How companies can improve workplace wellbeing in the Intelligent Age – and why it matters

The world of work for many people in 2025 "isn't necessarily a positive place," says Jan-Emmanuel De Neve.

Five years after the COVID pandemic increased the focus on mental health and wellbeing at work, "the pendulum is swinging back" to a pre-COVID era, the Oxford Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science believes, with a shift away from the human case for investing in workplace wellbeing.

The McKinsey Health Institute finds investing in employee wellbeing could boost the global economy by $11.7 trillion, according to the World Economic Forum's Thriving Workplaces report, which also cites De Neve's research.

The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Health and Healthcare is working with its partners to strengthen both the investment case and evidence base for prioritizing holistic workplace health to improve productivity and the overall health resilience of the global workforce. Through the Healthy Workforces and Chief Health Officers communities, leading organizations are working with De Neve and other researchers to illuminate and harmonize the most critical workplace measurements and metrics.

These efforts are urgently needed. Only a quarter of workers in the US, UK, Canada and beyond are actually happy at work, according to De Neve's research with Indeed, outlined in a new book he has co-written with colleague George Ward, Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance.

But only a quarter of workers in the US, UK, Canada and beyond are actually happy at work, according to De Neve's research with Indeed, outlined in a new book he has co-written with colleague George Ward, Why Workplace Wellbeing Matters: The Science Behind Employee Happiness and Organizational Performance.

"There's a lot of room for improvement. There's also a huge gap between saying and doing from senior managers."

More than 80% of managers surveyed by De Neve and his team agreed that investing in people is good for business. "But only 19% have actions against a strategic priority around investing in people and making that the core of their business."

The book makes the business case for why workplace wellbeing matters for company performance, productivity, retention and recruitment.

"This is really a call to all senior managers that people are their greatest assets and if you take care of people, they'll take care of business."

“We need to rethink how we define success in the workplace,” says Shyam Bishen, Head of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Health and Healthcare.

“For too long, wellbeing has been treated as an option. But the evidence is clear: when organizations put people’s health and wellbeing at the heart of their strategy, everything else improves, from innovation to resilience to business performance. This is a pivotal moment to make workplace health a shared priority across leadership teams, for the sake of employees and the future strength and sustainability of organizations. Good leaders create an environment of wellbeing for their teams.”

April 28 marks World Day for Safety and Health at Work, with a focus on the role of AI and digitalization. The five years since the COVID pandemic has seen the roll-out of generative AI, with platforms such as ChatGPT being increasingly adopted at work. But how do they impact on workplace wellbeing?

Here, in an edited interview, De Neve discusses the drivers and benefits of workplace wellbeing – and how technology could shape the future of work.

"Workplace wellbeing is ultimately how we feel at work and that then drives our actions in terms of staying, being engaged and productive and recommending it to others," says De Neve.

"How we feel at work is captured by experiencing positive emotions: Are you happy at work? Are you not experiencing overly much stress? Are you satisfied with your job and finding purpose and meaning in the work you do? Happiness, stress, job satisfaction, sense of purpose and meaning are outcome indicators. They don't explain why you feel the way you do it, but they capture how people feel while at work or when they think about their job.

"When I speak with senior leaders in HR or CFOs or CEOs, they typically think of workplace wellbeing as a long list of good things from fair compensation to belonging to trust to job satisfaction to engagement. But they don't make a conceptual split between the inputs, what drives how people feel, and an overarching indicator for capturing how people feel in your workplace. That is important and will help pieces of the puzzle fall into place, both in terms of being able to prioritize where to invest limited resources into improving workplace wellbeing and [giving] you a KPI for how your people are actually doing.

"Changes in how people feel at work drive their behaviours. How people feel drives whether they are engaged, productive, whether they recommend the company, or whether they stay at the company. When you properly measure and capture that outcome indicator, you'll see it's predictive of hard, objective outcome indicators, such as retention, employee net promoter scores, customer satisfaction, and the holy grail for a lot of folk, productivity and engagement."

In a very British study in the field, De Neve and Ward studied call centre workers at telecommunications company BT and found a causal link between happiness and productivity.

By integrating weather data into their analyses, they discovered that workers were happier and therefore more productive on sunny days, which led to increased sales.

Then, using crowdsourced data from more than 20 million respondents to Indeed.com's work wellbeing surveys, they created the Work Wellbeing 100 index. This recognizes the 100 companies that score highest among employees across the core indicators of happiness, job satisfaction, purpose and lack of stress.

In the past five years and throughout 2024 (as below), the index has consistently outperformed other stock market indexes.

"What we find is that whatever companies do, however much they invest to effectively raise workplace wellbeing, it pays in terms of gross profits in billions of dollars and profitability ratios as well," says De Neve.

"If you were to invest in those companies with the highest workplace wellbeing, that is a leading indicator to a future stock market performance. That's really exciting.

"How people feel at work is a leading indicator of downstream business consequences because if you make people feel better at work, productivity gains, retention gains, recruitment gains, and these pathways to performance make their way in the short, mid to long run onto the bottom line. And then you get these earnings surprises suddenly in the market, and then the market adopts and adapts and raises the equity value of those companies."

"When you ask people what's most important for workplace wellbeing, senior managers and workers alike will tend to put compensation, flexibility on top," says De Neve.

"But when you actually run the analysis to see what explains most of the variance between people and organizations, it turns out the social elements, and in particular, the sense of belonging to an organization, is at the top.

"What it comes down to is people wanting to feel like the organization cares about them as a person. In focus groups, that's literally the language they start using, in addition to obviously having friends at work and connecting socially.

"How you're made to feel and whether the organization cares about you is crystallized and channeled through the line manager, as well as the larger organization and your co-workers.

"If you have people at work that you respect and admire and like to interact with, that social tissue, that is so much more important to workplace wellbeing than people expect. And that's what makes people stay at the organization more so than the intrinsic nature of the job or the compensation attached to it."

"People appreciate flexibility but working from home and especially fully remotely does then play negatively on a number of other drivers including social connections and a sense of belonging.

"Quite early in COVID, when companies were predicting the end of the office, I was saying 'careful' because in the short run, the flexibility gains are there and you may achieve similar levels of productivity. But in the mid to long run, our social and intellectual capital is a capital stock that gets eroded over time.

"There was no commuting, no cost of commuting, and a bit more flexibility around how we schedule the day, but people were starting to run on fumes in terms of social and intellectual capital. No more water-cooler moments, no more interdisciplinary cross-silo influences to get your thoughts flowing.

"Three days a week, hybrid working is optimal, but it needs a coordinated approach to make sure that we all come into the office on those days so that we benefit from replenishing our social capital.

"We need coordination on the types of tasks we do when we're back in the office. Synchronous tasks that are brainstorming, client-facing meetings, getting inspired, are the ones that are better done together – and will boost wellbeing and productivity."

"The impact of automation and AI in particular on the future of work, or frankly, the present day workplace, is obviously tremendous. But whether it's a good or a bad thing is difficult to foretell and to predict," says De Neve.

"In the book, we take a step back and look at how AI and automation are impacting on all the drivers of workplace wellbeing.

"What we find is that it positively influences things like flexibility and it takes out the less interesting tasks. But where people are worried, and so are we, is it does have the potential, and in some cases, realized potential, of undermining our sense of belonging, our social capital, the positive social ties in the workplace.

"The introduction of digital and AI large language model tools that might take out some of the human interactions is really worrying.

"The discussion around the future of work and wellbeing ought to focus a bit more on the qualitative rather than just the quantitative aspects. Are these tools, which are mostly focused on productivity and efficiency, undermining the quality of work?

"We know that how you feel from one week to another very much influences your productivity that week. And so the efficiency of a productivity enhancing tool that takes out human aspects in the workplace might be counteracted by lower wellbeing throughout the week, which makes people less engaged and less productive.

"We need the HR leaders and people leaders to be involved in the design of these large language models and involve employees in their rollout. It cannot just be the technologists designing productivity enhancing tools and the CEO or CFO signing off on this and then steamrolling it throughout an organization. There the risk is too high, it may backfire and reduce qualitative elements of work that then will undo the hoped-for gains in productivity."

"I think the first thing to note is to not be too focused on the individual. There can be a focus on building up the skillset and resiliency of individuals to try and improve workplace wellbeing. However, most of the drivers of workplace wellbeing are actually structural, environmental, organizational.

"You can throw a mindfulness app at people and you can organize yoga classes and those things are good and important. But if ways of working are so bad or there's bullying or there is just stress from overload of work and burnout, then adding yoga classes onto the agenda while not withdrawing some of the actual workload is just going to compound negatively onto people's stress and will have counterproductive effects.

"At the Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre, we have been very outspoken on this front: you have to work with the individual but you also have to take responsibility as an organization to make sure that you pay people fairly, provide autonomy and voice. That sense of belonging doesn't come through the individual, that comes through the line manager, co-workers, and a culture set from the very top around caring about people as human beings in the organization.

"These things don't necessarily have to cost the earth: a positive culture, psychological safety, feeling that you can actually speak up around mental health. It's about setting positive examples and generating positive managerial attitudes to these kinds of approaches and opening up the psychological safe space to do so.

"The responsibility for leading on this is not just the Chief HR Officer. Culture is set by the CEO or is definitely top down in many instances. I see the future generation of Chief People Officers or Chief HR Officers as bridging all the organizational functions: to work with the CFO to work on compensation; the CEO around culture; to work with line managers and to train them to become the best possible middle managers.

"I think the CHRO role will be changing, which does make the task and the job of HR leaders more difficult because that means they need to become bridge builders and influence other folk in the C-suite to try to do better for people in the workplace."