National benchmark data

The nation's well-being@work

The purpose of our national project was two-fold; firstly to gather national benchmark data, and secondly to understand the evidence about which factors most influence people’s experience of their jobs. Further benchmarking information is provided at the end of this section.

Factors that most influence well-being at work

We can identify some general factors that promote well-being at work from a national survey but we cannot say that these results hold for all organisations. Specific organisations will have their own cultures, particular mixes of people and tasks that need to be carried out. However some broad findings are interesting.

KEY FACTOR 1: Creating interesting jobs is more important than reducing stress

How interesting people find their jobs is a far more important factor for motivating employees than an absence of stress. This means that whilst stress audits have a role to play, there is no guarantee that reducing stress will create more satisfied and motivated employees. Organisations should consider adopting a more complete assessment of well-being at work to see the full picture. The factors that seem to create interesting jobs are having a fair degree of autonomy, an opportunity to be creative and to do a job which you feel you can do well.

KEY FACTOR 2: Good places to work and good line management

Equally important for creating motivated satisfied employees is for them to view their organisation as a good place to work. Good organisations are those that have a highly functional management system. The relationship between the line manager and those they manage is the ‘coal face’ of well-being at work and investing appropriate amounts of time and energy into supporting line managers to do the best job they can will repay itself.

KEY FACTOR 3: Size of organisation matters – a lot

People who work in small organisations have higher well-being at work across all job types – from the most routine right through to senior management. The data shows that this is predominantly associated with enhanced organisational climate – in other words it feels a better place to work. Obviously large organisations cannot become small ones; however they can strive to create smallness within the organisation.

KEY FACTOR 4: Social Value of work

People who feel their work is useful to other people enjoy their jobs more. Independent research has also shown that corporate social responsibility is an increasingly important factor in attracting talented people to an organisation. So whilst some jobs have by their nature more associated social value, many employers could be more creative in their activities (such as procurement processes or charitable donations).

Creating benchmarks

The nef consulting well-being at work tool needs to be based on robust statistical analysis. It is important that attention is drawn to the factors within an organisation that genuinely need attention. This would not only include trouble spots where employees have low well-being but also hot spots where teams are flourishing. It is important to set these benchmarks fairly as, for example, psychologically it is easier for people to criticise systems, they are distant from, than people they work with everyday. So this would mean setting a lower benchmark for say ‘confidence in senior management’ than ‘quality of team relationships’. By looking at the national distribution of responses to all the questions within the nef consulting well-being at work tool we can ensure that these benchmarks are correctly set. To make them easier to interpret we also create indexes that run from 0 to 10, with 5 always being set as the national average.