Documents Ward, George W. 4 results

"Happiness is typically defined by how people experience and evaluate their lives as a whole. Since the majority of people spend much of their lives at work, it is critically important to gain a solid understanding of the role that employment and the workplace play in shaping happiness for individuals and communities around the world. In this paper, we focus largely on the role of work and employment in shaping people's happiness, and investigate how employment status, job type, and workplace characteristics relate to measures of subjective wellbeing."

"Are individuals more sensitive to losses than gains in terms of economic growth? Using subjective well-being data, we observe an asymmetry in the way positive and negative economic growth are experienced. We find that measures of life satisfaction and affect are more than twice as sensitive to negative economic growth as compared to positive growth. We use Gallup World Poll data from over 150 countries, BRFSS data on 2.5 million US respondents, and Eurobarometer data that cover multiple business cycles over four decades. This research provides a new perspective on the welfare cost of business cycles and has implications for growth policy and our understanding of the long-run relationship between GDP and subjective well-being."

"Understanding the key determinants of people's life satisfaction will suggest policies for how best to reduce misery and promote wellbeing. This paper provides evidence from survey data on USA, Australia, Britain and Indonesia, which indicate that the things that matter most are people's social relationships and their mental and physical health. These adult factors affecting happiness are influenced in turn by the pattern of child development: the best predictor of an adult's life satisfaction is their emotional health as a child. These results call for a new focus for public policy – not “wealth-creation” but “wellbeing-creation”."

"Does higher employee wellbeing lead to higher productivity, and, ultimately, to tangible benefits to the bottom line of businesses? We survey the evidence and study this question in a meta-analysis of 339 independent research studies, including the wellbeing of 1,882,131 employees and the performance of 82,248 business units, originating from 230 independent organisations across 49 industries in the Gallup client database. We find a significant, strong positive correlation between employees' satisfaction with their company and employee productivity and customer loyalty, and a strong negative correlation with staff turnover. Ultimately, higher wellbeing at work is positively correlated with more business-unit level profitability. "