Why workplace wellness programmes don't work

0:00500 orders a month was manageable. 5 ,000 is madness. Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation, the only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns, and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Automate fulfillment and rate shopping to ship up to 15 times more with up to 90 % savings. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO to try ShipStation free for 60 days. Cash Now More Later from Opendoor gives you cash up front for your home, plus all the profit later. That's no chaos now, no cash left behind later.

0:40Skip the showings now, pocket extra profit later. This is so simple now, this is so awesome later. Or sell fast now and pop the champagne later. Cash Now More Later, now available nationwide. Start your offer at opendoor.com slash ACAST. Profits calculated after fees and costs, eligibility and offer price may vary.

1:04William Fleming: this is eat sleep work repeat it's a podcast about workplace culture hello i'm bruce tasley a couple of years ago a piece of work was published that ended up getting headlines across the world an academic paper the work of oxford university's william fleming found that workplace well-being programs didn't work that wellness initiatives largely were a red herring that wellness app subscription yeah didn't have any impact that burnout webinar that healthy eating week had no impact on work or our experience at work it raised really interesting questions about the subtext of what was really going on inside organizations were bosses using wellness initiatives as reputational alibis giving them deniability when workers inevitably became exhausted by an unsustainable pace of work.

1:55William Fleming: Was wellness a way to try to ensure that the status quo wasn't disrupted, but merely painted with a brighter hue? The researcher behind that paper, William Fleming, is pretty early in his career, actually, but he's already started proving himself as one of the most exciting workplace thinkers around. He works as part of Jan Emanuel Denev's Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. My conversation with him takes in not only what is called the, sometimes called the Oxford Wellbeing Study, but also his latest work, which explores the stunning finding about the impact of compressed working hours as a means of going to a four-day week.

2:34William Fleming: You might have seen this, the idea that you do 40 hours in four days rather than in five days. Really, really astonishing research finding there. He talks about his brand new research into AI chatbots and what we're learning about their impact on wellbeing at work. Overall, it's an outstanding discussion by someone who's really at the cutting edge of examining the impact of work acceleration on the rest of us. This is my conversation with Dr. William Fleming. William, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if you could kick off by just introducing who you are and what you do. Hi, Bruce. Yeah, great.

3:12Great to be here. I'm Will Fleming, and I'm a postdoc research fellow at the Wellbeing Research Center in the University of Oxford. Yeah, I'm an academic researcher specifically focused on ways to improve workplaces. And as it turns out, on ways not to improve workplaces. I've got a PhD in sociology, so that means I come with these questions from slightly more structural than individual focus anyway. and I've got a variety of projects really centered on how work affects us, how we can change work and all of these types of topics.

3:44William Fleming: I'm really curious with this wellbeing centre and I wonder if you could just introduce us because I've seen quite a lot of work out of the wellbeing centre that has been fascinating for me. Can you just sort of describe what the wellbeing centre thinks about, what it does and maybe your role as a sociologist as part of that? Yeah, I mean the research centre is amazing. It's the brainchild of Jan Emmanuel Deneve, who's a professor of behavioral sciences at the business school in Oxford. And really the aim is to have a multidisciplinary group for researching well-being. So how good people's lives are and how people feel about their lives.

4:20And so in the group, so Jan's a behavioral scientist, I'm a sociologist, but we've got Laura Taylor, who's the deputy director. She's a psychologist by training. We've got economists connected. We've got Michael Plants, a philosopher. So we really come at this from all different perspectives in the social sciences. And I think that creates a really great atmosphere where, yeah, we have different paradigms and different ways of thinking about questions. And we're all very independent minded, independently minded. And we all have our own research focus. And it's quite rare in that sense. I think maybe the only comparable research center that has this emphasis on well-being is the Center for Economic Performance, the LSE, which Richard Layard has been very influential in.

5:01And I think also the Research Center over the last few years has taken over the World Happiness Report as well, which I'm sure every couple of years you see the headlines, oh, Finland's the happiest place in the world, or oh, Americans are not as happy as they used to be 10 years ago, and these type of trends. So, yeah, we're very interested in this type of public research as well. We're not just an academic center interested in publishing papers that maybe five or other colleagues read, but we're very much interested in Paddlehead's research.

5:27William Fleming: Yeah, I've always been interested in that. As someone who sort of previously did a job and never saw a lot of the research that was published while I was doing the job, I'm always interested in this bridging the gap between, you know, the important job of research is not only to create research, but to transfer it into people's brains. And actually, the work that you seem to be doing, the wellness center, seems to be achieving more of that transition. So that's why it really stands out to me. Yeah, well, first of all, you said the wellness center, and it's important, it's the well-being research center, because we see a big conceptual distinction to be made.

6:06But I think you're right, but it's not something that comes about, you have to put effort in to do this successfully. and most academics this is not a critical statement but i think most academics are not so interested in that knowledge transfer um are not as committed to that knowledge transfer and that's partly because of the incentives that you face um you know i'm a junior researcher my priority is publishing academic papers in top journals and once this once you've got the name of the journal on your cv you can basically stop and go into the next one um and so actually you're incentivized to publish.

6:41And the incentive for this translation is not quite there. There is more so, you know, especially the government through UKRI, which is the main research funding body, which has several research councils, they emphasize as part of the research excellence framework, social impact and impact on policy and these types of things. And so there are structural incentives for knowledge translation impact, but it's not, you don't experience a necessarily on that day to day. Whereas I think in our research center, I think maybe because we're writing about well-being is so central. Well, it's just, it's everybody's life all the time.

7:18It's how good your life is and how you feel about your life. And so I think the topic and the theme lends itself to having a more public facing type of research. But we also put a lot of effort into it. All of us speak at various corporate conferences and public policy conferences and workshops, and we speak with journalists. And we have a full-time comms manager, Jonathan Whitney, who's great at helping put our research out on social media and talking with journalists. So it's something that we prioritize, but it does take effort. And also, we just have a topic that people like to read about as well.

7:56William Fleming: I'd love to delve into some of the specifics of the work you've done and obviously the one that probably a lot of people will have heard of either with your name associated or with Oxford associated is the report into workplace well-being and probably sort of garnered attention because of the headline finding whether it was a fair reflection of what you felt you'd uncovered that well workplace well-being programs didn't work I just wonder if you could sort of give us I think that was a 2024 paper could you sort of give us you were the only named researcher on that I think but could you give us like your take on what the paper set out to do, what it found Yeah of course, so that paper came out of my PhD research which really centered around analyzing this data set they had that had a few hundred organizations in it over a few years and then can't remember the exact number now about 50 ,000 employees spread out across these organizations.

8:56And also within this, there are various questions about HR policies that the organizations have, and especially a number of individual level wellbeing programs. So by this, I mean HR policies, which are specifically targeted at just the single employee and trying to change their behaviors or mindsets, something we might call these resources. And so there are types of programs like mindfulness and stress management training and time management training and these types of programs that I guess can improve your capacity to cope with jobs and manage jobs. And also with this data, I had lots of outcomes around mental health, workplace well-being, evaluations of people's jobs, and this type of thing.

9:35So I kind of had this data and then I was in the academic literature for a while before, probably for the last 10 years. So there has been a bit of a debate about the best HR approach to improve workers' well-being. So is it through these types of programs, like maybe mindfulness, which we can run some great RCTs and get some great effects that we improve people's mental health? Or is it more of an approach trying to improve people's jobs, changing working conditions and how organizations function, which has a much longer tradition in workplace research, partly tied to industrial relations research, which came out, you know, trade union work.

10:14So there was this debate about what we should be doing to try and improve workers well-being and how best to evaluate it and so i just happened to have so i had this data through a partnership and i wanted to test whether these individual level programs are actually doing what they said on the tin in everyday organizations not when we run it in a in an rct where everything's very controlled so what happens when all these organizations are just offering various hr programs designed to help people's mental health and with some very statistical techniques, the argument really that I make is that those who are participating in these types of individualized programs are no better off than those who are not.

10:52Yes. And so I think the headlines around this paper were quite dramatic, but in essence is what I found. And there's an element of selection going on around who participates and who engages with specific programs and who doesn't. Well, there's two ways to take it. Either they're not very effective at translating these kind of psychological skills or what's being translated is not relevant to the demands that people are facing and and their jobs and what they actually have to do um and so the idea being in work you've got to cope with um the requirements and you have various skills and resources to manage this but um these very popular wellness psychological interventions are not actually attuned to what we're facing in our every day i mean for me that The headlines is great.

11:38You know, I'm a junior researcher. This is my first published paper. And it got covered in, yeah, the New York Times, Financial Times, all these sort of top papers, which is great. But I think it did seem to touch into some wider sentiment around workplace wellbeing discourse. There was too, well, it was too individualizing. It was very much focused on people's own ability to cope. And it wasn't really engaging with the day-to-day work and people's working conditions that they experience. So I think I just, and this was especially coming out of the pandemic when there'd been lots of change in organizations and everybody's work.

12:14They'd been changing people's expectations of the role of the employer as well about what they should be doing to support people's mental health. And so I think the research was published at the right moment to start a bit of a debate around what we should be doing. and it was quite funny to read some of the comments the below the line comments on some of the newspaper articles like oh so two way one oh finally someone said that these programs are BS or other people saying oh we didn't need a research study to tell us that a team mindfulness session is not going to help me cope with all my work pressures and so on so it did seem to touch a nerve and since then it's been great to see my LinkedIn is full of people always debating well-being in HR policy and all of this sort of stuff.

13:00So it definitely kick-started a bit of debate, which was great to see. And that's the kind of impact that we want to be having to have people interrogating policies and organizations about what's best for people.

13:12William Fleming: And do you think the findings are timeless? I know the data you pulled was for 2017, 2018. Do you think there would have been any difference if you'd have pulled it? Is your instinct, look, you know, the finding is the finding? Yeah, yeah. So the data is from before COVID. And whether it's changed, I mean, there's no theoretical reason why it should change. You know, these programs are promoted as universal, so they should help everybody regardless of whether you are doing well or not coping so well. You know, they're supposed to promote your cognitive resources regardless. And so there's no theoretical reason why anything would change.

13:51that some research talks about the need to fit the job with the type of well-being intervention and whether they're actually tied together or not. And I think those questions remain. Our theories of well-being both in and outside of workplace, they're quite universal, so they shouldn't be changing. They should be fairly permanent. So I would say no. I think if the data happened to be afterwards, they would be the same.

14:15William Fleming: It's worth saying that there was one element of workplace interventions or well-being interventions that did seem to work, and that was volunteering. And I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about why you think that was the one bit that was like the remaining gem. Yeah, I mean, I think that the volunteers' inclusion in the study was quite strange because it's not quite the same type of practice as many of the others. but I thought oh this is still something that's trying to change an individual that's trying to change their their behavior maybe rather than their psychological skills well I think there's maybe two explanations one is slightly to do with the methodology which we definitely pick up some what we call selection effects where some people are more likely to do something because of pre-existing sort of characteristics and in this case we know that people who are basically people are happier are more engaged in the community.

15:11But then there's also evidence which shows that people engaged in the community become happier. So we have this kind of two-way relationship. So in my findings, there's a little bit of this selection going on. So it's probably that happier workers are more likely to engage with some extracurricular post-social activities. So a bit of a selection, but then there is other research from some of my colleagues in LSE that participating in corporate employee volunteering programs, you know, it can improve your experience at work for several reasons. Maybe it makes it more meaningful because you're having a more direct sort of community impact.

15:49Maybe it just gives some respite because actually it's an afternoon where you're not doing the regular work. Maybe it improves your relationship with your teammates. I was chatting with one corporate volunteering provider and they said one of the best things is when senior leaders are a part of these volunteering programs and then they actually get to just chat informally with more junior employees. So there's various mechanisms why I think those programs could be beneficial. But I also kind of, I'm not super interested in volunteering programs. There's another solution to workers' well-being, I would say.

16:22I just think there's probably a positive association and it's probably good for employees to get this chance. Volunteering opportunities don't get this fundamental issue about how we should improve workers' jobs and how should organizations be designed. So I think it's a cool finding and does touch with existing research, but there's more to the story than, oh, that's the solution, because it was slightly coincidental that it ended up, it just happened to be in my data. And so I was like, oh, definitely, let's just test this as well, yeah. Which shows that sometimes research questions and the inclusion is led by what data is available and what's not.

16:56William Fleming: Yeah, it was your start point as a sociologist, I think that for me produced one of the most interesting follow-ups to that. I saw you writing, it was only published sort of this summer, but you're talking about well-being programs or workplace well-being is depoliticized labor reform or depoliticized. And I was absolutely captivated with that idea in a number of ways, really. I loved the phrase, I think you were citing someone else where you said, well-being programs quite often give companies a reputational alibi. You also mentioned elsewhere that they were sometimes seen as an attempt to exert control outside of the working week.

17:38William Fleming: And I was just really interested in exploring some of those things of the lens that we might bring to wellbeing programs. Yeah. So this paper, again, that I've been working on, I was working on it for quite a long time. And really the starting point before it came, where I wanted to know why we were suddenly talking about wellbeing so much in and out of workplaces. I think if you go back, I mean, now it's been around for quite a long time. So if you've been working for the last 20 years, you're going to have heard this type of language, especially in the UK, where back in 2008, we were publishing policy reports on it.

18:11But before that, it wasn't this explicit concern. So my big question was, why are we talking about this? And then you have to come up with some precise research questions. And then I have to identify data and devised theoretical frameworks before and after. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on afterwards. But I think that was where I started from, is where did it come from? And very separate from the organizational psychology research, which looks at interventions and what their effects are and maybe how HR managers might best implement them, there is this separate literature, which is basically full of left-wing critics.

18:53who, you know, and it's tied to, oh, what do wellbeing programs represent as a management technique? Why is this appealing to large organizations? Why is this beneficial? And there's multiple explanations that are put forward. Yeah, I think you've touched on some of them. Perhaps it's a reputational alibi. Perhaps actually the organization is not a great place to work, but oh, look, we have a bunch of initiatives on wellbeing. We care about your mental health. Actually, they're just symbolic and lacking in much substance. So it might be something like that or this argument around control. Probably the best account of this was from, I can't remember the company, but it was in Sweden.

19:29And I think it was like a big manufacturing company in Sweden. And they implemented a load of health promotion programs, mostly around health lifestyles. And the author's argument was that this is about trying to construct a notion of what the perfect worker would be like. They would be there on time. they would be very engaged and then when you finish work they would be straight off to the gym or sports and you know there's this perfect worker that actually that would be tied uh to the workplace through not only just their um not only just because that's where they gather income but through value alignment through lifestyle alignment and then so that's where it's control but perhaps maybe less cynically is more about um a bit more conditioning and then value aligned so there's this whole critical literature on well-being programs but normally people who are doing one type of research on empirical psychological research are not engaging with the critical debate and in critical debate are not really interested in statistical studies for various paradigmatic and methodological divisions but I'm a statistician by training so I was like, okay, well, what about let's take these critical perspectives and see does this match up with the various resources that are out there that construct well-being as a public and social policy concern?

20:55That this is something governments are interested in, this is something citizens are interested in, and this is something that all employers are interested in. And I want to see whether these critiques actually hold up. I think most practices, you can talk about it generally as HR practices, are well-meaning, definitely. I think they're there to keep people in the job and ensure that people are able to perform their job and that people, to a lesser extent, like doing it. It's manageable. Some people actually love it, but most people just, it's whatever, it's just a job. And so it's well-meaning, but the types of strategies and solutions that actually get developed in this wider framework and looking at what's promoted to employers through this specific resource hub that I looked at, they sort of shirk the big questions around why is work good or bad for us?

21:50And when we're negatively affected at work, when a workforce is suffering from poor mental health, what are the causes of that? And what can we do about it? And this depoliticization aspect is that so much of the information around well-being tries to step back from the fact that often work is the problem. Often we have, you know, it might be really per management. It might be you've got terrible colleagues. It might be that their workload is atrocious. It might be that you are not able to disconnect because you're receiving emails outside of it. There's loads of reasons why work can be bad and can make us feel bad.

22:28So little of the discourse around well-being is actually engaging with that. There's some other bits around this de-politicalization around And historically, this argument was made by especially unions against employers saying, oh, we have to be doing more for the welfare of the workforce. And that was very much a contested argument. And that contestation is no longer there as unionization has declined. And it has become a more agreeable space, perhaps, or at least that's how it's presented. These changes are also part of this longer macro trend in what's happening in workplaces and how workplaces get changed and how people make claims around what's important.

23:10To try and think about well-being and work-solving, not just as an HR concern or as a workplace concern, but they kind of ties into wider transformations in employment and also about societies and policies focused as well.

23:25William Fleming: Yeah, I was working on something recently and it was sort of, if you recognize that groups, the idea of groups for health, that social identity theory, that you're feeling part of a collective seems to be one of the most predictive elements of our health and well-being. and then you say, well, then workplace cohesion actually has a role, a societal role to play because if you're spending 40 hours a week and feeling part of something, feeling uplifted by the people around you, then that seems to be sort of a noble goal. One of the things you immediately jump to when you go through that is you go, yeah, yeah, there was a solution to that and it was unions.

24:01William Fleming: You know, you got the benefit of workplace cohesion without necessarily feeling like it was to the benefit of employers. And it's just a really interesting one because unions really don't play a big part in the discourse about how we organize work right now. It seems at times that workplace well-being programs are a cosmetic attempt to portray that, the company's interest in workplace cohesion, without necessarily ceding any of the power to it. So that's why I was interested in that analysis. I mean, and that's the, I think that's criticism that actually, for example, the Trade Unions Congress have explicitly made around well-being discourses that is, you know, it's basically trying to cut them out.

24:47Often it doesn't include workers' perspectives in it. But I think there's also, it can be maybe less critical. I think it shows that there's an opportunity for employee organizations to, you know, well-being seems to have some credence for everybody. Everybody cares about it. So maybe there's opportunity to engage in that as well. But yeah, that's one of the cynical takes right there.

25:11William Fleming: I'd love to go on because I guess one of the biggest interventions when it comes to thinking about a meaningful impact on wellbeing is the debate about the four-day week. And one of the things that I've definitely been guilty of is when it comes to discussions about the four-day week, suggesting that actually the compressed work week is one of the executions of that. So that would be explicitly that a four-day week might be in its purest form, you just cancel Friday, or you cancel the equivalent of Friday. And it's the same amount of hours per day, you're just doing one day less. The compressed working week is something slightly different to that.

25:49William Fleming: It's suggesting, you know, we might see it actually quite frequently in healthcare, or we might see it in train drivers, that you do 40 hours, but you just do them over fewer days. And what I loved, again, at a paper that you published this summer, was you actually looked at this. You actually looked at the impact of these things. And I'd love you to take us through that. I've linked to that in the show notes for completists who want to read the actual report. But I'd love you to give us the top line of something because it certainly took me by surprise. I'll need to rethink how I talk about these things.

26:21Well, as you say, people talk about the 40-week uncompressed working hours in the same sentence. You'll say, these are just different, I call them working time arrangements. and they're put forward as almost comparable initiatives that, oh, if we just rejig things, it should improve people's experience at work. And a compressed work week has been around actually for ages. Back in the 70s, people were writing in Harvard Business Review about the revolution of the compressed work week and this type of thing. But with the 40-week pilots a few years ago, this really brought working time into our wider debates about employment.

27:02And so this is just a cool trend. And I was thinking, okay, I would love to research this because it's obviously so important. And there's a lot of debate going on about it. And especially I was interested in the confusion between these initiatives. So on one hand, you've got 40-week, which is working time reduction. So you actually work a few hours. And then you have working time compression, which is the same amount of time, but spreads differently across calendar days. And there's actually public policy, for example, in Belgium, where you have a right to request a compressed work week. And this received headlines in newspapers saying, oh, a right to a 4D week.

27:39And so there's a bit of confusion and equivalence that goes on. So I really wanted to just say, okay, if we look at them both, which is best for workers? Do they have comparable effects? And in my study, which uses longitudinal data on British workers, working fewer hours is associated with improvements across a raft of well-being and mental and physical health outcomes, whereas working time compression, same amount of hours, doesn't have the same corresponding effects. And actually for women, even there's declines in women's mental health as they're changing into a compressed work group. And I'm quite precise about the language I use when talking about that because it's quite difficult to infer the reasons why people are now working on a compressed work group versus not.

28:26And there's lots of reasons why you might change. and so we have divergent findings so reduction is basically good for you and compression is doesn't seem to be associated with improvements and actually this is quite shocking but then is not if you look at previous evaluations of compressed workweek basically there's nowhere suggests that the compressed workweek is going to improve your well-being you know there's been various studies there was one with i think it was a norwegian civil service they trialed in a few departments and there were no changes, especially in absence, for instance, there was no change.

29:01And in other organizational studies as well, we actually don't see improvements. Perhaps it's not effective. And the theoretical explanation would be that there are various pressures and demands and you have to expend so much energy for each job. And it doesn't matter how you spread out your exposure to those demands, you're still going to be experiencing. I think perhaps it makes sense that it's not that much different. This doesn't mean that if control over your own schedule isn't beneficial. So if you're perhaps choosing to do this, you have a lot of autonomy over when and where you work. This allows you to balance your family life and your working life.

29:39This doesn't mean that that is harmful. And actually, this is what my study shows. I look at in this bridge of data, we also have a question of how much say over basically when and where you work you have. And actually, if you say, I've got a lot of control, we don't see any of these negative. We don't see these negative science. So I think your working time is very much tied to the control that you have over when and where you do your job. Yeah, so I think that summarizes fairly well what that study's saying. It's still under review, so there'll probably be a few changes and maybe a bit of additional analysis goes into it.

30:17It should hopefully help clarify some of these debates. The interesting thing, it goes with a piece.

30:21William Fleming: There was the Alan Felstead research from Cardiff University, I think, sort of a longitudinal study there that suggested in the last 20, 30 years, the amount of task discretion that people have got in their jobs has gone from two-thirds of people saying they had task discretion to one-third. So that control over your schedule is the lowest level that it's ever been. And so, you know, albeit the people being able to dial up or dial down, their use of time is powerful. That's not the way that work looks for most people right now. Yeah, I think also actually what comes out of Alan Feldstein's research especially is about increasing work intensity, that the sort of speed of work has increased over the last decade or so, which would tie with, it would link in with some of these findings actually that if work generally is becoming more intense, it doesn't necessarily matter if you're, when you're doing it, it's still going to be experienced to some kind of stress on you.

31:22William Fleming: I read that you were working on something related to AI and AI usage. I'd love you to give us a peek behind the curtain of what you're working on right now. Yeah, so we have a big study going on at the moment, which is over a long period of time, we're interested in whether AI can, how it affects your experience at work. There's lots of great studies by economists showing that this is improving people's productivity through various metrics that actually it can, in some contexts, improve the quality of what people produce as well. So there's that more economic and more performance-oriented research that's already out there and already being published.

32:02But we are more interested as the Wellbeing Research Center in whether it's improving people's experience and how they're feeling work. And so we have a big randomized field experiment at the moment answering these questions. I don't want to say too much about how the results are going, but it's not quite so positive, I would say. and partly why I can talk maybe a bit about some other data analysis we've been doing, which seems to be that, of course, AI is basically transforming all knowledge work. On a daily basis, almost everybody is using it and is changing what we do, how we do, how we work with our colleagues and so on.

32:38One of the things that we've seen changing is that the number of meetings and calls that people are taking seems to be increasing with the amount of AI that people are using. and we think perhaps actually it's leading to something like well the time I come up with a relational intensity so because you can now do technical more isolated work much more efficiently so I'm working on a research paper it used to take me a week to do my coding and write up some tables now I can do that in a day so we need to have more coordination more quickly so I need to talk to my colleagues just the day after instead of the week after and so maybe is leading to this speeding up of the workplace.

33:19So I think we've got a bit of research around what's happening with AI and people's experience of work generally. And then we have this field experiment about whether this specific AI tool can actually help people. With the field experiment, the other thing I think we're learning is that it's very difficult to push a specific product, a specific AI product to help workers experience. I think partly because I mean I'm sure you experience as well you're just sort of bombarded by oh AI tool, AI this you know in your emails and on various websites, AI summaries and so on and I think to cut through the various development of AI I don't want to be too cynical and say you know AI not that's what I want to say but that's not what I mean I think there's just a lot of requests around AI and it's very new to people and you probably have preferred products and so on.

34:11And so we're finding a bit of challenge. We're also learning about, I think, AI adoption in organizations and about what sort of rollouts are effective and what's not so effective and how you reach people and how you go from an HR policy to actually changing people's behaviors, which actually touches in with my paper that we started talking about, about how do you actually reach people with well-being programs as well.

34:33William Fleming: Anyway, so there will be some great findings. It's interesting. There seems to be a sort of recurrent illusion that we find ourselves falling guilty of. I'm old enough to remember an era when people first got email on their mobile devices, and everyone was really clear that this was going to be the thing that reduced work intensity because it was going to turn downtime into the moment you could clear your inbox. So you could sit at your desk doing your job, and every step of the way, whether it was the advent of Slack, whether it was the advent of AI, whether it was the advent of transcription devices, every single thing has actually served to surprise us, to increase work intensity.

35:11William Fleming: So it's interesting your findings are moving in that direction. Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, I feel it as well. Rather than these being labor-saving technologies that actually don't need to work so much, you just end up doing more work because suddenly you can just speed up the whole process. And I mean, in the academic world, journals are receiving double the number of submissions than they were five years ago because everybody's just accelerating their own production. Although these are labour saving, we could just keep the expectations the same and we could just have more leisure time. That's not the route society set up to lead us down.

35:52William Fleming: Tell me this, as we're sort of coming to the end now, you're doing, I think, the most exciting research and work. You're actually answering the questions that people who do jobs want to know the answers to. So who's got in touch when you published your sort of well-being report? Who gets in touch? Who picks up the phone to you either to influence you or to ask you questions? Who gets in touch? Mostly popular podcasts on workplace relations, like yourself. No, no, I mean, it was – so I think, yeah, I mean, so many people reached out. It's been fun. You know, I love getting emails from people who often from companies, Maybe there are vendors of HR solutions or people management consultancies are also interested.

36:38Lots of journalists always want to have stories around well-being at work. It's always a hot topic. Of course, other researchers are interested in research findings. And sometimes people are, actually most people that get in touch are very positive. And it's, oh, this is so interesting. this has been a fresh perspective or these are new findings that counter existing thinking so thanks for that I don't really get the critical emails so often or critical phone calls I'm happy to have a bit of a debate in my emails but the critical people don't reach out so frequently but I think it's more

37:20especially organizations organizations and HR solutions, these types of vendors who have long been saying that we need to focus on the organization and not so much just on people's individual ability to cope. I think they're the ones that I get on with the best. For example, recently I applied to Australia to speak at a conference. And in Australia, they're very interested in my research because they've just had a whole load of new health and safety laws, which make more explicit the need to focus on psychological harms of work, whereas in lots of other policy in the UK, it's a bit more implicit and less codified.

37:57And so there, there is a real interest on, oh, how can we improve the quality of work for people to protect their mental health? And so there's been a real appetite there as well. So that's a geographic distinction as well as sort of industrial distinction.

38:10William Fleming: Love it. The final question is sort of, you know, as you're sitting there now and thinking about where your work goes next, Do you have things in mind that you want to research next? I mean, yeah, the timelines for research is always, because every project takes about five years. So you've got to have everything in various different stages. So I've got this working hours paper that we spoke about, which hopefully should come out at some point soon. Then probably the year after that, hopefully we'll have some findings around AI and well-being. Probably the year after that, we've got a new project on employment tribunals in the UK about how disputes are resolved.

38:45And actually, there's been a huge expansion of the employment tribunal system in the UK because of the new employment rights bill. So that seems to be, you know, the employment tribunal system is going to be a big enforcement mechanism for working conditions in the UK, which actually is a historical trend towards legalization of workplace issues. And so I'm not too sure. We're working on the data for that at the moment. I'm not too sure what we'll find about how the system is changing. and actually the system itself is being changed because it's so easy to write up documentary evidence through AI and all of this.

39:17So employment tribunals will probably come after the AI findings, I think. But I'm also interested in trying to do a project on some of the digital, more so your digital experience of work and how that impacts your wellbeing. So I'd say those are the main topics that I think people who listen to this podcast will be into. And then I have a few other projects on the go as well. So there's always one more to keep adding in.

39:42William Fleming: Will, I'm so grateful that you took the time to talk to us today. I love your work. I've linked to two or three bits of it in the show notes. And thank you for taking the time. No, thanks so much, Bruce. I hope all the listeners enjoyed it. And yeah, maybe even read some of the papers.

40:07All the profit later. That's no chaos now. No cash left behind later. Skip the showings now. Pocket extra profit later. This is so simple now. This is so awesome later. Or sell fast now and pop the champagne later. Cash now more later. Now available nationwide. Start your offer at opendoor.com slash ACAST. Profits calculated after fees and costs, eligibility and offer price may vary. Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with Stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home.

40:50Save up to 90 % with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com. Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. 75 % of women who seek menopause care don't receive it. The lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering what's happening to your body ends now. MIDI is virtual care built for women in perimenopause and menopause with clinicians who specialize in women's health. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. Midlife needs MIDI. Visit JoinMIDI.com to book your first visit today.

41:28That's JoinMIDI.com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.

41:35William Fleming: Thank you to Will Fleming. I appreciate that. Even if you're only slightly interested, reading some of those papers that I've linked to in the show notes gives you a real insight into the mechanics of, firstly, how that work is done. Gives you a real understanding of what's going on in our workplaces. Strongly recommended. Might take you 30 minutes to delve into one of them, but honestly, you'll feel so much better informed. If you're interested in this or anything about the examination of how to make work better, you'll find all of that in the weekly newsletter. And that's linked in the show notes.

42:11William Fleming: I've been Bruce Daisley. Thank you as ever for your company today. See you next time.

42:43We'll see you next time. Or sell fast now and pop the champagne later. Cash now, more later. Now available nationwide. Start your offer at opendoor.com slash ACAST. Profits calculated after fees and costs, eligibility and offer price may vary. Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things. So why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way? Mail and ship when you want, how you want with stamps.com. Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90 % with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com.

43:22Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. Thumbtack presents Tile Trouble. Every single time I use my sink, I make eye contact with the uneven ground on my kitchen backsplash. the crooked corners eye me and i'm haunted by more tiling questions than i thought possible what kind of pro can fix a backsplash can i replace one cracked tile or should i replace them all what what if i just use thumbtack i can hire top rated pros read reviews and compare prices with a tap all on the app thumbtack knows homes download the app today