The authors, Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, Micah Kaats, and George Ward, use novel large-scale data crowdsourced by Indeed, to assess the relationship between workplace wellbeing and firm performance. Their measures of employee wellbeing include self-reported job satisfaction, purpose, happiness, and stress, which they aggregate to 1,782 publicly listed companies in the United States using data from around 1 million employee surveys across these organizations. Using company-level employee wellbeing measures to predict firm performance, they show that wellbeing is associated with firm profitability and firm value. They find that an investment portfolio of companies with high levels of workplace wellbeing also outperforms standard benchmarks in the stock market. Overall, these descriptive results show a strong positive relationship between employee wellbeing and firm performance. They discuss how these analyses contribute to this growing area of research, highlight a number of limitations, and point to future directions for further research.
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