On Aon’s Better Being Series: The World Wellbeing Movement

Intro:
Welcome to “On Aon,” an award-winning podcast featuring conversations between colleagues and their guests on, well, Aon. This week, in part 6 of a special series on resilience called Better Being, we hear from Rachel Fellowes, Aon’s Chief Wellbeing Officer, with her guest, Sarah Cunningham, as they talk about why wellbeing strategies and company culture need to align, the wellbeing workplace paradox and the work of the World Wellbeing Movement.

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 it's linked with performance and wellbeing. So today only around 30 percent of colleagues actually identify themselves as resilient, and this has huge implications both for their mental and physical health as well as organizational productivity, agility, innovation and workforce engagement. So, in this series I discuss what can be done about this issue with thought leaders and subject matter experts, and we look at the actions we can all take to build and support resilience at the individual, team and organizational level in the modern workplace. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about the importance of thinking through what wellbeing at the organizational level means. I've had fascinating conversations on this podcast to date, and we've talked methodically about wellbeing at the individual level and at the team level, and often talked about the organizational level as if it's some bizarre construct.

So, I am so excited to then invite Sarah Cunningham to the podcast today to talk about wellbeing at the organizational level. And why is Sarah so brilliantly placed to facilitate this conversation? Well, because Sarah is an organizational leader, behavioral scientist, and a future work strategist. She's a bit of a superstar in my mind. I've heard about her for a number of years and we crossed paths serendipitously about three months ago. And part of how I heard of her was also linked to the fact she's Managing Director of the World Wellbeing Movement, and it's in that capacity that she's standing or talking to me today in the podcast. So, Sarah, I'm going to invite you to share a little bit more about yourself and the World Wellbeing Movement. But just before I go there, I just want to remind everybody about Aon's own story. And I've been enrolled now for about 20 months, and we've been talking about moving methodically from ill beings, so how do I best help our colleagues support each other and themselves when things go wrong?

So, elements such as our global EAP service, and then starting to shift to something called wellbeing. So how do I help educate our colleagues, our managers and our leaders as to what it means to help inform a culture of thriving? And this third mysterious bucket, which links directly to our conversation is what we're talking through as human sustainability. How do I enable organizations to support steps one and two, i.e. ill being and wellbeing? Now, what's been phenomenal in the getting to know process with Sarah is the evidence-based research and interventions that are funneling through the World Wellbeing Movement today.

So no longer is it a nice to have, very much this research is helping to inform the future success of organizations, whether that be from a performance perspective or an engagement perspective. We'll come onto that detail in a lot more shortly. So, Sarah, you can probably tell from the tone of my voice how excited I am to have you here. So welcome to the show, and I'd love if you could just share with the listeners a little bit more about yourself and your story before we dive into the World's Wellbeing Movement side of things.

Sarah Cunningham:
Well, Rachel, you are so kind. And I have to say I was very humbled listening to your kind words. I'm not sure I'm deserving of that phrase at all. I am very much still on a learning journey. I'm learning every day. But I suppose my background bridges both the corporate and academic world. So, I started out my career back in the 1990s. I was working in call centers whilst also studying for my undergraduate degree. When I graduated, I moved into management consultancy, and since then I became more senior, initially took on people leadership roles and made a ton of mistakes because people are simply not given enough training when they first become a people manager. I've worked for Google, I've worked for MasterCard, and I've worked up to site leadership level, so senior leadership level where I've had overall accountability for employee wellbeing in a company, and that's something I took really seriously.

I think there's two reasons I took it so seriously. The first is I observed over the course of a 25-year career that the world of work was becoming a more stressful place, and that's not any one particular company, I'm talking at a macro level. And I felt I had a duty, and I think it's partly because I have my own lived experience. So, when I go back to those call center days, I suffered from debilitating panic attacks. That was in the 1990s when people really didn't talk about mental health. It took a while, but I was lucky, and I got professional support. And anybody listening who's struggling, the best advice I can say is to seek that professional support. But I guess, fast-forward back to the later stages of my career, I definitely felt, I don't know, was it a calling or a very strong sense of duty to play my part in supporting that.

And I got to work with some brilliant experts in employee wellbeing. I got to learn lots from them, but I realized that nobody had all the answers. And so it was at that point that I turned to the academic world and I studied a Master's degree in Psychological and Behavioral Science at LSE, and that was when I got introduced to Wellbeing Science. And I confess up until that point, I probably hadn't thought of wellbeing as being a science. It is. You can measure wellbeing, it is a science. And it was through that network that I encountered the two brilliant co-founders of the World Wellbeing Movement, Professor Lord Richard Layard and Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve. Both of them, two of the world's leading experts in wellbeing science. And I'm very grateful to them that they have put their faith in a rookie like me to lead the World Wellbeing Movement, and I've been doing that for just coming up on 18 months now.

Rachel Fellowes:
Oh, Sarah. And I don't think there's any rookie in your adjective or descriptions that we should attribute at all. But as I was listening to you, there was a really lovely picture growing almost like the traditional CV that you were sharing with me, but then also the reality of the serendipitous notion of your life experience. And if I think about how when I talk to clients, it's often those in really challenging roles such as call centers where you have to try and dig deeper to understand organizationally, how can we help people in such high stress environment.

So, there were lots of wonderful things as I was listening to you and just thinking how serendipitous that your story has taken that path and you've ended up here, and obviously a huge validation from the double professors that we can call them. And I'd love to also just build on that last point and dive into more around the World Wellbeing Movement. So could you describe it, I know you've just touched on it. What is it, what's its purpose and ultimately, why has it brought you from Dublin to Oxford? Because I know there's been a big personal life change in that mix as well.

Sarah Cunningham:
Well, there certainly has. So, the World Wellbeing Movement, it's a not-for-profit social impact organization housed within the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Center. So that might start answering the question as to why it brought me to Oxford. There is some incredible high-end academic research coming out of the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Center. They are our academic partner. And I felt it was really important that I was close to the research fellows so that I understood that research. So, I realized much as I'd like to, I couldn't do this role from Dublin, but I haven't told you our mission yet. So, our aim is to improve the quality of people's lives across the world by putting wellbeing at the heart of decision-making in both business and public policy. Now, our approach is very much evidence-based. So, we're focusing hard on taking insights from the academic world and then actually getting those into the hands of those people in society who are positioned to drive positive change, so business leaders and policymakers for instance.

And that translation of academic insights into real world impact is such a core part of our operating model. And I think that's part of the reason why that academic partnership with the University of Oxford is so important. But that's not the only partnership that's important. We are a movement. So, our coalition of global wellbeing experts from companies including BT, Cisco, HSBC, Indeed, EssenceMediacom, Unilever, S&P Global, the McKinsey Health Institute. I know I've forgotten some, and I'm sorry if I've forgotten your one, but we're so grateful for that collaboration and that coalition. We are a movement, movement by name, movement by nature. And I always say as the old adage goes, that we are stronger than the sum of our parts.

Rachel Fellowes:
I mean, again, you can even sense in the pace of your voice and also the culture that you create when you engage with people. It really feels like a community of energized people that are in this for the long game. We're not flirting around the edges and doing tactical things. We're now looking at meaningful data that can drive change at the systemic level, as you say. For me sitting in a Chief Wellbeing Officer level, I need your support. I get challenges both internally and from clients around how do you actually really articulate the correlation with engagement, performance productivity? And I lean on partners like you to help inform that narrative. And then vice versa, we can be the incubator, the so what, so you have the data, you have the research, but how do we actually action and create change on that? So, in your description, just laying a little bit of the Rachel-ness onto it, but hopefully that's useful.

Sarah Cunningham:
Oh gosh, I couldn't agree more. It really works both ways. There's very little point doing academic research in a silo. It really needs to be informed by on the ground insights for it to be relevant and effective.

Rachel Fellowes:
Yeah. Well, thank you. And I know that you are obviously in the world of data and science. I love the way you use that word and almost encourage us to consider quantitative and qualitative components of wellbeing. I'm obviously sitting in a data business. At Aon, we help our clients drive better decisions primarily through having access to better data, whether that's be to inform their benefits or wellbeing more broadly. So, I'd love to get your view, and I appreciate in our dress rehearsal as well, we also talked about Nic Marks and his view on measuring happiness. But I also know there's a distinction between the way that you think about measuring this to inform organizational change. And can we go there first and then we can build on some of the research pieces in the next couple of questions after that?

Sarah Cunningham:
Absolutely. And look, I would certainly say that the way in which we recommend measuring workplace wellbeing is informed by the way in which wellbeing science experts would measure wellbeing in the general population, so there's definitely a very clear link there. But I suppose if I had a magic wand and if I could make one single change tomorrow, it would be that every single employer globally not only measures how people are feeling using comparable science-based metrics, but also measure why people feel the way they do. Because unless you understand why people are feeling that way, you won't be able to put a targeted program of interventions in place to solve for that. So, I might just very quickly go through that, starting with how people are feeling. At the World Wellbeing Movement, we recommend measuring the four key dimensions of employee wellbeing. So that's job satisfaction, happiness at work, stress at work and sense of purpose.

Now combined, those four questions provide us with a holistic picture of how people are feeling about the work they do. And I think it is important to note that these are science-based. They mirror questions used by the OECD and the UK's Office for National Statistics and various other statistical agencies to measure wellbeing in the general population. But I did say that you shouldn't stop there because that's only telling you how people are feeling. It's not giving you any information as to why people are feeling the way they are. And the reality is there are so many factors that contribute to our wellbeing at work, and I don't think you'll ever get that down to a finite list, but we certainly have a fairly comprehensive list that we recommend. So, these are the factors that drive your wellbeing at work, so we call them the drivers.

And there are so many, from your pay to your working conditions, to whether you're getting support from your manager, whether you feel a sense of inclusion and belonging, whether you feel appreciated and recognized for the work you do, whether the work you do is energizing, whether you have flexibility, trust, scope to learn and grow. There are so many drivers of our wellbeing at work. Now, we are diverse and as a result, different drivers will have more or less impact on different people. But we recommend that employers measure those drivers. At a high level, they'll be able to identify their poorest performing drivers, but they should also slice and dice to see how different drivers are impacting different groups of people.

And that will give employers the data informed evidence they need to figure out which evidence-based interventions they should be rolling out. And I think this is really important because I see a lot of very well-intentioned business leaders, heads of wellbeing, heads of HR, site leads, really trying, but they don't know where to start. And so, what we're saying is, instead of starting myopically with wellbeing, look beneath the surface of what drives our wellbeing and target your interventions at those areas which are poorest performing.

Rachel Fellowes:
I don't want to use a naff analogy of a red flag, an amber flag, and a green flag, but in a way, you're using data to determine where the biggest red flags are and how we can best support, again through evidence-based interventions, those risks-

Sarah Cunningham:
Yeah, absolutely.

Rachel Fellowes:
Which I absolutely love. And I also love the fact you are bringing in the broad brush organizational drivers to use your language, so even thinking about job satisfaction, career path through remuneration, this is very much at the top level. And the way we've described it in the past around accountability is, Rachel's responsible for her wellbeing. My manager would be responsible for the team environment, so reasonable conditions for me to thrive, but my ultimate leader is responsible for the overall strategy around the notions, the drivers that you've just teed up so brilliantly. So, I want to continue on that vein, and it's not to take us in a different direction, but I do want to acknowledge the workplace wellbeing paradox that we're all currently experiencing.

So, there's an inflationary environment. There is huge sensitivities around cost at the moment. So, you listen to, in the corporate world, anyone's, any public company's quarterly earnings call, there is a challenged environment within which we're all working. We also know behind that that we are spending more on wellbeing, and I maybe asterisk that, potentially ill being not actually wellbeing. And we can also see as we start to measure ill being and now wellbeing, that those rates are declining, so there's a very peculiar predicament. So, either Sarah, there's a condition that we're not measuring the right things or we're measuring new things that are giving us a more pragmatic view on the challenges within which we now need to serve or we're actually spending on money in the wrong place. And I'd love to just get your view on all of that, and I appreciate that it's quite an over-designed question, but this is really the challenging position, and you often get in client conversations, you're between a rock and a hard place, that type of statement. So, can we dig into that a little bit more please?

Sarah Cunningham:
Yeah. And gosh, every time I talk to you, Rachel, I just think how aligned we are in our thinking. So I gave a talk actually earlier this year at the World Happiness Summit, which is the most incredible event I have to say. And I talked about the workplace wellbeing paradox. And I guess, how I defined it at that point was exactly as you're saying, we're seeing an increase in the investment in employee wellbeing by employers across the globe. And I believe Aon actually did some research into that yourselves, that you could see increased spend. You can also see that honestly simply by the number of jobs with the word wellbeing and the title like your own job, number of publications, there's even awards now. So there's an awful lot of indicators that there is this increased spending. Now, I'd agree with your asterisk, by the way, as to there's a question as to whether that's on wellbeing or ill being, but I'll park the asterisk for now.

I guess, you would intuitively imagine that you would therefore see a decrease in the indicators of employee stress and unhappiness, but that doesn't seem to be the case. So counterintuitively, we're actually seeing an increase in those indicators of stress and unhappiness. So Gallup are telling us that employee stress has never been higher. The McKinsey Health Institute tell us that employee burnout has never been higher. CIPD tells us that in the UK, one in eight employees reports feeling miserable at work. And Deloitte have done some research which quantifies the cost of mental health related absences in the UK alone to be about £46 billion a year to employers, so there's definitely something going on here. Now, what I believe we're seeing is a fundamental disconnect between employers investment in employee wellbeing, and employees actually experienced wellbeing. And I looked at that disconnect to try and figure out, "Well, what's driving that?" And I know your question got to that.

One of the things that I always say is that you cannot treat wellbeing in isolation, and you'll hear me repeat this like a mantra, but your wellbeing benefits have got to be aligned with your company culture. And I know that I'm preaching to the choir here because all of the work you're doing on that front is absolutely incredible. But not every company, of course, actually has the budget at this stage to hire such an experienced chief wellbeing officer, and we are seeing those disconnects. And I think where those disconnects become very visible, and I think a lot of your listeners will recognize these disconnects. So, if you've ever gone to a Wellness talk or walk, but in your company, but the room is half or three quarters empty despite the fact that this is a really interesting speaker, well, that's telling you something. That's telling you that people might want to go, but they're just too busy. Their workload is unmanageable.

If you see a lot of yoga classes and mindfulness-based meditation classes and all of these great things, and again, people are either not going at all or only going sporadically. If you see companies roll out all sorts of employee assistance programs and talk about flexibility and diversity and inclusion, but actually the reality is that employees are still receiving emails at 11:00 PM at night, at 2:00 AM in the morning on Saturday and Sunday, and feel that pressure to respond, all of these, and there are so many more examples of a disconnect between wellbeing benefits and company culture. And I think that's really a driving force of this paradox.

Rachel Fellowes:
I mean, this is fascinating, isn't it? So I guess, you're listening to it going, "Yeah, and oh yes. That particular manager that sent me that email at 2 o'clock, thank you very much. I know what I would like to do with that." But actually can we maybe start to think about what can be done about this? And I'm really interested in who's accountable and responsible for this change. And just as a bit of context, we've trialed different approaches depending on the theme or the topic at Aon. So we've got to the place now whereby diversity, equity, inclusion, and we've also added on and belonging, which is wonderful, this is actually owned by our CEO. But track back a little bit, we had a chief diversity officer, so think about the same sort of vein for ESG and obviously for wellbeing. So this might be an incubation role for then another bounce for the topic of mental health, et cetera. But I'd love your view on best practice and who do we actually want to hold accountability for this, bearing in mind we're a traditional corporate structure.

Sarah Cunningham:
Absolutely. And plus one on belonging, and plus one on whoever has ownership for diversity, inclusion and belonging reporting to the CEO. And I should say that they are key drivers of employee wellbeing, and the analysis conducted by my Research colleagues at the University of Oxford really highlights that. But stepping back to your question, I'm going to start first of all by saying that each and every one of us has got a responsibility, not an accountability, but a responsibility. And by that just treating each other with kindness, just coming at a situation with empathy, because the reality of work is that there will be many times where you are working with people who have a different viewpoint. And I think if we can try to come at that situation with a lens of empathy and a lens of kindness, and I say that as somebody who has let myself down many times and I'm on a learning journey and I continue to learn, and I'm sure many listeners will feel the same, but when it comes to ultimate accountability, I agree with you.

Ultimately the reality is that employee wellbeing is not just the right thing to do, there is a business imperative. So there's a huge amount of research, and I can talk more about that, that demonstrates that companies that have higher average employee wellbeing actually benefit from improved productivity, talent attraction and retention, bottom line financial results, and even stock market performance, so it is a financial imperative. I firmly believe that the CEO themselves should have accountability for employee wellbeing, and every company should have a chief wellbeing officer who reports directly into the CEO. And I think this point is important, that role should be as critical to any company as the CFO. Just to expand upon, I suppose one of those studies, just to give you an example, and I don't want to go into too much detail, but my colleagues at the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Center ran quite a long study with BT where they did a pulse survey to BT Call Center workers, which obviously resonates with me as a former call center worker to ask them their happiness on a weekly basis.

They then did some very fancy analysis, which is far above my head, but they actually found the first causal field evidence that a happier employee is a more productive employee. So for a one point increase in happiness on a scale of one to 10, they saw a 12 percentincrease in productivity. So I definitely think that speaks to the business imperative that wellbeing should not be seen as a luxury or a nice to have, or even just the right thing to do, even though it is the right thing to do, but it really is a business imperative.

Rachel Fellowes:
I'm going to go a little bit off track at the moment and just play that back to you. So I, as in you, we can now evidence that wellbeing has a positive effect on talent, on bottom line results, on stock market performance, on individual performance and individual productivity, or indeed a team productivity rate such as a sales team or a call center. What goes on in my mind, that feels like we've been trying to have that breakthrough research moment that came to diversity where suddenly everybody accepts what we're trying to do, so right, we've got that.

What do you think is going on about why we haven't or are we actually gaining the same momentum as diversity because it feels like we're, I like to call it the third child? ESG was first, then it was diversity and then it was wellbeing. We're beautifully following, but I would love your view on that because this stuff is really powerful and most of it has come out of post pandemic research. Now, we can get in now that there was such a 2020 crisis point around mental health. People are opening the doors to enable you to do causal research, so would love your view on that.

Sarah Cunningham:
There's two things I want to talk about. One is, it's very hard to take a positive from a time of global tragedy, but people did start talking about mental health and about wellbeing, and the stigma, the taboo of discussing mental health challenges was challenged during the period of the pandemic. One of the things which worries me is that as the pandemic moves further and further into the past, so do those conversations. So I suppose my great hope is that wellbeing is now elevated, but the reality is that... Now, I like to simplify things, so I'm going to simplify something right down. But in a very simple world, there's two types of executive leaders. There's those leaders who really want to make a difference. They really want to improve employee wellbeing, but they do not know where to start. And that's where all the advice I've given is so important, measuring how people feel and why they feel that way and then targeting interventions at those drivers.

But there's another type of business leader, and this is the more cynical business leader, and I am simplifying here. But the reality is there are certain leaders, and I'm sure we can all think of some who are in the public eye who really only care about the bottom line. And let's be honest, they don't really care that much about employee wellbeing because they're so focused on their P&L. And I think that's why we've needed to do the research that has been done. You asked me at the beginning of this why I moved from Dublin to Oxford for this job, and that's exactly why. I wanted to sit side by side with the actual people who conducted the research so that I understand it at a deep level. Very quickly and sticking with all script, but another research study they did, which is just so compelling, is they looked at the top companies that are US stock listed on the Indeed Work Wellbeing Score.

So this is a very large survey of employee wellbeing that has been run by Indeed. And to date, they've had, I think it's over 17 million responses at this stage. They looked at just those companies who are US stock listed, and then they said, "Gosh, I wonder, imagine if you could comprise a stock portfolio, comprised of the happiest companies to work at, what might that look like?" So they took the top 100 companies, they created this stock portfolio, and then they let the market do their thing. And what was really interesting was if you look at the stock market for the past three years, in 2021 it was going up. That was a bull market.

In 2022, it was going down, that was a bear market, and in 2023 it was volatile. Now, that fictitious portfolio comprised of the happiest companies to work at outperformed the market in both the bull market that went up, the bear market that went down and the volatility of 2023. So that's incredible research, which is highlighting that even when it comes to your stock market performance, if you can improve your average employee wellbeing, you can improve your stock market performance. Why is this important research? It's important so that we can get buy-in from that second type of executive leader who is cynical and only caress about the bottom line.

Rachel Fellowes:
What's fascinating about that last comment is it proves the point that actually not being informed around happiness as a manager is actually bad for business. You reduce the almost opportunity of what sustainable high performance could actually translate to into your P&L, which I absolutely love. And it also reminds me of an experiment we're doing internally at Aon at the moment. We're actually taking our, and this is the performance levers driven by our financial performance, not personal, but we're taking a higher, a medium and a lower performing team and helping embed the philosophy, including the data points of wellbeing to help them think about their 2024 plans. And I think it's absolutely speaking to everything you are saying, and I love that degree of almost 1 percent ncrease could equal 12 percentmore in terms of productivity and then what that translates to onto the bottom line. Fascinating.

I'm conscious of your time because I know what a busy lady that you're, and I'd love to just slowly start to wrap up now and think through a parting thought of which no doubt there are many. And we also had the side conversation earlier on, didn't we, Sarah around, could we have a whole separate podcast just on how does this data inform public policy both in the US and the UK? And we also touched on some of my learnings from my North America tour even thinking about the opioid crisis. Up to 57 percent of young female adults are now clinically depressed. There's an extraordinary amount of post pandemic data that continues and is still expected in 2024 to spike again and translate into higher EAP numbers by way of example. Building on all of that, it's like the grand drum roll. What would you like to leave us with in this conversation that we can all reflect on?

Sarah Cunningham:
Well, as you've gone off script, I'm going to give I suppose two separate reflections. The first one is on workplace wellbeing and the second is on wellbeing public policy. So I suppose when it comes to workplace wellbeing, my great hope is that over the next five to 10 years, how employee wellbeing is viewed will have evolved. So, it really will be viewed, as I said, as a critical part of any business strategy because it isn't a business imperative. And as I say, a one point increase on a scale of one to 10 in happiness leads to a 12 percent increase in productivity. It's very powerful. So, there is a strong business imperative. Every company should have a chief wellbeing officer reporting into the CEO. And remember that it is a science, so employee wellbeing can and should be measured and not just how, but also why, what's driving that wellbeing.

So, that's my recap of what I think is really important on the workplace wellbeing side of things. And you will find more information on this on the World Wellbeing Movement's website. And over the coming months, we're going to be publishing a lot more information on evidence-informed interventions that can be used to move the needle on those drivers. Very quickly, because I know we're tight on time, you brought into it some very, very sad statistics, and it makes my heart sink when I hear things like that. And there's so many statistics around this and the reality is not everybody is in the workplace. It's really only people of working age, of course, who are employed. So how can we affect systematic change at a macro level? And this is where the second part of the World Wellbeing Movement's mission is to put wellbeing at the heart of decision-making in public policy.

So, if I really simplify that, we believe that every country should have a minister for wellbeing, should have a budget for wellbeing, and should appraise any potential policy or look at any potential policy through the lens of wellbeing. And if those changes were made, can you imagine the mammoth policy changes that that would drive both at a prevention level and at a support level? And if that is something that people are more interested in, and I'm so sorry to do a plug, but we have a podcast as well, not as long-running as yours, but it's called the Working on Wellbeing Podcast by the World Wellbeing Movement. And I interviewed our co-founder, Professor Lord Richard Layard, and he shared his views. He's an expert on Wellbeing Public Policy on why wellbeing should be the overarching goal of governments across the world. So that's my final thought.

Rachel Fellowes:
Absolutely amazing. And we would be delighted to plug your podcast. As you said, this is all about being a movement and supporting each other along the way. But I do want to end with a huge thank you, Sarah, because it's not only your time to record the conversation, but also the time to get to know each other, and no doubt the time beyond this conversation where we can partner better and also if your wonderful insights and lens that we definitely haven't covered in our conversations to date. So, thank you so very much for being here.

Sarah Cunningham:
Oh, thank you so much for inviting me on. And thank you for all of the incredible work you're doing, Rachel and everybody on your team as well.

Rachel Fellowes:
Thank you.

Outro:
This has been a conversation “On Aon” and workplace wellbeing today. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, you can get more insights on wellbeing in the workplace and information on future podcasts by following Rachel Fellowes on LinkedIn. To learn more about Aon, its colleagues.