need to necessarily go into tertiary education of the liberal arts ty- type.
- JSJay Shetty
We hire a lot of people, and I can't remember the last time I looked at what college someone went to.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
Because it's just not become an important factor because the skills that we need to grow-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... are not the skills that people are learning in college. We are expecting them to be able to prove it on the job, to show experiments, to create work. And of course, we're not hiring at the scale of the largest companies in the world, so there's a different, uh, task for sure. But it's interesting to hear you say that-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah
- JSJay Shetty
... because I think we are moving away from that as time goes on-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
I think so
- JSJay Shetty
... uh, depending on what career paths someone takes.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah. And I think tertiary education, universities and, and colleges in particular, they're in for a ride because they'll have to both subs- substantively the courses and what, what the skills that are being taught cannot be outdated. And universities, they take a long time to change, but ChatGPT is really
- 8:09 – 11:11
Skills That Matter More Now
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
catching up.
- JSJay Shetty
When you talk about uncertainty-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... when I was at college, we were being told that everyone should dream of being a data scientist.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
Like, that was the goal. That's what would be the ideal career. If you were talking to parents today, what skill would you encourage them to think about exposing their children to, or college students to think about learning in the uncertain environment that we're at right now?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
No, and frankly, m- myself, the team, ChatGPT does all the coding at this point for us, but it may not be far off that the real skill in the future of education will be asking the right questions, and not the skill set to find answers through data science or engineering, 'cause tools and machinery and large language models will do that for us. But we still need to ask the right questions to prompt the machines [chuckles] to do the job for us. So I think maybe we'll shift back to questions and the right questions rather than the skills to make and build out answers to questions posed by somebody else. I'll be teaching for the first time at the University of Oxford a class on the science of wellbeing in business policy and life. And the fact that this new elective was oversubscribed from never having been taught, a bit like Laurie Santos at Yale, uh, though in this case within the business school, uh, with, uh, about a third of the entire MBA court signing up for this, a class that's never been taught, no word of mouth, no nothing, I think also speaks to the question you just raised around uncertainty, looking for answers, asking the right questions. And so that's exactly what we'll be doing in this class, and speaks to the point we just raised. I will be asking in this class more questions than providing answers, and we will debate it. We'll be asking questions around purpose and meaning and, and the role of income and wellbeing and, and how much is enough, um, and, uh, what's the human case, not just the business case for investing in workplace wellbeing, and so on and so forth. And so maybe that's a sign of the times that I'm starting to teach this class at Oxford and that students are signing up for it in droves, and it's about asking the bigger questions rather than just looking for tools and tricks and skills.
- JSJay Shetty
I agree with that approach, and we grew up at a time where answers made you smart.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
And today we're living at a time where questions make you smarter because the answers are available.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yes.
- JSJay Shetty
It's easy-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Wikipedia, Google, ChatGPT
- JSJay Shetty
... to do any calculation. Yeah, it's, it's easy. You, you-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
The smartness comes through the right questions.
- JSJay Shetty
Exactly. And I couldn't agree with you more that whether it's art, whether it's math, whether it's engineering, whether it's design, it's like, do you know what you're searching for? I wanna go off what you just said about the conversations and the debates you wanna start in your class, and I'm so glad that that class exists because I think it's been needed for a long time, especially in business schools-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... because the people that are at the business schools are going to go off to be leaders of organizations and companies, and if they don't understand the value of wellbeing-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... it's pretty impossible for that, that anyone else will. You just said there a question that you think people will debate is how
- 11:11 – 18:46
How Much Money Is Enough?
- JSJay Shetty
much is enough?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
I wanted to get the empirical take on how much is enough.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
So first and foremost, two Nobel Prize winners, Angus Deaton and Danny Kahneman. In 2010, they published a paper showing that, uh, you may remember this figure, about $75,000 was the golden number. Now truth be told, it depends also on how you define wellbeing. [chuckles] If it's about sort of positive experiences in the moment, then yes, they were right back in the days. Obviously, you would, you would have to inflation adjust that today. It was about 75K. But if you, if what matters to you is sort of life evaluations, how you evaluate the quality of life as you stand back, then income plays a bit more of a role and it went up a bit higher, like 100,000, 120,000. Again, I would need to inflation adjust.The thing that all economists and all of the science, uh, agrees on is there's huge diminishing marginal returns to further income. And so for as soon as you reach about 100,000, 120,000, 150,000, then it becomes difficult, uh, more and more difficult to pick up differences in wellbeing for further income.
- JSJay Shetty
Why is that?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
The relationship is logarithmic, as they say. To have the same impact on your wellbeing from moving from 20,000 to 40,000, you would need another 40,000. To then have the same impact again, you would need from 80 to 160,000. To then have the same impact on your wellbeing again, you would need to move from 160 to 320,000. And so that's how it sort of creeps up. There's continues to be increases, but it requires way more money to find the additional increase. Now, you asked the question why, and the reason is, unless you're inheriting money or you're winning the lottery, you still have to work for it, and you're starting to make compromises. And you're making compromises in terms of work-life balance, seeing your friends and family, stress, you're rising in the hierarchy, you're responsible for other people. And so there's trade-offs at that point. And while, yes, more money may allow you to do more things and live bigger and nicer, you will be missing out on other drivers of wellbeing. And this is where we come back to the science of wellbeing, is that in our societies, we've been led to believe, in particular so [chuckles] in the United States, that money does make you happy, and the more, the better. Yes. But the trade-offs you're starting to make are real, and they're real in terms of sharing meals with your friends and family. They're real in terms of looking after your own health, physical and mental. And so all in all, uh, it weighs it back down, and you find lit- little or no difference anymore in people's life satisfaction above a certain point. And so there is a bit of an optimal point for well- for, for wellbeing in terms of income.
- JSJay Shetty
It's interesting because it's not that we don't all want and need more money, it's the fact that those roles and responsibilities come with more work, more sacrifices, more choices, more, more difficult options, could be more stress mentally and physically if you're not prioritizing that. And, and it's interesting to think about that because you would hope that if people had more money, that they would be able to reduce some of their problems, which is true. I think it can decrease some of your issues. But it's interesting to think about the proportion of happiness and-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
You're absolutely right, but only up to a certain point. So the real issues that you're solving with money, the deeper issues like daily anxieties, paying off mortgage, paying off your loans, paying for the basic necessities, you're there after, say, 100 or $120,000.
- JSJay Shetty
Unless you live in, like, New York or LA or London.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah, of course. But, but, uh, and so this is obviously context dependent, and inflation needs to be inflation adjusted, et cetera, et cetera. But the, the trade-offs starting to weigh in after that sort of satiation point weigh more heavily than the benefits of further money at that point.
- JSJay Shetty
Interesting.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And that's real. And but the fact of the matter is, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the data's right there. I could show you right now if it were on my computer that extraordinary line. So if you don't have much money, it matters a great deal because it solves real issues, as you were alluding to. But after a certain point, obviously depending where you are, LA, New York will be a bit more, but after a certain point, the basic amenities, necessities, the, the real worries are taken care of, then aspiring for even more money will, by all means, go for it. But beware of the trade-offs you're making, and then that will start putting a real brake on the, the opportunity for improving your wellbeing because you're gonna be... Your integrity might be out of the window. Uh, you'll be more responsible, stress, family, work-life balance, physical, mental health, everything we've just alluded to. And the, the fact of the matter is people underestimate these other drivers of one's wellbeing. In our societies, and particularly in the United States, there's this real focus on wealth and income, and everything around us, from marketing and so on and so forth, pushes us to think in the direction of, "Okay, gotta make more money. It'll make me happier." But we forgo and underestimate the importance of something like just social connection, running into people, having shared meals, and we can talk about this. We've got new data on this. It's just, just extraordinary. In the United States, and this is brand-new research, just come out in the World Happiness Report, published on March 20th of this year, International Day of Happiness. And one of the most... We always knew social capital, the importance of social connections. In the field, we know that people underestimate the importance of social ties, our social lives. I had no idea just how powerful and important our social lives were for our wellbeing until this. In the United States, we've got data on how many of your meals are being shared, uh, on a week-to-week basis. So how many of your lunches, how many of your dinners? So a variable that runs from zero to 14, seven lunches, seven dinners. Uh, unfortunately, we don't have anything about breakfast, but anyway, lunches and dinners. In the US, on average, people now have about seven of the 14 meals together. That means half of your meals, on average in the US, are essentially dining alone. What we've seen is an increase of 53%, to be precise, in America over the last two decades in dining alone. If you slice and dice that by age groups, it's been an increase of a, an almost doubling for youth. So below 30-year-olds are now almost twice as likely to be dining alone on a day-to-day basis as compared to two, two decades ago. Now, why does this matter? Going back to the point we made earlier, is if you run a regression, think of it as a horse race between variables, income, social connections as proxy through number of shared meals, employment status, et cetera. You would obviously think that while your income and employment status matter more, that coefficient will come in s- more strongly. No. The simple indicator, that number around how many of your meals over the past week were shared, is as influential in explaining people's life satisfaction as their relative income and their employment status.
- JSJay Shetty
No way.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yes way, and it's, it's really striking. So even for us, this was a real sort of, um, eye-opener. Oh my God, we th- we knew social capital and social ties were important. Didn't quite realize just how-How important. And we've been very lucky to have, to be able to get information around sharing meals. Um, we, we've got this over the past two decades thanks to the American Time Use Survey, and we have it globally thanks to the Ajinomoto module on the Gallup Poll, which has just gone in for one year, and my God, there's such variation in the extent to which people have social lives around the world. There's countries where out of the 14 lunches and dinners in a week, there's countries where there's only three or four meals shared, and then there's others, mostly Latin American countries, where it's sort of like 12, 11, 12 out of the 14 meals are being shared. And in the US it's about seven.
- 18:46 – 21:14
Why Are Youth People Less Happy?
- JSJay Shetty
Wow.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah.
- JSJay Shetty
Why, why is it that millennials are becoming unhappier and boomers are becoming happier?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
So first of all, you gotta know, and I'm sure you know this, Jay, but in one of the, what we thought was one of the universal facts in wellbeing science was the U shape. The, the relationship between age and wellbeing is one that has the form of a U. People start higher in terms of wellbeing, so lose that happiness and wellbeing [chuckles] over the years, reach a midlife crisis. So everybody talks about midlife crisis, but you actually pick it up in the data. It exists. And then from there on in the midlife crisis, sort of like early 40s, the peak of, of the pressures, um, mortgages, small children, responsibilities at work and all of it coming together. And then from there on, on average, people go up again in terms of wellbeing as measured through their satisfaction with life. Uh, and only at the very, very end do you see it come down again when physical issues and disabilities come into play. What we're finding in the United States in particular, but generally in the West, is that first leg of the U, the high, what is meant to be high levels of wellbeing for youth, that is gone. So I got in the news quite a bit with quotes along the lines of, "Youth in America are experiencing their midlife crisis today." We find that that is apparently the case. So there's this long-thought universal truth that we thought was the case around the U, uh, shape relationship between wellbeing and, and age is just, just gone. Now the question of course is why? And in the United States, we touched upon it earlier, there's a number of reasons, um, why we believe youth are, um, having their midlife [chuckles] crisis today, and it's got to do with the affordability crisis. It has to do with absolute distress and anxiety, worry about the future of work for them, and the questions it raises about decisions around studies, for example, now. And then social media being a very, um, a force for distraction and not really social, uh, or as social as it should be. And all of these things sort of come together and you see it come together in the likes of people feeling more and more lonely. And if we look at the extent to which people share meals together, you find that youth, especially in America, is now almost twice as likely to be dining alone on a, on, on a, on a day-to-day basis as compared to two decades ago.
- JSJay Shetty
You know, when Radhi and I started our tea company, Juni, it didn't start with a big plan. It started with an idea we really believed in. Shopify is what helped us turn that idea into a real business. It's the platform we use to build and grow Juni
- 21:14 – 29:42
The Hidden Cost of Loneliness
- JSJay Shetty
while staying connected to the people who support what we do. And what's been mind-blowing? How people actually find us. Sometimes it's an ad on Instagram, other times a YouTube video, a TikTok scroll, and even through AI tools like ChatGPT, you can literally complete a purchase inside a conversation. Shopify makes all of that seamless because Shopify meets customers where they already are. Our products show up naturally, making it easier for people to connect with what we've created. As Juni continues to grow, I get to focus more on the creative side, knowing Shopify is handling the rest. Thought about starting a business? This is your sign. Get started today at shopify.com/j. What does loneliness actually do to us? Because we talk about it a lot, but what does it actually do?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
A lot. So obviously loneliness is the bigger concept and the, and the indicat- the indicator that we have here is the extent to which we share meals, and that's coming down. So in, in the World Happiness Report this year, we dig into precisely the question you're after. And what we're finding is if you are less social, so you have less social interactions, in other words you're more lonely, you will have less social support. Duh, needless to say. So if you're having less social connections, it means that in times of need you'll have less people to call on. You also are less socially trusting of others. People, and Jay, this is important and I owe this to Professor John Helliwell, the founding editor of the World Happiness Report, who, while we did chapter three, he did chapter two, he found that, um, and he's always been very strong on this particular aspect, we underestimate the kindness of people by a factor of two. And so left to our own devices and by ourselves, lonely, we underestimate the kindness of others. So we need to get in touch and in front of other people to find out that they're actually all right, other people. Left to our own devices and, and echo chambers within social media, we obviously, um, um, polarize in our thinking. And so this too, the New York Times really du- dug into this when I spoke with them, is loneliness as, for example, proxy to the fact that we're having less and less meals shared, is also important in, in sort of radicalization of opinions. Because if you think about it, and I don't have strong empirical evidence for this, this is more sort of conjecture, but still, when you speak with other people, everybody has slightly different views on the world. There, there are frames of, of, of views of the world in other people. But the more you speak with people, the more you moderate your own views. You generate a sense of empathy necessarily, and you find that your views need to be moderated because not everybody thinks the same way. If we are less and less social, we eat by ourselves or with our phones in our hand rather than with others around the table, and this is clear in the data, then it's also one of the reasons why we're polarizing in terms of opinions. It's because we're no longer moderating our views very much and are stuck in our echo chambers. And so the result of which is more polarized political behaviorAnd this, by the way, is very important generally because wonderful colleague and co-author of this book, George Ward, his early studies and some of them co-authored, including published in the American Journal of Political Science, we find that how you feel about life is predictive of your political behaviors, your voting behavior.
- JSJay Shetty
Interesting. In what sense? Talk to me about that.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Well, think about it. If you're unhappy with the way life is going, you're not in favor of the incumbent. Obvious. And so you're way more likely to vote, um, uh, anti-system. And as in the United States, we've now seen in the last decade, as exemplified in the World Happiness Report, you see a decline in general wellbeing. There's inequalities. There's people are happy, but people are less happy. But generally speaking, decline in, in wellbeing in the US, particularly so for youth, you find thus a, a more fertile ground for anti-system votes, populist votes. Now, that can go towards a, a, a Donald Trump, that can go, uh, towards a Bernie Sanders, depending on a number of indicators. But the fact of the matter is the increasing number of people being unhappy makes them angry, makes them wanna vote against the current system, and that is most reasonable and most normal. Uh, but we're picking this up very strongly, and what's really important here to know is that this is really an advantage of our kind of data, subjective wellbeing data. They capture how people feel about their lives, and it's how they feel about their lives that makes them choose and vote a certain way. And what's really powerful, and we owe this to George and others, we really find, uh, that if you, uh, compare this with economic proxies, it's how we feel about life is a lot stronger in predicting how we vote. Quick example, GDP in the United States is growing, but wellbeing is dropping. So if you look at it from a traditional economics perspective, like an alien landing and you're neoclassical economist alien, and you arrive and you see the United States, and you're like, "Oh wait, they're doing well. There's growth, uh, so people must be happier 'cause there's more growth and the GDP has grown as compared to last year." And it isn't, and yet you have these, um, and wellbeing is dropping, and as a result you obviously have these anti-system votes. Now, I don't wanna be scaremongering, but when we picked up these big differences where there's growth and yet people are getting unhappier, the first time this was picked up, and we owe this to John Clifton, the CEO of Gallup, was the Arab Spring. If you looked at Egypt, Syria, remember, this is now about a decade and a half ago, the Arab Spring, you would've said, "Things are going great in Egypt." They had almost double-digit growth, and yet wellbeing was dropping. Well, guess what happens? The next time in our textbook on wellbeing science, we read the, the analysis for the Hong Kong riots. Back in 2019, youth in Hong Kong really stood up, and there was real riots and it was, uh, real, real concerns. If you look at the GDP of Hong Kong, it is through the roof in the decade before. It's, it's like plus 60% in the space of a decade. Yet, if you look at life satisfaction, as particularly that of youth, it's gone down. It was minus 10 or 12% over that same decade.
- JSJay Shetty
Wow.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
So you're looking in from the outside and saying like, "Wait, whoa, growth, fantastic." And you look at how people feel in that society, and it's actually come down, and it's when you see that difference, and obviously we're now starting to pick it up greatly in the United States as well, where there continues to be economic growth, but wellbeing negative and dropping, that fuels anti-system sentiment and obviously makes it a fertile ground for, for, for discontent and, and possibly more.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah, it's incredible to see the connection between something like individual loneliness and then national outrage.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yes.
- JSJay Shetty
Right? Like that kind of... You don't necessarily put the two together.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And one should, because it's the loneliness that makes us unhappy, and being unhappy makes us not wanting the current system and voting anti-system, and thus uprooting everything.
- JSJay Shetty
Mm.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Um, and so that's sort of the linkages there, and this is where wellbeing science and actually capturing how you feel, which is what you're all about, is really capturing how we feel about our lives and how to improve that. If you can put numbers on this like we do in the economics of wellbeing, you can capture this, and this is... I'm not new. I'm part of a larger movement called the Beyond GDP movement, where at a population level, we really try and think more holistically and capture what really matters, which is real progress in society is people's quality of life improving as they experience it, and not... GDP is a means to an end. Growth in GDP will likely enable, if done properly, greater and better lives, but the proof of the pudding is maybe not in the eating, but is in the measuring of people's wellbeing. And so we urge so strongly to do a lot more in the measurement. You know, most countries actually do. United Kingdom have been doing really well. Since 2012, the UK Office for National Statistics measures in the annual population household survey wellbeing. How satisfied are you with your life these days? We have that data since 2012 in the UK in the official national statistics. In the United States, it is not there. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the, the statistical agents in the US do not measure how people feel about their lives. Crazy, isn't it?
- JSJay Shetty
That's crazy.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
It's absolutely crazy.
- JSJay Shetty
So they don't even ask anyone?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
They don't even ask. We've been pushing. The entire field of the, the wellbeing economists, we've been lobbying, we've been working, and Washington say like, "Hey, no, we, we... It's subjective."
- JSJay Shetty
Why do you think that is?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Because it's subjective is the argument, and then, then we make the case, but wait a second, subjective wellbeing, how you feel about life, isn't that what ultimately matters?
- 29:42 – 33:15
Why Feeling Good at Work Changes Everything
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And then they're still not convinced, and then we have to make the case for, well, but how you feel about life drives objective behaviors.
- JSJay Shetty
Mm-hmm.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Like productivity, and we can talk about it.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Or voting, like what we're seeing in the United States. Um, and yeah, it's difficult.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah. I mean, it impacts whether people get married or not, impacts the amount of children you have. It impacts everything.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah. It, like, our behaviors are, and we owe, again, Daniel Kahneman and others, the, the, the extraordinary Nobel Prize winner, like, why we do thing, the things we do is because it makes us feel a certain way.And yet-
- JSJay Shetty
Well-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
... the US government is not interested, or at least the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not interested in measuring people's subjective wellbeing.
- JSJay Shetty
I wanna dive into work if we can, because I think that's the core of this book, uh, Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance. And the reason why I wanna talk about this is because I think what's interesting is probably around three decades ago, we found happiness and meaning in multiple different places. We had church or temple or community. You had home life, children. You had other friends that lived close by. You probably lived close to your family. I don't live close to my family, you're not-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm
- JSJay Shetty
... that close to yours.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
True.
- JSJay Shetty
And then you had work. Whereas now it feels like church, temple, community has gone.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
We're further away from our families-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yep
- JSJay Shetty
... so all the pressure is on work-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Absolutely
- JSJay Shetty
... to provide all of this. And that's why I think the work conversation is so important because we're now living at a time where that's the place that we're looking for meaning, for belonging, for connection. But as you talk about in the book-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
We're not getting it
- JSJay Shetty
... we're not getting it there.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
No, no. Only one in four people, less than a quarter in the States, would report high workplace wellbeing. And with high workplace wellbeing, I'd say it w- it would mean a four out of five, out of five in terms of job satisfaction, for example. And so that's really, really, re- really worrying. And the other reason why we know why work is just so important for all the reasons you just mentioned is if you're being made redundant, as the English say, which is probably the worst term to use, um, or being laid off as they, I guess they'd say in the States, is we see a huge drop in life satisfaction. But to your point, only about half of the drop in life satisfaction of being made unemployed is due to the loss of income. Most of the drop is actually explained by the loss of identity and social ties, which is exactly the point you're making. People's identities are now tied up with their work and their titles, less so than with family or church or temple, as you say, and so makes it all, makes work all the more important.
- JSJay Shetty
So this blew my mind. On page 74 of your book, figure 4-2, only feeling sick in bed is a more unhappy activity than working, which means we would rather care or help for adults, wait in line, do admin or organizing, do housework, chores, or DIY more than working and studying. The only thing we'd rather not do than work-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Is being sick in bed
- JSJay Shetty
... is being sick in bed.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah, so I, we owe this study to, uh, George MacKerron, who developed mappiness, which is extraordinary, and like looked at what people were doing day to day and the work bit, uh, and especially spending time with your line manager, as it turns out, was really the worst thing. Now truth be told, while in the workplace you do a number of things, um, you're also socializing at work. You're having lunch together, one would hope,
- 33:15 – 36:14
What Great Leaders Do Differently
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
or you're, uh, uh, also exchanging and being excited by, by, by projects and developments. Here what George MacKerron was after was really the work-work bit. Uh, and so that is, is not particularly liked. Whether it's the, the mappiness study that puts work so low in terms of, uh, emotional wellbeing in terms of daily activities, whether you're looking at the, the world's largest study, uh, thanks to Indeed, where we find and crowdsource data and find that only a quarter of people, actually less than a quarter of people feel happy, but you look at our friends at Gallup who do engagement surveys around the US and the rest of the world, they also find that less than 20% of people are actually actively engaged in the work they're doing, which is a proxy for wellbeing. And so there's a lot of room for improvement.
- JSJay Shetty
What can individuals do differently-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Oh
- JSJay Shetty
... to find meaning at work?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Can I start with leaders?
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah, let's start with leaders. Let's go there.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Don't just talk the talk, walk the walk, and I'll, I'll back this up. I feel kinda sad about this, and it took me a while 'cause I come out of a family of actual people managers. My dad ran business, and he was a, an actual people manager, and so that's what I thought good managers were. And starting in the study of workplace wellbeing, it sort of drove me because I thought, "Okay, this is interesting and important and I care, and it's sort of part of my DNA." And lo and behold, and it was only about a year or two ago, we were able to advise and set questions on an HBR survey of senior managers, H- HBR being Harvard Business Review. What we found is that 87%, to be precise, of managers, senior managers would say, "Yes, I care about my people, and it would give, uh, a competitive advantage, and it's the right thing to do," blah, blah, blah. In that same survey, we actually started test- testing them to look for what they prioritize when it comes down to it. Only a third of people would actually prioritize their people over other, uh, stakeholders.
- JSJay Shetty
How did you test them?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Essentially asking questions and, and, and sort of, um, in, in a, in, um, a s- in a situation having to, uh, prioritize particular stakeholders. So for example, it would be customers and clients would be prioritized over people, for example. But actually, Jay, the real point is only half of that third, 19%, actually has actions against people management and, a- and wellbeing of your people being a strategic priority. Study by my colleague Stefan Meier, Columbia Business School, great friend, great guy, sit tight. He studied with an army of, of, uh, uh, research assistants, all the earnings calls of the big listed companies in the US, and that's typically the CEO and the CFO talking about financial results every quarter, and they speak to the investor community. What Stefan found was that the word customer, business development side, came up eight times more than people employee side of the business. So obviously a business is essentially you gotta have clients and you gotta have people delivering, so there, there are two main stakeholders here in delivering and running a business, obviously the clients and the people who make it possible. And yet somehow customers to business development is so much more prevalent in their minds as their own people who deliver
- 36:14 – 46:17
Most Leaders Get This Wrong
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
on the business. But worse, when they then sent sentiment analysis around when the word customer was raised, it was in the context of-Positive words, opportunity. When the word employee was raised, it was in the context of challenge, problem, risk. And so the fact of the matter is, and this is the sad truth, is that, and again, this is about 20-- I think only about 20% of senior leaders actually care, invest, act on the notion that take care of your people and they'll take care of business. Most leaders, about 80%, I'm willing to put that number out there, um, talk the talk but don't walk the walk.
- JSJay Shetty
What I find about that, having worked in the corporate world, is I found that a lot of leaders were never cared for themselves, so they don't know how to care for others.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Possibly.
- JSJay Shetty
They were the person who came in, and they had to carry everyone's laptops. They had to go run around and grab everyone's coffee. They had to go and walk someone's dog or drop their kid to school or whatever it was. And now as that person's come up the ranks, they have never even known what it feels like to have someone say, "How are you feeling?"
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
"How are you doing?" And because they don't give themselves that permission-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly
- JSJay Shetty
... they don't know how to do it for anyone else. The amount of times I've coached senior leaders inside of organizations, and they'll always be like, "Yeah, we wish people were more productive, more proactive, more organized, more this, more that." I'm like, "Yeah, but you realize people need a break. They need this, they need wa- whatever it may be." And then they go, "Yeah, but I never did it."
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly.
- JSJay Shetty
"I don't take my vacation, so why do they need it?" Right? And it's that.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
But it's, it's these senior leaders, they're so driven, they're so ambitious, and we-- going back, straight back to where we started with this conversation, they make trade-offs with their health, with their humanity, their, the empathy for others who may not be in the, uh, same spirit of wanting to be at the very top of the organization. The, the partial reason why senior, senior leaders just don't walk the walk as much as they should in terms of investing in people is because they didn't invest in their own work-life balance [chuckles] enough, so they don't quite see it for the others. So they need to be reminded. And one of the ways of reminding and speaking to that caliber, to that level in the organization is to build out the business case. And so in a way, I, I... This is something I really have to get off my chest because, and it took me a while to really get this, is George and I, we should not have had to write a book on why workplace wellbeing matters. When you think about it, Jay, as you know, the, the human case ought to be self-evident. I mean, we're human beings. We ought to care about each other. It's in the scriptures and in our religions, in our, just our n-nature. We o- we, we like being cared for, and we ought to care for others. So the world of work, in which God knows how much time we all spend, it ought to be naturally a positive place, and it isn't, as, as we show through the crowdsourced data with Indeed and many other places. So it's the business case that then tries to resonate with you, with, with those senior leaders who have the power and the tools and the influence to try and raise workplace wellbeing for others. But they have a tough time because they didn't invest in their own wellbeing, perhaps sufficiently so, to actually care about the wellbeing of others. But they do r- what does resonate with them is numbers, the business case, and so that's obviously what the book sets out is to show that investing in workplace wellbeing-
- JSJay Shetty
Is actually good for the bottom line
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
... is good for the bottom line. So there's the human case, which ought to be self-evident, but that didn't work out all too well, and so the business case needs to be made. And what the book does is to show the business case, the links between wellbeing and productivity, retention, and talent r- attraction, and ultimately the bottom line in terms of, uh, uh, profitability and even stock market performance in a way that's never been shown before. And it took George and me, oh God, a decade and a half to put it all together, uh, and different academic papers and large, large studies with major companies, and to finally bring it together in the book. It makes a very strong case for why investing in workplace wellbeing is not just the right thing to do but also the clever thing to do.
- JSJay Shetty
Do you think it's possible for people to have work-life balance and be at the top of a company?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
That is such a good question. It's hard to... And every case is different. So one thing, one caveat that listeners need to know [chuckles] is that we study big samples, and is there's averages, and there's always... Case by case might be different, but on average, it is the way we find it. I'm afraid the answer is, to your question, is yes. I think, um, people who make it all the way to the top have given up on a chunk of work-life balance. And I think it goes back to right at the start when you asked the question about money. Does money make you happy? And these high levels, these very, very big salaries, it's surprising how little extra happiness it buys them. And that is because they've given up and, and trade off other things like work-life balance.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah. And I think we need to change that as well because it won't change for everyone else unless it changes for someone at the top, and then you start to see that, oh, someone at the top sleeps eight hours, and therefore they're more effective.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
Oh, someone at the top works out, and so they're more productive.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
Because I remember a period in my life when I was working 18-hour days, seven days a week, and my wife would always say to me, she'd say, "Hey, if you took care of your health, like if you worked out and you slept a little bit more-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... I promise you, you'd be more productive and effective."
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm.
- JSJay Shetty
And I'd say to her, "No, no, no. You don't understand. Gotta work this hard." And it was only when I started to listen to her that I started to see the value of that, and I was so much more effective, strategic. I didn't get ill as often. I wasn't dealing with migraines or headaches. I didn't have to take an Advil or whatever to suppress that feeling. Like, you just felt better. But my wife had to literally coach me to that.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
I'm very proud to be able to say that not, not only is your wife right, we have the causal field evidence to back her up.
- JSJay Shetty
Okay.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And you'll know the company that we had. It took us 10 years to get to this point. A company with whom we worked to be able to show for the first time the causal effect of how you feelWhether that's through better sleep, working out, whatever. But how you feel from one week to another impacting how you perform that week. It was with British Telecom, BT.
- JSJay Shetty
Mm-hmm.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
You'll know them.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah.
- 46:17 – 50:41
What Actually Makes Work Feel Good
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
and wellbeing.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And we were able to disentangle the two arrows in that dynamic relationship by leveraging weather differences because... Anyway, long story.
- JSJay Shetty
[laughs]
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And I urge you to read the paper that came out in Management Science on this.
- JSJay Shetty
What employee programs, wellbeing programs actually helped? Because I think the challenge is there's so many wellbeing programs now. Every company is subscribed to a million of them. They're all available-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... but the actual take-up is low.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly.
- JSJay Shetty
Or people don't know what to do or people don't know what's available to them. So what actually helped versus what people thought would help?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
So our Wellbeing Research Centre is quite well known now in the HR space for pushing a basic but very important argument. A lot of the benefits and programs that you're referring to are individual options, um, mindfulness apps, you name it, and those are good, and by all means, continue them. But you're right, there's typically a pickup problem, so a selection bias in who actually uses them, and typically it's people who don't need them the most who actually, uh, uh, use them, and people who would benefit a lot from them are not using them. And so we find that, that there's mixed evidence on those sort of more individualistic interventions. And then, um, others like yoga and others are fantastic, but you cannot yoga your way out of more structural issues. So if you're underpaying people, offering yoga class is not gonna help them. If there's bullying in the, i-i-in a company, you're not gonna yoga your way out of that. If the CEO is not setting the right tone or, or, or, or a culture that generally cares about people, it's like, it's not yoga or mindfulness apps that's gonna... If there's just too much work and you're stressing people out f- because of overwork, don't ask them to then also [laughs] in the office do yoga on top of it while they're stressed out, and then it's ways of working. And so we've made a lot of claims and evidence, uh, and research on the fact that we've got to look a bit more broadly. And so then int- and then we've even done a huge systematic literature review around what interventions actually work the best by driver. So how to generate more sense of belonging, how to improve, uh, the impact of people feeling they're being paid fairly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a lot there. We've got a whole playbook that we've put out where we summarize and highlight a- about five or six studies for each driver of workplace wellbeing out of about 4,000 p- papers that we've analyzed and rank ordered. We've called it, um, The Playbook, uh, The Interventions Playbook, and it's published by the World Wellbeing Movement in partnership with Indeed. And so that's out there at no charge, free, free to use for everybody.But I think you're gonna be asking me, "So what actually works? Like, give me e-examples." And here I'm gonna... I, I wanna give you one, 'cause as an economist, I do feel obliged, incentives do matter. So, um, how much you pay people, uh, does matter, especially at the bottom of the pay scale. And so pay people a living wage, for crying out loud, and particularly so in context refer- uh, context-dependent places like Los Angeles or New York, where the cost of living is so high. But, and here this is really important, it's not just how much you pay people, it's also how you pay people that can make a difference in terms of how they're made to feel while at work, which is the definition of workplace wellbeing. And so if you look at just, um... We've compared-- Actually, colleagues of mine, Andrew Clark and others, have looked at similar pay packages overall on an annual basis, but those that would just be straightforward salaries versus those that are a combination of salary plus variable pay, that is, for example, a group bonus or eq- joint equity schemes where you become sort of, however small it might be, like co-owner of the company and the organization. And it helps raise the purpose, um, it helps raise a number of elements around how you feel engaged and a sense of agency and whether the organization cares about you as a person. And if you're a part, however small, owner of the organization, that's a real change in the way you view it, the organization to begin with. Then it no longer becomes a transactional thing, but much more one where we're all in the same boat, and we are not just a stakeholder, we're also a shareholder.
- JSJay Shetty
Mm-hmm.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Um, and that's really, really quite critical. So the first thing to really urge people is think beyond just the individual. If, if there's a workplace wellbeing problem in your organization, don't put the responsibility all on the individual. It's probably, if not more than half of the [chuckles] variance in workplace wellbeing, is probably due to the environment of the organization, and work on that. And that could range from pay to setting a culture of belonging, and
- 50:41 – 54:34
The Biggest Lie We Believe About Work
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
so on and so forth. And there's ample evidence for types of interventions that work on each front.
- JSJay Shetty
Mm. I love that, and I'm so glad that that's available.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah.
- JSJay Shetty
We should link to that in the resources-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Absolutely
- JSJay Shetty
... as well.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Thanks.
- JSJay Shetty
'Cause it'd be great for people to dive into that.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Absolutely.
- JSJay Shetty
For sure.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And it, and it's easy, accessible. It's just like, um, bullet points, suggestions, and a lot of these interventions will have already, already been-- Some of them you'll have in your workplace already. Some might inspire to do better, and so it's, it's a real, a real resource.
- JSJay Shetty
I wanted to ask you a question about page 124 of your book, figure 6.2. You talk about the determinants of work wellbeing-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah
- JSJay Shetty
... what people think versus reality. Walk us through what we think makes a workplace have better wellbeing versus what actually makes a difference.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
This is one of the big insights, uh, generally in the study of workplace wellbeing, but also coming through the big crowdsource study with Indeed, where we've got over twenty-five million workers, two hundred and fifty million data points by now and counting, where we've looked at how people feel at work and why they feel the way they do at work. And we've done a little cute test, which is we, um, we ran a survey where we asked people, "So what do you think makes you happy at work? What drives your workplace wellbeing?" And what comes through is pay and flexibility is what people would put on top in terms of what they think makes them happy at work. But when you actually run the analysis of what actually explains differences in job satisfaction, for example, work wellbeing more generally, you find that people hugely underestimated the social elements, a sense of belonging, feeling like you're being treated, uh, uh, as a person in the organization, having friends at work. In the Gallup Engagement Survey, there's an item called, "Do you have a best friend at work?" People laugh at it when they have to answer it. The reality is, is the answer to that question is most predictive of job satisfaction-
- JSJay Shetty
Wow
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
... more than anything else.
- JSJay Shetty
Do you have a best friend at work?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly. [chuckles]
- JSJay Shetty
That's so good.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
It is. It absolutely is. And so we've now picked up in the Indeed data, in the Gallup Engagement Survey data, but other more academic data sets, people always and consistently underestimate the importance of our social capital in the workspace as the thing that is actually most... All things matter, but some things matter more than others, and it's our social capital in the workplace that is way more predictive of how we end up feeling generally at work compared to other things. Now, that's not to say that pay doesn't matter or flexibility don't matter. In fact, it's sort of more like half of, middle of the pack in terms of the relative importance in driving workplace wellbeing. But people underestimate feeling like they belong, having friends at work, and feeling like the company cares about them as a person, and I think that's really important. In the HR space, there's an old saying, "People don't quit their jobs, they leave their bosses."
- JSJay Shetty
Mm-hmm.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Or you could reframe that as they don't leave their jobs, they quit their teams, and that's true. Think about it. For whomever's listening, think about this yourself. When would you make the decision to leave the company? When are, when are you sick and tired and no longer st-sticking it out is when you're not getting along with people, when your line manager is not treating you like a human being, when you no longer have friends at work. That's when you actually start making the move to start thinking about going somewhere else, more so than when the job is not that interesting to you anymore or you feel like pay isn't all that fair, but you can sort of live with it. It's the social elements that trigger, uh, people's workplace wellbeing and their behaviors more than anything else.
- JSJay Shetty
There's two things there that stood out to me. One is when you realize that you need a best friend at work-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... one of the biggest challenges I find is versus sta- uh, you said flexibility-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... and money, which are both important, as you said.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah.
- JSJay Shetty
Flexibility means working from home. Friendship generally means being in person.
- 54:34 – 58:16
Remote Work Is Breaking Something We Didn’t Expect
- JSJay Shetty
Do you believe that companies and people should want to be in person, or the flexibility of being at home is actually outweighing having a best friend at work?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
That's a classic ec-economic answer, on the one hand, on the other hand. But Jay, I feel very strongly and passionately about precisely this question, and I came out very strongly-At the start of COVID, which was March 2020 when it really hit, uh, and the lockdown started, two, three months in, so we're talking mid-2020, the likes of Facebook and Twitter were saying, "Brilliant. People are working from home. We don't see a drop in productivity. That's the end of the office. Everybody can work remotely." And I came out strongly in the, the UK newspapers, uh, coming out saying, "Careful, careful." Yes, there's short-term benefits of the fully remote working from home, uh, approach. Um, no commute, no cost of commute, more flexibility. You can take care of X, Y, Z, and, and you can sort of work-life balance and job craft a bit more. But I said, "Careful, careful what you wish for, because your social capital and your intellectual capital are capitals. They need inflows because there's outflows all the time, so you need to restock that stock of, um, so a capital stock of intellectual and social capital." And so people were relying on the existing social intellectual capital they had, but essentially that got undermined. And about six months in or a year into the pandemic, these calls for fully working remotely were starting to be dialed back, and talk came around hybrid working. And truth be told, we owe a lot of this work, by the way, to, to, um, uh, Nick Bloom at Stanford, a colleague in the economics department who's done most research on this. It's now clear that we can have the best of both worlds. We need to have a hybrid way of working where people can work part-time at home, part-time in the office. Sa- It's looking like the best is three days office, two days home, but we need to do this cleverly. It needs to be a coordinated/smart hybrid. The worst thing that can happen, Jay, is half of your team in on Monday, Tuesday, and the other half on Thursday, Friday, 'cause you're not building that social capital and that sense of belonging that we know is so important. Same thing for intellectual capital. You need to be having these sort of water cooler moments. There's no point coming into the office if it's to be doing emails, report writing, or Zoom calls again. And so what does this mean? It means that we need to have conversations within teams or units. Okay, are we gonna coordinate on being in mostly the beginning of the week or midweek or the end of the week? And what kind of tasks? So we need to think throughout the week, what are our tasks? What are the synchronous and the asynchronous tasks? What do we do, what, what do we do together? What do we do solo? And to separate the tasks and to do the asynchronous tasks, email writing, report writing, Zoom calls at home, and whereas it's the client meetings, the engagements, the brainstorming sessions, the interviews, that happens together. And so I think if we can nail hybrid working, then we'll have the best of both worlds. We'll see improvements in productivity and improvements in wellbeing.
- JSJay Shetty
I agree with that. We've done that too, where we have flexibility in the sense ... I mean, um, ours is easy. When I'm traveling, the team works from home. When I'm in LA, the team is in the office, and that works exceptionally well for us because we get enough together community time, and the team has enough time to be productive at home or have flexibility. And, and I couldn't imagine-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... being on a Zoom call every day with my whole team. Like, I just couldn't imagine it. And the amount of social capital you lose, the connection, the, the best friend-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
The belonging
- JSJay Shetty
... at work. That idea is ... Some of these ideas that you've shared today, the, the eating meals,
- 58:16 – 1:00:13
Does Your Work Follow You Home?
- JSJay Shetty
you know, taking that from 50% up to 75% of our meals every week to be with people. The big advice right now of having a best friend at work. I think for so long we've started to think work is work and life is life, and I always like to remind people, you spend at least-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah
- JSJay Shetty
... eight to nine hours a day at work. You're basically saying that a third of your life, it doesn't matter if I don't feel good there.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
No. And how satisfied we are with our job feeds into how satisfied we are with our lives. So job satisfaction is a huge predictor of, you've guessed it, life satisfaction. You don't check into the office leaving your home life behind, and you don't check out of the office leaving your work life behind, and so the two are integrally connected. That puts a lot of responsibility on the organization, because how you treat people, their workplace wellbeing feeds into the larger society, and there's a degree of separation of even three people away will have been touched by how you were made to feel coming back from the office.
- JSJay Shetty
Mm-hmm.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
There's amazing studies by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. Their book Connected is a real, real recommendation, where they essentially show that the way you drive home from the office, the, the mood that you're in-
- JSJay Shetty
No
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
... will impact your wife, your children, and they'll pick up sentiment changes with the fr- school friends of your children. So in other words, three degrees of separation out will be impacted indirectly. So people you don't even know, w- their wellbeing will be marginally impacted by how, about how you're feeling. So if you're driving home from work in a bad mood because bullying, for example, in the office, that's impacting not just the person who gets bullied, the victim. It impacts three degrees of separation out. So when we're ... Actually goes back to the fact that if only about a quarter of people actually feel good at work, there's so much room for improvement within the workplace, but this feeds into our societies and
- 1:00:13 – 1:00:41
The Signs You’re in a Toxic Workplace
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
our communities big time.
- JSJay Shetty
Did you find anything about what the factors were around a toxic work culture or a toxic workplace? You've mentioned bullying a few times, but did you, have you done any research on that?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Not specifically in, in toxic workplaces as, as such. What we have done, obviously, it's, it's the reversal, like all the drivers of workplace wellbeing then go into reverse. People are stressed out, not satisfied with their job, find little purpose and meaning in the work they do.
- 1:00:41 – 1:04:25
Why Your Work Feels Meaningless (And How to Change It)
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
If ... And are not happy day to day, if there's no belonging, if there's no flexibility, and there's no room for job crafting, if they're poorly paid, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
- JSJay Shetty
Is it possible to find meaning and purpose in a job that is purely functional and repetitive?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
You're raising a good questionBecause we started by saying, "God, there's so much room for improvement here." But what's the upper limits? Is what the, is what you're really after is like, can we make everybody happy at work all the time? Can we go to 100% of people saying four or five out of five in terms of, say, job satisfaction? I think yes and no. [laughs] I think yes, we can do... Frankly, we can do a lot better still, and the way we know this is, thanks to the, the large crowd source data with Indeed, we know that even in tough industries, in tough areas of the US, for example, in companies that are not necessarily known to be good workplaces, we'll still find examples of warehouses, units where people feel good. E- even within industries that are difficult, say hamburger industry, flipping burgers, selling them, you'll find big differences. And no naming and shaming, but applauding our friends at In-N-Out Burger, and I know we're in, in Los Angeles, so that's, that, that's a real shout-out.
- JSJay Shetty
[laughs]
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And so they're doing the same job as other hamburger chains, and somehow, and we've put in the book, um, somehow workers at In-N-Out are reporting about 20% higher workplace wellbeing than in other hamburger joints.
- JSJay Shetty
No way. That's cool.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And, and it shows. It shows in the way they connect to people, the smiles on their faces, et cetera. So it is possible. So we can do a lot better than we're currently doing. Now, back to the question at hand. Can we raise everybody to, like, 100% all the time? Your original question was a bit more profound, is like can we raise levels of purpose and meaning? Can we... And there I think it's a, that's a higher bar to clear. In-N-Out does an amazing job at raising workplace wellbeing in a job that is difficult, uh, otherwise. So they connect with clients, there's camaraderie between workers, et cetera. They do a whole thing, a whole host of things right. But when, when you say actual high purpose and meaning, I think of the notion of being in flow, so consumed and within the work you're doing, you're losing track of time, and you don't even think about being happy or not. You're sort of obsessed with what you're doing. And so the kindest... People like you and me, or musicians or mathematicians get into a state of flow, but I think that's not a given for everybody, and we're very fortunate to have found our niche where we can unleash our talents and be in a state of flow because we're so engaged in, in the significance of what we're doing, and we find it purposeful and meaningful, that we think about nothing else and the whole notion of work and life become... Yeah. That I think is not realistic-
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
... for the majority or the vast majority of people.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah. And I really appreciate your In-N-Out example because that, that's great. That... And also I've, I've always loved Amy Wrzesniewski's study from Yale of the hospital cleaners and how half of them saw themselves as cleaners and the others saw themselves as healers because of job crafting.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly.
- JSJay Shetty
That they really believed that a clean hospital was integral to the healing journey of the patient. So, so I think you are right. It is possible. Of course, flow state and everything else, you know, there's certain careers and, and maybe not everyone wants that, needs that, is searching for that.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly.
- JSJay Shetty
But it is good to know that we can do so much better.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
We can.
- JSJay Shetty
And there are jobs that externally seem repetitive and functional, and yet there are places that have made them enjoyable. Because I think a lot of people think, "Oh yeah, well, I'm an X and I don't need my job to be meaningful. It will never be meaningful." And the truth is, it'll
- 1:04:25 – 1:07:00
The Truth About Work-Life Balance
- JSJay Shetty
be better for your health-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Mm-hmm
- JSJay Shetty
... if it is. Like, it'll be better for your wellbeing-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Absolutely
- JSJay Shetty
... if you feel that work is a little bit meaningful-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly
- JSJay Shetty
... even if you're not in flow.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly.
- JSJay Shetty
That's the goal.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Absolutely.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Couldn't agree more.
- JSJay Shetty
I wanted to ask you about what work-life balance actually is because I think lots of the time we think when we hear the word work-life balance, the word balance in and of itself makes us feel equal, and we all spend at least five days at work and only have two days off a week. So it's already not equal. So-
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
That with the evenings, the work-
- JSJay Shetty
And the evenings, yeah.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
[laughs] The workday evenings.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
This, you're asking a tough question, and I know lots of pe- there's people out there who will vehemently go after, "Oh, work-life balance, overrated," what have you. Jeff Bezos, for example, Amazon, I, I remember seeing a clip of him saying, "Oh, work-life balance, if you're in a state of flow at work, it will feed positively into life, and it should all sort of flow over into one another." And I agree with him in a sense for entrepreneurs like him, like you, like me, really loving what I'm doing with that, the two flow into one another. But I think for the vast majority, reflecting to the discussion we just had, it is a bit more transactional, and we do have to respect work-life balance, and we cannot expect as leaders, as managers, as entrepreneurs, that everybody, the staff, the team members, are necessarily looking to be fully engaged all day, all night, weekends included, uh, engaged with work. Um, and, and I think we gotta be honest about this, and we cannot expect the same of, of everybody. And so I, I, I actually feel strongly that most people do care a lot about work-life balance and being able to check out and not have to think about work, like you and I will typically do after, say, 5:00 or 6:00 PM. Um, and I think we gotta respect that.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah. I think we have to respect that an employee should never have to work as hard as the entrepreneur.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Exactly.
- JSJay Shetty
And that the member of staff will never have to be as strategic as the founder. It just isn't fair.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah.
- JSJay Shetty
It doesn't work.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
No. And yet founders or senior leaders expect no less of their team.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And as we referred to earlier, they themselves have given up on a number or trade all, traded off a whole host of things, possibly their own health, mis- mental and physical, to be where they are and taking the risk that they are taking, uh, as entrepreneurs or senior leaders. And so it's hard for them to raise the empathy to realize that a majority of people are not CEOs and are not meant to be CEOs. And I think,
- 1:07:00 – 1:08:45
What Actually Matters at the End of the Day
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
again, we, we have to respect that and have the, the wisdom to take a bit of distance and out of our own mental frames and understand that we're all a bit different.
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah, and it's been so illuminating talking to you. I'm wondering, what have I not asked you that you wish I had?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Well, maybe one last thing on workplace wellbeing.Sadly, I've s- George and I have spent, and teams, have spent a lot of time developing out the business case, and I think that's obviously what the book then ultimately works its way towards, is giving the best evidence to date on how we feel at work matters for how you perform at work, whether you stay at work, and whether the workplace will attract talent in the first place. And those are all the benefits of workplace wellbeing. But if you then actually look at the organization level, and you look at whatever it might cost organizations to raise wellbeing or do the right thing... And by the way, some of these interventions don't cost the earth at all. Being a good boss, opening up about mental health-
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
... culture and, and sense of belonging, and, and, and developing a care and community doesn't need to cost anything. It's about setting the right example and the, the s- the right leadership. Whatever companies can do to improve workplace wellbeing, it pays. And so we've then shown leveraging the Indeed crowdsourced data for all the US-listed companies on the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange, that we link their workplace wellbeing score, 'cause we have data from behind the back of their CHROs. We've, we- we've pulsed and crowdsourced 25 million workers around the US. And so we know that the levels of workplace wellbeing in these companies correlate and predict very strongly their quarterly financials. And if you were to invest solely based on workplace wellbeing, you'd find that you outperform the S&P 500, uh, and the NASDAQ, and so on and so forth. We've now been doing
- 1:08:45 – 1:13:41
Jan on Final Five
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
this since 2020. And so that's obviously, that's gotten the attention of the, the business world, and that's the business case right there for you.
- JSJay Shetty
I love it. Jan, uh, thank you so much. We end every On Purpose episode with a Final Five. Each question has to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Okay.
- JSJay Shetty
So Jan, these are your Final Five. The first question is, what is the best wellbeing advice you've ever heard or received?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
If you want to move from ill being to wellbeing, change focus from I to we.
- JSJay Shetty
Hmm. I like that. That's great.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Literally, and empirically.
- JSJay Shetty
That's great. Uh, question number two: what's the worst wellbeing advice you've ever heard or received?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
I'm gonna upset some of my colleagues. Flow. I think it's, it's, it's only a few people who will actually achieve the state of flow.
- JSJay Shetty
Mm.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
And I find it annoying and disrespectful of the majority of people to think that that is to be aspired to, whereas they may not wish it and will never achieve it.
- JSJay Shetty
Question number three: if you were speaking to a room of 100 CEOs and leaders right now, what would be your number one piece of advice for them?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Read Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters, please. Seriously.
- JSJay Shetty
Question number four: if you were speaking to a group of employees, team members, standing in front of you right now, what would be your advice to them?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
[laughs] Slam Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters on your CEO's desk today. [laughs]
- JSJay Shetty
[laughs] Anonymously.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
[laughs]
- JSJay Shetty
Yeah. Fifth and final question, we ask this to every guest who's ever been on the show: if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
If there's a law that I would love to really implement, which I would think have short-term and positive consequences immediately, a four-day workweek. It's been since Henry Ford, almost 100 years ago, that we've made the weekend from, uh, into two days, from a Sunday to also include a Saturday. It's high time to try and think about giving us off another half a day or a day, but we would have to do it all together. The entire US or the entire world would have to come together and coordinate on this. And doing so will make the future of work more exciting, uh, for m- for youngsters, to know that, um, the gains of productivity will also be given back in time.
- JSJay Shetty
So you're saying just 100 years ago we were working six-day weeks?
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Yeah. So it's Henry Ford who realized that caring for their people, for his employees, and their health, and their wellbeing, meant that he couldn't keep squeezing them six days a week, and so he's the one... So obviously Sunday was Sunday because of religious reasons, and even that was a hard-fought fight. And then so the Saturday came up. In fact, uh, the Saturday was Henry Ford. But you know, for example, my grandparents, uh, still had to work the Saturday mornings, and so it's only in the 1950s that, that we extended the weekend to not just be the Sunday and a Saturday afternoon, but also the Saturday morning included. But we're talking the 1930s, '40s, '50s when we got the weekend, and yet we've become five times more productive in the century that followed, and yet we're still working the old-fashioned five-day workweek. But our brains are still the old monkey brains, or the hunter-gatherer brains I should say, and yet they're having to process so much more. So people are surprised then that we're having all these burnouts, and people are unhappy and stressed out. And so I think I've lost faith in the fact that these gains in productivity get redistributed to people, 'cause most of the gains in productivity go to shareholders and, and the happy few. I've now started to think that one way we can make the future of work more exciting and have the gains of productivity redistributed in terms not just of trying to give back money and redistribute, but also give back time-
- JSJay Shetty
Mm-hmm
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
... which ultimately is our most precious commodity. And so I do think it's high time, frankly, to start thinking about a shorter workweek. And if we do that, then it will make the future of work less anxious, less wor- worrisome for, um, for youth today.
- JSJay Shetty
Really great answer. Everyone, the book is called Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. Jan, honestly, this has been such an illuminating conversation. I find it so insightful to sit and talk to you about these things. I love the way you think about them, and I'm so glad you're doing this work. It's massively needed, and I know I'll be giving this to every leader I know for sure. Uh, so thank you so much for coming all the way from Oxford to be here with us, and, uh, I'm really grateful for you and your work. Thank you so much.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Thank you, Jay. And thank you for everything you do disseminating your own nuggets of wisdom and, and help spread those of others.
- JSJay Shetty
Thank you.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
Thank you.
- JSJay Shetty
If you loved this episode, you'll love my conversation with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky on how to tap into your creative potential and the number one thing people get wrong about success.
- JNJan-Emmanuel De Neve
The best people in your life will be people who see potential in you that you didn't see in yourself. And I often wonder-
Episode duration: 1:13:41
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