Why workplace wellness programmes don't work

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Check with your plan for coverage. This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It’s a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I’m Bruce Daisley. 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 wellbeing 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, where bosses using wellness initiatives as reputational alibis, giving them deniability when workers inevitably became exhausted by an unsustainable pace of work. Was wellness a way to try to ensure that the status quo wasn’t disrupted, but merely painted with a brighter hue? The research 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 Yann Emmanuel De Neve's Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford. My conversation with him takes in not only what is 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. 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, great to be here. I'm Will Fleming, and I'm a postdoc research fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre 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 at these questions from slightly more structural than individual focus anyway. And I've got a variety of projects really centred on how work affects us, how we can change work, and all of these types of topics. 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 Yann Emmanuel De Neve, who's a professor of behavioural 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. And so in the group, so Jan's 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 Plant, 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 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 at the LSE, which Richard Layard has been very influential in. And 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 of our other colleagues read, but we're very much interested in impact-led research. Yeah, I've always been interested in that. And 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 at the Wellbeing 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 Wellbeing Research Center, because we see a big conceptual distinction to be made. But 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, are not as committed to that knowledge transfer. And that's partly because of the incentives that you face. You know, I'm a junior researcher. My priority is publishing academic papers in top journals. And once you've got the name of the journal on your CV, you can basically stop and go into the next one. And so actually you're incentivized to publish, and 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 it necessarily on that day to day. Whereas I think in our research center, we—I think maybe because we're writing about well-being, it's so central. Well, it's just, it's everybody's life all the time. It'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. 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 that I had that had a few hundred organizations in it over a few years, and then I can't remember the exact number now, but about 50,000 employees by now across these organizations. And also within this there are various questions about HR policies that the organizations have, and especially a number of individual-level well-being programs. So by this I mean HR policies which were specifically targeted at just a single employee and trying to change their behaviors or mindsets, something we might call these resources. And so there were 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. So I kind of had this data, and then there was, in the academic literature for a while before probably for the last 10 years or 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 of, you know, trade union work. So 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 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 an RCT where everything is 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. Yes, 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 in, 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 their jobs and what they actually have to do. And so the idea being, in work you've got to cope with the requirements, and you have various skills and resources to manage this. But these very popular wellness psychological interventions are not actually attuned to what we're facing in our everyday. I mean, for me, the headline is great. You 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 well-being discourse that was too individualizing. It was very much focused on people's own ability to cope and wasn't really engaging with the day-to-day work and people's working conditions that they experience. So I think I just, especially, so this was especially coming out of the pandemic when there've been lots of change in organizations and everybody's work. There'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 my work pressures, and so on. So it did seem to touch a nerve. And since then, it's been great to see, yeah, on my LinkedIn is full of people always debating. While being an HR policy and all of this sort of stuff. So it definitely kick-started a bit of debate, which is great to see, and that's the kind of impact that we want to be having, to have people interrogating policies and organisations and about what's best for people. 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, you know, 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. Some research talks about the need to fit the job with the type of wellbeing intervention and whether they're actually tied together or not. And I think those questions remain. Our theories of wellbeing, both in and outside of workplace, they are 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, it would be the same. It's worth saying that there was one element of workplace interventions or wellbeing 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 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 who are happier are more engaged in the community. But 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 sort of extracurricular prosocial 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. Maybe 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 as they're not the solution to work as well-being, I would say. I just think there's— work as well-being, I would say. I just think there's probably a positive association, and it's probably good for employees to get this chance. Volunteering opportunities don't get at this fundamental issue about how we should improve workers' jobs and how organizations should 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 inclusion is led by what data is available and what's not. 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 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, and I was just really interested in exploring some of those things of the lens that we might bring to well-being programs. Yeah, so this paper, again, that I was working on for quite a long time, and really the starting point for it came where I wanted to know why we were suddenly talking about well-being 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, you know, back in 2008 we were publishing policy reports on it. But before that, it wasn't this explicit concern. So my big question really was like, 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 come... Device theoretical frameworks before and after. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on after it. But I think that was where I started from, is where did it come from? And very separate from the psychological, 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 who, you know, and is tied to what do well-being 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 well-being, we care about your mental health. But 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, and 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, you know, they would be there on time, they would be very engaged, and then when they 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 to the workplace through not only just there, not only just because that's where they get their income, but through value alignment, through lifestyle alignment. And so that's where it's control, but perhaps maybe less cynically it's more about a bit more of conditioning and then value alignment. So there's this whole critical literature on well-being programs, but normally people in 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 wellbeing as a public and social policy concern? That 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 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, you know, to a lesser extent, like doing it. You know, 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 the specific resource hub that I looked at, they sort of shirk the big questions around why is work good or bad for us, and when we're negatively affected at work, when our workforce is suffering from poor mental health, what are the causes of that and what can we do about it? And that this depoliticization aspect is that so much of the information around wellbeing tries to step back from the fact that often work is the problem. Often we have, you know, it might be really poor management. It might be you've got terrible colleagues. It might be that the workload is atrocious. It might be that you're 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. And so little of the discourse around wellbeing is actually engaging with that. So there's some other bits around this depoliticisation around, 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 unionisation 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. To try and think about wellbeing in work, not just as an HR concern or as a workplace concern, but it kind of ties into wider transformations in employment and also about societies and policies focus as well. Yeah, I was looking at—I was working on something recently, and it was sort of, if you recognise that groups, the idea of groups for health, that social identity theory, that feeling part of a collective seems to be one of the most predictive elements of our health and wellbeing. And then you say, well, then workplace cohesion actually has a societal role to play, because if you're spending 40 hours a week then 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. 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— A big part in the discourse about how we organise work right now, it seems at times that workplace wellbeing programmes are a cosmetic attempt to portray that the company is interested in workplace cohesion without necessarily ceding any of the power to. So that's why I was just, 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 wellbeing discourse, is that it's, you know, it's basically trying to cut them out. Often 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 employer organisations to, you know, wellbeing 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. 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. 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, a paper that you published this summer, where 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 completeds 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. Well, as you say, people talk about the 40-week and compressed 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, yeah, 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 four-day week pilots a few years ago, this really brought working time into our wider debates about employment. And so I, you know, so this is just a cool trend, and I was thinking, okay, I do, I'd 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 a 40-week, which is working time reduction, so you actually work fewer hours. And then you have working time compression, which is the same amount of time but spread 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 four-day week. And 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 compressed work week. 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 week versus not. And there's lots of reasons why you might change. And so we have divergent findings. So reduction is basically good for you, and compression 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 work week. Basically, there's nowhere suggests that the compressed work week is going to improve your well-being. You know, there's been various studies. There was one with, I think it was in Norway, civil service. They trialed in a few departments, and there were no changes, especially in absence, for instance, there was no change. And 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. This doesn't mean that that is harmful. And actually, this is what my study shows. I look at, in this British data, we also have a question of how much say over basically when and where you work you have. And actually, if you say, Oh, I've got a lot of control, we don't see any of these negative signs. 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 summarises fairly well what that study is saying. It's still under review, so there'll probably be a few changes and maybe a bit of additional analysis goes into it, which should hopefully help clarify some of these debates around. The interesting thing it goes with a piece, 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 that 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 Felstead'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 some, it would link in with some of these findings actually, that if work generally is becoming more intense, it doesn't necessarily matter when you're doing it, it's still going to be experienced as some kind of stress on you. I read that you were working on something related to AI and AI usage. I'd love you to give us a sort of 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 of work. So 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 is already out there and already being published. But we were more interested, as the Wellbeing Research Centre, in whether it's improving people's experience and how they're feeling at work. And so we have a big randomised 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 it's changing what we do, how we do, how we work with our colleagues, and so on. One of the things that we've seen changing is that the number of meetings and calls that people are taking seems to be increasing. 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 term I came up with is relational intensity. So because you can now do technical, more isolated work much more efficiently. So I'm working on a research paper. It would 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 it's leading to this speeding up of the workplace. So I think, so 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 and I don't want to be too cynical and say, you know, AI, it's 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. And 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 wellbeing programs as well. 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 the 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 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 sort of transcription devices, every single thing has actually served to surprise us, to increase work intensity. So it's interesting if your findings are moving in that direction. Yeah, definitely. I mean, yeah, I feel it as well. Rather than these being labor-saving technologies, you know, 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 labor-saving, we could just keep the expectations the same, and we could just have more leisure time. That's not the route society is set up to lead us down. Tell me this, as we're sort of coming to the end now, you're doing, I think, the most exciting research in work. Like, you're actually answering the questions that people who do jobs want to know the answers to. Who's got in touch when you published your sort of wellbeing 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 they're vendors of HR solutions or people management consultancies are also interested. Lots of journalists always wanted to have stories around wellbeing 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, especially 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 flew 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. And 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. 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 wellbeing. Probably the year after that, we've got a new project on employment tribunals in the UK about how disputes are resolved. And 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 the legalisation of workplace issues. And so I'm not too sure. We're working on the data for that at the moment, so 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. So employment tribunals will probably come after the AI findings, I think. But I'm also interested trying to do a project on some of the digital, more so 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. There's always one. There's always one more to keep adding in. 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 the listeners enjoyed it and, yeah, maybe even read some of the papers. Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90% off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds. Then schedule a pickup right from your home or office. For a limited time, go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST for a free welcome gift. Taxes and fees apply. Cash now, more later from OpenDoor gives you cash upfront for your home plus all 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/acast. Profits calculated after fees and costs. Eligibility and offer price may vary. Hot flashes. Rage crying. Forgetting words mid-sentence. Yeah, we know. Menopause is a lot. Midi Health gets it. That's why Midi offers virtual healthcare specially tailored to women's needs. Built for women, by women. Every symptom, every stage, every question. Visit joinmidi.com to get started today. That's join M-I-D-I dot com. Individual results and coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage. Thank you to Will Fleming. 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. I've been Bruce Daisley. Thank you, as ever, for your company today. See you next time. Shipping, billing, admin, payroll, marketing. You're managing all the things, so why waste time sending important documents the old-fashioned way? 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