""

Lonely U.K workers 43% less happy during pandemic

Published

Associate Professor Jan-Emmanuel De Neve to present findings to House of Lords Covid-19 Committee on 23 March

  • Work and Well-being During Covid-19: Impact, Inequalities, Resilience, and Lessons for the Future of Work published today in World Happiness Report
  • Furloughed workers experienced decline in wellbeing, even when fully paid
  • Sense of belonging, flexibility and inclusion are key drivers of wellbeing, not pay

New research published in the World Happiness Report today has laid bare the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on workforce well-being. It finds that, amongst people who could not work due to furlough or redundancy, those that reported being lonely to begin with became 43% less happy than people who were not lonely.

Loneliness is also predictive of a slower pace of wellbeing recovery once the worker returns to their job. “Non-lonely respondents had recovered to 95 percent of their baseline life satisfaction five weeks later. Lonely respondents had still not reached this milestone eight weeks on,” explain the authors.

These findings were drawn from the UCL Social Study, which has documented changes in social behaviour and mental health in the U.K. since April 2020.

The authors also studied the wellbeing impact of the U.K’s furlough scheme, which initially provided 80% of workers’ wages while forbidding them to undertake work for their organisation.

Furloughed workers reported a drop in wellbeing compared to those remaining in work, even in instances in which they retained their full salary. Those on 80% pay experienced the more significant decline, with an average 10% drop in life satisfaction. Workers who lost their jobs reported an average 21% drop in life satisfaction.

These findings point towards a ‘hybrid’ future of work, that strikes a balance between office life and working from home to maintain social connections while ensuring flexibility for workers.

Jan-Emmanuel De Neve

Associate Professor of Economics and Strategy

Despite the broad impact of Covid-19 on our wellbeing, the drivers of wellbeing at work have mostly stayed the same, but they are not what many business leaders would expect.

The authors find that a feeling of belonging, workplace flexibility and a sense of inclusion are more important to people than the contents of their paycheck. This finding was drawn from the largest ever survey of workplace wellbeing, which was conducted by Indeed.com exclusively for the World Happiness Report and surveyed over 4.5 million workers in the U.S.

Co-author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Associate Professor of Economics and Strategy at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford states: ‘My previous research showed how happy workers are 13% more productive. This paper proves that happiness is not driven by pay, and that the social connections and a sense of identity are more important. These findings point towards a ‘hybrid’ future of work, that strikes a balance between office life and working from home to maintain social connections while ensuring flexibility for workers, both of which turn out to be key drivers of workplace well-being.’

Image by Andrew Neel.