On Aon’s Better Being Series: Measuring Wellbeing

Rachel Fellowes:
Hello and welcome to Better Being with me, Rachel Fellowes. I'm the Chief Wellbeing Officer here at Aon, and I'm passionate about resilience in the workplace and its link with performance and wellbeing. Today, around 30 percent of employees globally identify themselves as resilient. This has a huge impact on mental health, productivity, agility and our sense of belonging. In this series, I discuss what could be done about this issue with thought leaders and subject matter experts and academics to look at the actions we can take to build and support resiliency at the individual team and organizational level in the modern workplace. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about data and why measuring wellbeing in organizations is so important if we genuinely want to prove it. My guest today describes numbers as the language of business and is a passionate advocate of all things metrics in the pursuit of happiness at work. So I'm delighted to welcome Nic Marks, who I'm going to absolutely indulge with quite a long introduction because I couldn't justify taking any of it out.

Nic is the CEO and founder of Friday Pulse, and a self-professed happiness expert who not only has a TED Talk with over two and a half million views under his belt, he's also built a phenomenal career that I've heard of for decades, I dare to say, around measuring wellbeing. Having read maths and decision making at Cambridge University, he went on to found the Center for Wellbeing at the New Economics Foundation in the UK. His work there has included a project for the British Government on measuring population wellbeing, as well as the development of the Happy Planet Index, which is a subject of his hugely popular TED Talk, and he also has a new book coming out. Nic, you are known as a statistician with a soul, and I couldn't be happier to welcome you to the show, and I appreciate I'm giving you a long introduction, but it'd be great to hear a little bit more about your story and also what led you to be so interested in all things happiness and wellbeing.

Nic Marks:
Thanks very much, Rachel, for a lovely introduction. I'm a statistician by trade, but my mother was a family therapist and so I also studied as a therapist when I was young and I think in the end, my work on measuring happiness becomes like a merging of the two things. I mean, I'd love to say it was all planned. It's kind of random. You do things that interest you or that you've got an opportunity to do, and the world takes you places. I didn't expect to work in a think tank. I just got challenged by the director of the think tank to do something about wellbeing and he said, "Drive some meaning underneath it," because it was very early days in 2001, and I said, "Well, I want to measure it." He said, "Great," and that's really how the project started, and it became unexpectedly successful.

I think by measuring wellbeing and happiness, it grounds it in some ways and makes it more easy certainly for decision makers to relate to, and that's really where my work's taken me really. How do you help people make better decisions that can lead to better outcomes for people?

Rachel Fellowes:
Sounds absolutely awesome. I'm going to be hopefully, usefully pedantic just as the listeners are trying to think about, oh gosh, Nic, right, you've talked about happiness and wellbeing. Rachel's talking about wellbeing, even her title is chief wellbeing officer. Is there a right or wrong? What's the difference here? Does language matter? Maybe we can go into that a little bit more.

Nic Marks:
I think language does matter. When I was working in public policy, we definitely mainly branded things as wellbeing, and there was a strategic reason for that. There was a local government act in 2000 in the UK that was called the Act of Wellbeing, Local Wellbeing, and so we wanted to do work around that, but I drifted into happiness because people relate to it more. Actually, if you say to someone, "How's your wellbeing? They struggle to answer you. Or you say how happy they are, it's very easy to relate to, so when I'm facing public, I very much talk happiness. Policymakers, I tend to talk about wellbeing, but happiness is kind of a little bit more engaging as a word. It's more fun, more vibrant, it's got more energy to it, so I've sort of moved more and more into the work using the word happiness over the years. I mean, my original title for the Happy Planet Index was Sustainable Wellbeing Index. I don't think anyone would've cared about it much. It sounds very boring, whereas Happy Planet suddenly sounds fun, so it's as much that reason as any other.

Rachel Fellowes:
I love that. I know as I'm looking at you now, you've got a phenomenal rainbow effect of books behind you, and I appreciate that you focus on the UK, but our listeners are probably global. Do you think all of what you've just said, the sentiment lands elsewhere in the world as well?

Nic Marks:
Yes, I do. I think sometimes there's a fear about using the word happiness that you're going to overpromise if you say, "Oh, we can make you happy." Of course, I think there's a truth in that. The reality is that for all of us, our happiness goes up and down. If you ask someone in a business, "How's your wellbeing?" Do they know how to answer that? That's really where I go to with it and it's very energetic as a word, so I do think it relates across the planet. I don't know about different languages, that there are nuances and how words are used across different languages. But in North America, in English-speaking world, I think the distinction's quite clear and I'm happy to use both words, but yeah, happiness I prefer. I think it's easier to measure as well, happiness, by the way.

Rachel Fellowes:
Well, on that beautiful sort of last sentence that you just added on there, maybe we can dig into that a little bit more. How do you measure this stuff? Is there standard metrics now?

Nic Marks:
I wouldn't say there's a standard. When I came into the field about 20 years ago, I thought I'd just be able to pick it off the shelf from academia and it's not like that. Every different academic has a different way of measuring it and if you get into business, every consultancy has a different way of measuring, say, engagement or wellbeing. They find their own metrics. But there is some standard ways of doing it.

What you can do is you can either try and measure things overall, ask people about their overall life or you can get very specific. I prefer to get more and more specific these days. I will ask people questions, "How happy were you at work this week?" To be very grounded in what's going on in their work. Whereas if you ask how happy at work overall, people sort of think much more about whether they like the status of the job and things like that. Whereas you ask them, "How happy were you this week?" It's actually what's happening. I find you get more grounded.

With wellbeing the way to measure it is to ask the longer questionnaires and to get to different angles because obviously, when you get into wellbeing, you can start talking about physical, emotional, mental wellbeing, different ways of thinking about it and there are scales that do that, but I quite like the simplicity of just asking people how happy they are because people can give you an answer straight away.

Rachel Fellowes:
I adore that, and I know that when we were chatting before our recording today that we started to talk about Rachel's happiness in isolation versus Rachel and Nic and a gang of people that we might interpret as a group or a team. There's often a distinction there as we start to think about individual or collective wellbeing and happiness. Can we start to dig into that a little bit more?

Nic Marks:
Yeah, I think that happiness and wellbeing are very social. Because our unit of measurement as a statistician, I would say, is the individual, it can be very tempting to just go into the individual circumstances of someone or the individual characteristics of that person, but actually the group explains an awful lot in the sense that we're very shaped by what what we have around us. I mean, we are literally born into this world through a relationship. Literally physically through our parents. We're brought up in a network of relationships, our families, our schools, our communities, and we go to work and live in networks. Very few of us, 10 percent, 15 percent of people work totally alone, but most of us work in teams, in organizations. Even those people that work alone tend to work with other people for other people, so there's very, very few people who work alone and actually they're less happy than people who work in teams and groups anyway and the group shapes us.
If we're down, it's just in our own life, what do we do? We ring a friend; we reach out to somebody. You can go for a walk, and you can do other things as well, but one natural thing we do is we reach out for social support. Our happiness and wellbeing is very collective, very group-based, and that can be misunderstood, and it can also be, I think efforts can be misdirected by thinking about individuals rather than groups and the key intervention in an organization, I think is around teams rather than around individuals would be my take on it.

Rachel Fellowes:
Well, this feels really cool and really new, Nic. I don't think many people are talking about this. Can I just go back to the data point, and I love the fact you kind of talk about the multi-facets of being a human, like emotional health, mental health, physical health, all of that. Is it as simple as you just lump all of that or aggregate that data together as a team? Or do you need to be bringing other stuff into that mix as well? Sorry if that was overly simple.

Nic Marks:
No, no, no. I mean, to be honest, the way I normally treat it is really just very simply, which is to say you measure a team by taking the average happiness across the individuals. You can ask questions around what do you think about the team around you? How is the morale of the team? They correlate as the relationship statistically very highly, so I think that actually having the individual as the unit of measurement, as the person who is reflecting on their experiences strong is strong data. As soon as you ask people about situations outside of ourselves, the data gets weaker.

For example, a question often used in organizations that your audience might be familiar with is called net promoter score. The net promoter score is for customers, and it's like, how much would you recommend this product to somebody else? People use it internally. How much would you recommend this organization as a good place to work? Well, you're doing a lot of leaps there. In your head you're asking, okay, you're talking to a hypothetical friend. What friend? Who is it? About this organization. Would I recommend it? You've basically got quite a long way from people's experience, whereas if you asked someone, "How happy were you at work today or this week?" That's me, I'm an expert on me, so I'm very strongly in favor of asking individuals about their reflective experience. But when you look at interventions and grouping scores, I'm much more interested in how the groups perform.

Rachel Fellowes:
For the visual people amongst us, is there like a matrix or an image or something that can articulate or play that out a little bit more for us?

Nic Marks:
Well, I mean, I definitely think in terms of circles that the circle of the individual, the circle of the team around them, the circle of division around them, so you can think in terms of embedded circles of influence and the stronger they are, the closer you are. Teams are influenced by the members, they're influenced by the team leader, definitely. Leading a team, managing a team is a really critical role and I think predominantly under-supported across organizations, but of course, they sit in an environment too.

When you look at the data closely, the biggest influence is the team experience on people. If you've got an organization, let's say that's really happy, but an unhappy team, the person's going to pick up the unhappiness of the team and vice versa, if it's an unhappy organization but the team are protected, they can get a really strong good feeling of morale from that, so the team is much more important than the whole organization. When an organization, say, talks about their culture, well, their cultures actually made up of lots of mini cultures, lots of microcultures, certainly statistically, you'll see lots of variation across an organization, so that influence is much, much stronger. I assume though, I've never actually tracked this, that if someone who's a total misery or someone's a total joy switches teams, they will influence that team. They will either bring them up or down depending on what's going on, and of course, they get lifted by the team too, so it goes both ways, but that's where the strongest place is, yeah.

Rachel Fellowes:
That is absolutely fascinating. I can also then, as soon as you start bringing the manager role and the team role, almost this like beautiful multi-levered analogy of, “I've got to deliver on my performance as well as my wellbeing.” Can we maybe go there a little bit and talk about the ROI or if there is a connection between those two things?

Nic Marks:
Yes. I think of it as actually a two-by-two matrix. If you think of it as, “is a team happy or not” or “are they successful or not,” by whatever metric you use success, but I mean most teams will have their business metrics around customer service or product delivery or whatever it is, they'll have it. You can name those quadrants. In the top right is great teams, they're happy and successful. Everybody wants to be in those teams. In the bottom left are the ones you want to avoid, which are miserable teams. They are unhappy and unsuccessful. I mean, they're no good for anybody. But you've got the other two diagonals and they're really interesting. You've got teams I call burning out, which are basically unhappy and successful, and then you've got the teams which I think senior leaders are frightened of. You can call slacking teams. They're happy and low-performing. I think it’s sometimes people’s fear of addressing happiness and wellbeing in an organization that they’re just going to make people happy and they’re not going to work hard.

Actually, statistically, probably six times as many people are happy in a successful team as in an unsuccessful one. Happiness is driving success. Probably three times as many people in a burning out team as a slacking team, so the slacking teams, I would think do exist out there, but they're eight percent of the sort of teams out there, many, many more in the other quadrants, so it's the least populated quadrant in any analysis I do. It's something to watch out for, but what's much more important is the burning out teams or the miserable teams.

Rachel Fellowes:
I mean, I love that. Again, the simplicity of it. You're very clever at that, aren't you? Taking big, really complex stuff and helping people understand it. If I'm a manager, I actually have a couple of teams. I'm very, very privileged to lead some phenomenal human beings in the UK, in Europe and in North America. What a joy. What do they expect of me if I start to lean into this, how do I go about doing good things? Is it simply about the data and the conversation, or is it more?

Nic Marks:
I think that, and I imagine you are a great team leader, Rachel, it's about being in tune with your team, isn't it? And listening to them and understanding what's going on. I think to be fair to a lot of team leaders and managers, they're what could be called accidental managers. They've been promoted for technical skills, for length of service, not for their people skills. If they haven't been shown how to be a good manager or they haven't been given the time budget particularly to be one, then it's hard for them, and time budgets are really important in this because relationships are difficult. Any relationships are difficult. I mean, I would hazard a guess that for virtually every listener on this podcast, the most difficult experience in their life has been relational. It is for all of us. Teams are relationships and also, they're relationships in a hierarchy too, which makes it even harder in the sense that there's all sorts of things going on there, ambition and subservience and all sorts of things that go on there that are different than friendships, for example, so they're hard.

The currency of relationships is not money. It's time. Time spent with people, so if leaders are to be good leaders, they need to have time for their one-to-ones with their teams. They need to have time for teaming exercises, for things that they do. I don't mean exercises in, well, you can do play things and they're great, and I love workshops and I think they can be very good, but just time for the team to be together and to bond. Yes, partly about the work, but also partly about themselves as human beings. You talk about resilience. For me, resilience is a social function. Resilience is about the resources you can draw on around you, not only within you. Yes, determination and persistence and grit and things are slightly important, but much more is have you got strong relationships to draw on when in need? That bringing together the team and working towards a common goal on a project is really, really important and the human side of it is really important.
Organizations, I think, have got very good at making KPIs, OKRs, whatever they want to call them about performance. I think they are really rubbish at doing good metrics for people and that's ultimately where I think I can add value to that is basically by saying, if you measure weekly team happiness, you've got a metric you can talk about every week. How happy were you last week? What went well for you or didn't? In a sense, it's just friction and flow. Things that get in your way and frustrate you, drag you down, things that go well raise you, so how do you do more of the things or learn from the things you're doing well, and you plan about things and how do you stop having things go wrong? I mean, in some ways, it's as simple as that, Rachel.

Rachel Fellowes:
Again, the simplicity of, I've got a few goosebumps there because even just as you were saying, I was thinking, when do I remember those moments with my manager? It's when she or he is being human and it's that spark of connection. It's not the to-do list and the pat on the back of tick, tick, tick. It's very much in that humanity piece, which is exactly what you're talking to. I love that.

Nic Marks:
Yeah, it is really how we can be humans at work. Virgin tried to do a big program about 10 years ago, Being Human at Work. I think that's right. How do we be human beings at work and not children? I mean, quite a lot of old-fashioned HR policies are quite infantilizing, if I can say that word. A lot of syllables there, but they sort of treat us as children. Well, we're not children, we're adults. We make sensible decisions or not sensible decisions about our relationships, our money and all sorts of things. We make decisions about stuff in life, and so to go to work and just be told what to do and to be treated as a child is not good, and so HR, all people functions need to treat people as adults, I think, yeah.

Rachel Fellowes:
If we carry on with that analogy, are we saying that happiness surveys, happiness scores are going to eventually replace engagement? It's almost like it's going down to that more human space or what are your views on that?

Nic Marks:
Well, I'm obviously a disruptor, and I think we should get rid of engagement surveys altogether. They're annual, they're out of date almost they are. Engagement itself is a made-up word really. I mean, yes, there is the idea of engagement in psychology, which basically means flow, but the way it's used in business is really, if we're honest, a bit of a code word for productivity. It's sort of saying how productive are you being? That's obviously the business's interest, and there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not very inspiring to people to basically say, "Here, we just want you to work harder for the same money." It doesn't really flick a tail.

Whereas if you say to people, "Oh, we'd like to make a job you really enjoy," then suddenly it's in their interest, and so I'm really interested in how you get that alignment between individuals and the organization. And there is, there's a huge win-win there in that everybody would prefer to enjoy their work. Actually, we like accomplishing things. It's working with our energy and our motivation, and so I think that happiness is much stronger at that than engagement and kindness somewhat ironically. I think happiness is more engaging than engagement because it's more appealing to people.

Rachel Fellowes:
Yeah, I love that. I love that. Thank you. I'm going to pivot a little bit now and I'm going to hopefully, make you blush a little bit because I've already told you this, but I know most people have like an Elton John poster on their wall when they're doing different things in their life, and I've already confessed that you are pretty much my pinup around wellbeing as I started on my quest about 20 years ago. I have followed your career and literally it is an honor to speak to you today, but I was really interested in saying, God, you've achieved so much already. If you're thinking about legacy and you've got so much more to achieve, where do you want to take wellbeing next? What's the sort of golden ticket where you might pat yourself on the back, if indeed that's even in your character type to do so? But I'd love to get a little bit of insight into what you're thinking around that.

Nic Marks:
Well, you're very kind. I mean, I did have this really golden decade in the think tank, and that was a lot to do with team. I had a great team, bright young PhDs who were really motivated and we worked really well, the five or six of us together. We would argue a lot, but we can never fall out for more than 24 hours because we just couldn't do that. It was a great team. But I did come away from that thinking. The Happy Planet Index is about the sustainability and the planet, and in some ways, yes, I've created a measure, but I haven't made any impact on that at all.

I really chose to work in work because I thought actually there was something very practical to be done there. We spend a lot of time at work, and so if I could nudge the world to creating better metrics of people's experience, whether people use our tool or anybody else's, but basically, we do that, then that would be my contribution to a huge challenge. I mean, a huge challenge is how do we work well together and how do we deliver things of value? Value to me is not only financial, it's about the wellbeing of the population and the planet and future generation.

We need a lot of innovation around climate change. We've got a lot of adjustments coming to AI and other things coming on. All of those things. The adaptability of people is very related to how they feel. When they feel better, they can adapt better. In that sense, if my little contribution as a statistician is to create a new metric, I mean, if I could create a metric that's as popular as net promoter score is for customer satisfaction, I would die a happy man.

Rachel Fellowes:
Boom. It almost is like, I can see it now, kind of a standard P&L. There is the Nic Marks line item on there.

Nic Marks:
It doesn't need to name me. I've learned over the years not to put your name to things. Things travel much more if you don't put your name to it. I think if you can get other people to sponsor it, that's better.

Rachel Fellowes:
That's awesome. That's awesome. I know we're nearly out of time, and I'm always one for the classic question at the end. What one thing do you want us to hear again or what one thing do you want us to take away from this conversation?

Nic Marks:
If you're a team leader, spend time with your team every week talking about how last week is. If you're an organization, create a measurement structure that supports that because that will help you understand it. If you want to know a little bit more about my work, then you can go to something called fridayone.com, and there's a personal questionnaire there about your happiness at work. Basically, going back to my sort of therapy training, I think the first step to change is self-awareness, so if you're a leader, whatever like that, then actually being aware of your own drivers. I designed the FridayOne questionnaire to help people understand about their own context of work and how happy they are so they can make better choices and whether that's the team or as an individual.

Rachel Fellowes:
That's absolutely fantastic. Thanks so much again, Nic, for your time and insights, especially as our third guest in our Wellbeing Podcast series. I know you've just mentioned where you're able to learn more, but we can hopefully, also follow you on LinkedIn, and of course, you've got your book coming out soon as well. Is there anything else you want to add?

Nic Marks:
No, LinkedIn is the place I'm most active. The book's still a bit away. It's still in draft, so there's bits to go with that.

Rachel Fellowes:
We'll all practice patience. We'll all practice patience. Thanks again, Nic.

Nic Marks:
Thank you.