Indeed. Measuring progress with Work Wellbeing Score

When people choose a job, they don’t have a lot to go on: title, pay, location, star rating — we often have richer guidance on which hotel to stay in. It's no coincidence that only 22% of people are thriving at work. Could we give people much richer guidance, so we know whether a job delivers on what really matters? And with better market signals, could we inspire companies to improve the quality of work for the world’s ~3Bn workers?

Year: 2019, Ongoing

Role: Future Design Brand Strategy Campaign Creative Direction Design System Digital

Designing better work

Serving 350M jobseekers every month, Indeed is the world’s largest marketplace for work. Life-changing decisions happening every second.
The long-term goal of our work with Indeed has been leading people to better work that enables better lives.

The Work Wellbeing Score emerged from a collaborative design sprint between enso and Indeed’s marketing and product teams. We explored many ways to radically improve how people find work, and that journey led us to philosophers, psychologists, economists, writers, workers, investors and leaders.

What really matters

Working with Sonja Lyubomirsky, a pioneer of the science of happiness, and Jan Emmanuel De Neve who leads the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University, we re-designed how employees review their current company. Rather than an old 5-star rating (which doesn’t tell job seekers much), we began collecting employees’ perspectives on 14 different dimensions of wellbeing, from pay to belonging, inclusion, support and growth. This data gets distilled to a single score for each company, The Work Wellbeing Score.

For the first time, robust, comparable data on what ‘good work’ looks like, and where to find it. Now, when you’re choosing a job, you can have a real sense of whether it’s a place to thrive.

Championing work wellbeing

With a powerfully differentiating product feature, we wanted to get the word out. So we created everything from a mini-doc series featuring the world’s experts on wellbeing, to ads, to content, research studies and experiences for leaders.
We’ve been able to shed new light on what drives wellbeing; for instance, most people think pay is the most important factor — but the data reveals that social capital, particularly belonging, is the key driver.

Championing work wellbeing

The business case for wellbeing

Changing the labor market requires not only empowering workers to make better choices, but inspiring leaders to invest. Oxford analyzed the financial performance of public companies with a Work Wellbeing Score; high wellbeing companies have higher return on assets, higher valuations, higher profitability — and outperform the major stock indices by ~30%.

The future

This project won Fast Company’s World Changing Idea Award, and the data even drove a chapter in the UN World Happiness Report. While changing the labor market does not happen overnight, investors, leaders and employees now have much greater clarity — and incentives — to create a better experience for the world’s 3.5Bn workers. Indeed now has a powerful differentiator, a societally-important agenda, and the tools to create a transformational legacy; it has also become a founding member of the World Wellbeing Movement.

Enso’s perspective is that wellbeing will be a major pillar of the next era of capitalism. If only 22% of employees are thriving today, changing that may be the biggest lever for social and business success available today.