Wellbeing Research Centre

Happy employees 🤝 Happy shareholders As well as being the morally right thing to do, improving the #wellbeing of employees leads to increased firm value, return on assets and profits. The Work Wellbeing 100, made up of the top-performing publicly-listed US companies as per crowdsourced responses to Indeed’s Work Wellbeing Score survey, outperformed the S&P 500, Russell 3000 Index and Nasdaq over the last three years.

⏮️ We round out our look back at the Wellbeing Research Centre’s research highlights of 2024 with this impactful study led by Dr George Ward. Researchers found that negative affect – not only ‘high-activation’ negative emotions such as anger and anxiety, but also ‘low-activation’ emotions such as depression and sadness – significantly predicted populist outcomes in the case of multiple international elections, including Donald Trump’s first run to the White House in 2016. Read more 👉 https://lnkd.in/ewKXHD9U

⏮️ Back in April, we highlighted some key areas which show promise as drivers of teacher #wellbeing. Read more in Wellbeing for Schoolteachers, published alongside the International Baccalaureate. Explore 👉 https://lnkd.in/eU7qzGAU

⏮️ No look back on the past year would be complete without celebrating the impact of World Happiness Report 2024 – the first to be published from the University of Oxford, in collaboration with our partners Gallup and the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. This year’s report examines themes of #wellbeing across and among various age groups: our Wellbeing Research Centre team were honoured to contribute a chapter focusing on global trends among children and young people. Read more in Ch3 of #WHR2024 👉 https://lnkd.in/eDmPpZXq

All of us at the Wellbeing Research Centre are saddened to hear of the passing of Richard ‘Dick’ Easterlin. Dick was a pioneer of happiness economics, and laid the foundations for every future generation of #wellbeing economists. His contributions to our field will live on.

⏮️ Next up in our review of our researchers’ landmark work in 2024, it’s a look back at ... looking back. A study of the UK population’s attitudes towards COVID-19 vaccines, co-authored by Dr Alberto Prati, revealed how psychological factors can distort opinions about scientific facts. The findings show that people tend to display retrospective optimism, a concept also uncovered in a previous Wellbeing Research Centre study focusing on happiness recall. Read more 👉 https://lnkd.in/e5TNnWQH

Thanks to Financial Times for featuring our research showing that *workplace wellbeing* is a leading indicator of stock market performance. And thanks to Indeed for making it possible to study this at a scale never seen before 🙌 For the FT article 👉 https://lnkd.in/ey5wYPyC For the research paper 👉 https://lnkd.in/eanapaFG For how to best improve workplace wellbeing 👉 https://lnkd.in/eQ9dnRqh To pre-order the book that has it all 😄 👉 https://lnkd.in/e3tmdjMY Wonderful also to see many others leading in this field get the attention they deserve 👏 Alison Unsted (MindForward Alliance) and Elizabeth Hampson (Deloitte) FYI Diana Han, MD, Jay Brewer, Andrew Gibbons, Anna Borg, Debarshi B., Loren I. Shuster, Lauren von Stackelberg, Alexi Robichaux, Eduardo Medina

⏮️ Every day this week, we’ll highlight a landmark study published by our researchers in 2024. Let’s kick off with this *much-shared* paper by Dr William Fleming, published in the Industrial Relations Journal, which found no evidence of improved workplace #wellbeing following individual-level mental health interventions… Read more 👉 https://lnkd.in/eBKYVTpf

So pleased to see our Wellbeing Research Centre given the responsibility of forming a United Nations task force (reporting to the UN Expert Group on Well-being Measurement) on policy issues in the measurement of subjective #wellbeing. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eFTTQU_A We were joined at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford last week by a team from the Office for National Statistics to discuss the UK’s wellbeing measurement landscape and the findings of our World Wellbeing Movement UK Wellbeing Report, before inviting expertise from a global group of wellbeing scientists, statisticians, and policymakers. Many thanks to all who have engaged so far – we hope this can serve as another watershed moment in pursuit of a world #beyondGDP.

🧑🏫 Teacher performance is a key contributor to the overall health of a school community – and yet the #wellbeing of teachers has traditionally been undervalued. Wellbeing Research Centre researchers Dr Wanying Zhou and Leoni Boyle recently featured on the School of Wellbeing podcast to discuss the importance of wellbeing among schoolteachers. Listen now 👉 https://lnkd.in/e5FKuGpm