The Importance of Causal Evidence in Global Impact Performance

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There's a sort of chicken and the egg problem. Is it, are you performing better because you feel better, or are you feeling better because you've performed better? In this study with BT, we've been able to disentangle the errors going in the other direction. So that is moving from correlational to causal. And then they're from lab to field. The field evidence is stronger because we're working with actual people in the field,. Whereas there has been causal evidence before, we're just in the labs.

In this episode of the ESG Insider podcast, we’re exploring the business case for happiness — specifically, how companies can measure and manage employee wellbeing.

We speak to Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Professor of Behavioural Science and Economics at Saïd Business School and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford. He is also Director of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre, and co-editor of the World Happiness Report. And he’s a co-founder of the World Wellbeing Movement, a coalition of stakeholders from business, civil society and academia aiming to put wellbeing at the heart of decision-making.

Jan talks to us about his research, including a new study making headlines that explores workplace wellbeing and firm performance. He explains that measuring worker wellbeing can be challenging because it involves the way people feel, and senior leaders are often hesitant to take action on subjective indicators.

"What's so nice about the studies we've done is that we showed these subjective indicators — how people feel at work — that there's real objective consequences or objective correlations to very highly objective data, including the financial performance of companies,” Jan tells us.

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