The workplace – whether we like it or not – plays a central role in our lives.

Our work often provides more than a source of income, but a sense of identity, purpose and community.

Spending a third of our adult lives at work¹ means that our experience of life is fundamentally shaped by our experiences at work.

The question of how to improve those experiences is a complex one: a question that many researchers, us included, spend their own careers dedicated to answering. And all of this research creates an intricate web of interconnected, related, and sometimes even contradictory evidence.

No wonder so many business leaders are unsure of the correct route to take when it comes to improving wellbeing at work.

That’s why, through the World Wellbeing Movement, we set out to create a succinct playbook of science-backed interventions that provide evidence of improvement in one of more of the drivers of workplace wellbeing.

Measure what you treasure

Before organisations even consider implementing one or more of these interventions, it’s critical to establish how your employees are feeling, and why they feel that way.

Drawing on interdisciplinary expertise from the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, we’ve developed a model of workplace wellbeing².

In simple terms, consider an iceberg: the four key measures of workplace wellbeing sit above the waterline for all to see. It’s important you ask these four questions of your employees as a way of ‘taking the temperature’ of the people that make your organisation tick.

But to understand why they feel the way they do about work, we must consider the diverse drivers of workplace wellbeing. To extend our metaphor, there’s a lot more under the surface.

These 12 drivers include factors like management, support, purpose, flexibility, compensation – and a whole lot more². Plus, we are all diverse in our needs, and so the importance of different drivers will vary across individuals, their teams, entire sites, and even whole organisations.

Following the evidence

We set out to bring together every piece of evidence we could find on what improves wellbeing at work. This is no small task. Our strategy employed two main approaches:

1. Bottom-up – We developed a series of search strings (one for each driver) and ran them through high-quality research databases using the University of Oxford’s world-class library system. Each search was carefully developed to capture the complexity and multiplicity of the drivers of wellbeing, and to ensure a depth and breadth of relevant studies.

2. Top-down – We also consulted multiple resources including business publications such as the Harvard Business Review, held discussions with corporate professionals, and drew on our own research experience, to identify interventions currently in use by organisations. We then performed specific searches for studies related to interventions that may not have otherwise been captured from our bottom-up searches.

To focus on the most-up-to-date evidence, we limited our searches to high-quality journal³ articles from the year 2000 onwards.

At this point, it’s important to bear in mind that not all scientific research is created equal. The articles selected contain various research designs including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method studies that range in their rigour from high-quality systematic reviews to lower quality cross-sectional studies.

In total, we reviewed more than 3,000 research studies.

We assessed each study’s reliability, validity, limitations, and risks, and eliminated poor quality and irrelevant studies during a full article review to distil our list down to an average of 50 relevant academic studies per driver.

Connecting science with real-world organisations

Once we had conducted our critical appraisal of the existing evidence, the next step was to translate the insights we found into an easily understood format for business leaders to digest.

What you’ll find on the World Wellbeing Movement website⁴ is the first iteration of this: concise slides signposting to some of what we found to be the most effective interventions, separated by driver.

But we hope to go further still. Our aim is for this ‘menu’ of interventions to serve as a living evidence base: updated, expanded and developed as fresh research is published, and new evidence emerges.

We hope that the Work Wellbeing Playbook can become a resource which business leaders use to critically inform their decision making around issues related to workplace wellbeing both now and in the future.

A wellbeing-first future

Organisations that prioritise wellbeing are more resilient, sustainable, and ultimately perform better⁵.

Business leaders who recognise the importance of workplace wellbeing have a key role to play in implementing strategies for making the world of work a better place.

One common theme which emerged from the research time and time again was the need for all levels of the organisation to buy-in to a wellbeing-first approach.

Surface-level interventions may serve a short-term boost, but without addressing the deep-rooted factors related to why employees feel the way they do about work, the investment in such programmes is often wasted. That’s why business leaders should aim to craft holistic work wellbeing strategies, combining multiple interventions (organisational-level interventions, group-level interventions and individual-level interventions) across multiple drivers of employee wellbeing.

Successful initiatives which genuinely – and sustainably – move the needle on workplace wellbeing require trust, bravery and commitment on the part of business leaders.

It is only then that we can all reap the rewards of making work better.

Sarah Cunningham is the Managing Director of the World Wellbeing Movement, Dr William Fleming is a Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford, and Cherise Regier is a PhD candidate in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford and a Research Associate at the Wellbeing Research Centre.

The World Wellbeing Movement is grateful for the support of its founding members – in particular Indeed – in enabling the creation of this work. Explore the Work Wellbeing Playbook by clicking here.

References and further reading

1. Giattino, C., Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2024, January 15). Working Hours. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours
2. De Neve, J-E., Ward, G. (2023). Measuring Workplace Wellbeing. University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre Working Paper 2303. org/10.5287/ora-exxjkdzym
3. Wolters Kluwer Health. (n.d.). JBI EBP Database Guide. https://ospguides.ovid.com/OSPguides/jbidb.htm
4. Cunningham, S., Fleming, W., Regier, C., Kaats, M., & De Neve, J. (2024) Work Wellbeing Playbook: A Systematic Review of Evidence-Based Interventions to Improve Employee Wellbeing. World Wellbeing Movement. https://worldwellbeingmovement.org/playbook
5. De Neve, J-E., Kaats, M., Ward, G. (2023). Workplace Wellbeing and Firm Performance. University of Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre Working Paper 2304. org/10.5287/ora-bpkbjayvk

Header image: World Wellbeing Movement