How do we elevate human happiness?
Today, many future thinkers are focused on this question. At the state level we see initiatives such as Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness, which includes an index used to measure the collective happiness of the population; last year New Zealand introduced its “Wellbeing Budget,” which included billions earmarked for tackling mental health, poverty and family violence; while each year the UN launches its World Happiness Report, which ranks the citizens of 156 countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be and looks at the contributing factors to what constitutes happiness.
But what about the world of work? After all, we spend one third of our lives at our jobs, so how we feel there can have a major impact on our sense of well-being. And in this current climate of uncertainty, psychological safety, resilience and empathy are needed more than ever. Yes, the usual categories like pay, work-life balance and flexibility all contribute to our well-being, but do they really capture everything we mean when we think about what really drives happiness and engagement across companies?
Here at Indeed we asked ourselves a question: What if we started going beyond the traditional reviews and ratings to capture the other factors that add up to a sense of workplace well-being? What if we started to ask people about how they feel and not just about the workplace tangibles such as compensation and benefits? The results could change how people choose jobs and how employers build workplace cultures — increasing everyone’s ability to thrive in the workplace.
And so we did just that. Working with experts on happiness from the UN, Oxford University and the University of California, we have rethought how Indeed captures information on our Company Pages, our global database of over 200M company reviews and ratings. With the insights Indeed is able to collect here we aim to create the largest study of workplace happiness ever — and with 1.5 million completed reviews already in our database, we are only just getting started.
Today, we launched the Indeed Work Happiness Score in recognition of the UN’s International Day of Happiness coming up on March 20. This will make it easier for job seekers to find work environments where they will be happiest — and will give employers insights into what their employees’ key drivers of happiness are so they can improve their employee experience and create happier organizations. Let’s take a closer look at what we’re doing.
62% of people say they are happy at work — but 96% of those who aren’t believe they can be
First, a simple question: Why happiness?
“Happiness matters,” says Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Vice Chair of Psychology at University of California, Riverside, and a world expert on happiness (and one of the experts helping us with this project). “My research has shown that happiness is a cause of success: happier people receive more positive reviews at work, are more productive and more creative, earn higher incomes, and are less likely to burn out…