Making wellbeing improvement cost-effective

Wellbeing is ‘how we’re doing’ and how sustainable that is for the future. We are aiming to improve wellbeing for the whole population in the UK, including for children and young people - who are our future. This means we need to be looking regularly at how our young people are doing. 

Resources in this project:

#BeeWell

Existing research

• The Department for Education - ‘State of the Nation 2020: Children and young people’s wellbeing’.
• Public Health England - Fingertips Profile of Children and Young People's Mental Health and Wellbeing.
• The Office for National Statistics - Wellbeing Indicators set.
• The Children’s Society - 2021 Good Childhood Report.
• OECD - Measuring What Matters for Child Wellbeing and Policies.

Wellbeing policy tools for decision-makers

How can this help you?

Covid-19: how can Local Authorities use emerging evidence to address wellbeing inequalities?

Culture and sport

• Sport, dance and young people
• Music, singing and wellbeing, including findings for young people

Employment transitions

• Finding and keeping work impact of wellbeing
• Unemployement and (re)employement
• Careers: what’s wellbeing like in different jobs?

Mental health treatment, early intervention

From the Centre

• Visual arts for mental health
• Music & Singing for those with diagnosed conditions

From other sources:

• Social & Emotional Skills for life and work (Early Intervention Foundation)
• Mental health and wellbeing guidelines (NICE)

Staff wellbeing

From the Centre:

• Overview employee wellbeing
• Wellbeing learning at work
• Team working/social connection at work
• Belonging at work and resilient organisations
• Retirement
• Job quality
• What is a good job?

From other sources:

• CIPD UK working lives job quality analysis
• Mindfulness at work evidence

Learning

Evidence from the Centre:

• Adult learning
• Wellbeing benefits of job related learning

Evidence from other sources:

• Apprenticeships – evidence informed guidance on take up and completion of apprenticeships (What Works for Local Growth)
• Employment training programmes – what to include for them to be effective and how to get high take up and completion (What Works Centre for Local Growth)
• Post 16 English & Maths attainment (Early Education Foundation)

• Read the first insight report in the series - When we sing it sounds like there are more of us: Findings from the first cohort of the Carer’s Music Fund
• See how projects are sustaining a wellbeing focus through the pandemic
• Listen to the podcast: Singing hurries along friendship: a Carers’ Music Fund insights podcast 

More about the Fund

Understanding the impact and sharing learning to tackle loneliness

1. Reducing or preventing loneliness, by enabling projects tackling loneliness to be more effective and evaluate their impact.
2. Build on our existing knowledge to better understand the most effective approaches to measure, reduce and prevent loneliness. Once complete in 2021, findings from the project will be used to improve the evidence base on loneliness. This will inform longer-term policy and funding decisions.

For grant-holders

10 tips to help your project reduce loneliness

Guidance on evaluation for grant holders

Guidance on co-design and community spaces

1. A brief introduction to co-design and why it matters
2. Top tips and tools for creating and monitoring a co-design process
3. Advice on how to evaluate co-design by reflecting on: the benefits of co-design for staff and young people; the quality of the co-design process; and insights into addressing loneliness and social isolation.

Co-design and community spaces - Final Report

Tips to help your remote project tackle loneliness

• Help service users increase their engagement with online activities and offer choice to meet different service users’ needs.
• Ensure support is consistent and reliable, with healthy relationships between staff and users and regular support to create trust and reassurance.
• Work together with local organisations to avoid duplication.
• Put appropriate safeguarding and privacy measures in place.
• Respond to changing user needs during different lockdowns or social distancing restrictions.

Reflections from the Building Connections Fund developmental evaluation

Covid:WIRED - The Covid Wellbeing Inequalities Research Evidence Dashboard

• Health
• What we do
• Relationships
• Money
• Where we live
• Education

*Developed by Deborah Hardoon, Ingrid Abreu-Scherer, Rosie Maguire, Saamah Abdallah, Sam Wren-Lewis, Liz Zeidler, Lisa Muller, Melissa Cairns, Joanne Smithson and Nancy Hey - in partnership with Centre for Thriving Places.

What is social prescribing?

Evidence-informed models

PERMA Plus

• Sleep
• Nutrition (five vegetables and two fruits a day)
• Physical activity
• Optimism

Five Ways to Wellbeing

• Connect
• Be active
• Take notice
• Keep learning
• Give

10 Keys to Happier Living

Other useful resources for social prescribing

The Health Foundation – What makes us healthy

C3 Collaborating for Health

• improving what we eat and drink
• stopping smoking
• increasing physical activity

Wellbeing outcome measurement

Where to find and create wellbeing data?

• UK Wellbeing Framework
• Sources of wellbeing data - which surveys the ONS4 are in 
• Local Area Wellbeing Indicators 
• Clustering local authorities against subnational indicators, England
• Thriving Places Index
• Map of wellbeing inequality across Great Britain 2017

How to create and use your own wellbeing data

• Using ONS4 in your survey
• Measure your wellbeing impact
• Workplace wellbeing snapshot survey and question bank
• Wellbeing policy tools for decision-makers

What analysis has been done? 

Analysis of ONS4

• Improve wellbeing with data infrastructure: seven actions for organisations

Culture and sport

• Music and singing  
• Sport and dance
• Visual arts
• Outdoor recreation

Work and learning

• Educational outcomes 
• Education to employment
• Adult learning 
• Job-related learning 
• Job changes
• Gender and employment
• What is a good job?

Life course analysis and cost effectiveness

• Origins of happiness
• Policy tools: wellbeing impacts and value for money - an online course

Community

• Measuring wellbeing inequality across Britain 
• Drivers of wellbeing inequality
• Social fragmentation and social deprivation
• Thriving Places 
• Community wellbeing spillover effect of violent crime

The recommended questions and scales

• Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
• Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
• Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
• Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?

• ‘Your manager helps and supports you’
• ‘Your colleagues help and support you’
• ‘Your job gives you the feeling of work well done’

• Southampton City Council: Employee wellbeing
• Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council: Mental wellbeing & inequalities
• East Devon County Council: Recovery & resilience
• Walsall Council: Wellbeing in all policies
• Sutton Council: Helping Early Strategy
• Babergh & Mid Suffolk District Council: Wellbeing strategy
• The City of Edinburgh Council: Wellbeing programme
• Westminster City Council: Employee wellbeing programme
• Redcar & Cleveland Council: Wellbeing strategy
• Kirklees Council: Inclusion Commission

• Define what wellbeing means in local areas
• Gather wellbeing data and assess wellbeing need
• Source evidence of what works to improve wellbeing and review how this applies in each area
• Select measures to understanding wellbeing impact
• Effectively review and evaluate policy

• The higher our income the less influence an increase has on our wellbeing and we get used to increases (we adapt). For example, £10 makes a much bigger difference to someone on minimum wage compared to someone already earning £35,000 a year.  This means we need to balance with other sources of wellbeing.
• We feel loses more than gains - You lose more wellbeing from a fall in income than you gain in wellbeing from an equal rise in income.
• Our perception of other people’s wealth, relative to our own, makes a difference to how we rate our wellbeing.
• Expenditure has a greater impact than level of income alone.
• There is no clear relation between average rate of economic growth and average employment rate. It is clear that unemployment has surprisingly big impacts on wellbeing, similar to that of bereavement and larger than can be explained by loss of income alone; and that we do not adapt, or get used to, being unemployed.

• Wellbeing evidence at the heart of policy
• Joint decision-making
• Using local indicators to improve local areas
• Supporting local authorities on strategies for improving wellbeing

Watch the Business Leaders' Council webinars

• What works for supporting employee mental health? October 2021
• How can businesses put wellbeing into the 'S' of ESG? (Blog) September 2021
• Why financial wellbeing matters at work June 2021
• Good work for wellbeing in the Coronavirus economy February 2021
• Why is employee wellbeing so important? December 2020
• How can we support the wellbeing of staff returning from furlough? October 2020

Business Leader benefits

• Engage with other leaders in non-competitive sectors, research academics and government on the subject of wellbeing.
• Help shape the agenda for research and policy on wellbeing, addressing all key drivers of wellbeing, not only of employees but also of customers and the communities in which businesses operate.
• Attend and contribute to the development of content for the All Party Parliamentary Group Wellbeing Economics.
• Attend, contribute and be named supporters of the Centre’s new evidence briefings (at no extra cost).
• Gain insight from academia into emerging workplace research and its relevance and have access to pre-publication findings from Centre projects.
• Access further sponsorship opportunities of new Centre publications and thereby benefit from enhanced reputation, corporate branding, associated position of thought leadership and input into any subsequent events related to the reports.
• Be profiled as practice examples and feature in guest blogs on the Centre’s website through blogs.
• Discuss the development of new and bespoke projects tailored to your business needs that also align with the Centre’s mission and further businesses’ and society’s understanding of wellbeing.
• Take advantage of pilot schemes to test implementation of wellbeing interventions to gain evidence and new insight into what works.
• Access support from the Centre to advise on evaluation methods for wellbeing interventions in your business.
• Receive briefings on developments in wellbeing public policy
• Offer potential for collaboration with academics, other companies and funders.
• Meet regularly through the year with information exchanged electronically between meetings.

In our role as an independent collaborating centre and thought leader, the What Works Centre for Wellbeing brings together the disparate theoretical threads to draw out what this means, practically, for decision makers. The Centre recognises wellbeing as a multi-dimensional concept, where a range of definitions and measures may apply and are useful for different purposes.

We don’t have just one measure of health or illness; we have many different tools designed to help us understand each in different situations. We’d like to encourage discussion of how different approaches to understanding and measuring wellbeing might be applied as ‘the best tool for the job’ in different situations as well.

This series of discussion papers, 'how-to guides', and sector perspectives include inputs from leaders in the field. It draws together views of how we could define and measure wellbeing and use this in decision-making in different sectors across UK.

• Prof Layard Using Subjective Wellbeing (Discussion paper 1)
• Prof Huppert  Using Wider psychological wellbeing measures (Discussion paper 2)
  • Academic Perspective Measurement really matters 
  • Abdallah Insights from European Social Survey
• Prof Dolan, Kundra, and Testoni  Using Experiential Measures of Subjective Wellbeing (Discussion paper 3)
  • Academic Perspective If you really want to know how happy we are ask often 
• Measuring wellbeing inequalities: a how-to guide
• Prof Sarah Stewart-Brown Insights and Reflections on the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scales (WEMWBS)

• Understanding happiness: ways to measure wellbeing including text and social media analysis
• Towards a WELLBY, a Wellbeing-adjusted life year
• Prof De Neve Beyond GDP: the economics of human wellbeing
• McManus Why nuance is needed when evaluating wellbeing
• Singh Sector Perspective How can we tell our story if we’re not measuring what we do?
• Singh Sector Perspective We’ve always done it, so why don’t we measure it? 
• Goodwin-Brown Sector Perspective Conversation with Funders on wellbeing evidence 

• Scottish Government Wellbeing Outcomes and Devolved Government
• The Childrens Society Measuring Children's Wellbeing in Practice
• Bromley by Bow Centre Who decides wellbeing measures 
• Triangle Using Outcomes Stars
• Work Foundation Measuring the impact of employee assistance programmes 
• Artis Foundation Measuring Impact of the Arts as a creative learning charity 
• Wellbeing measurement and people with learning disabilities
  • Leonard Cheshire Charity When off the shelf can miss the mark 
  • Scottish Commission for Learning Disability Measuring Quality of Life for people with learning disabilities

• Read our 2021 blog - Summary of HM Treasury’s Green Book: Valuation of Wellbeing Guidance for Appraisal

What do you do differently when you include wellbeing?

1. Strategic level

2. Policy or project level

• Design options which improve wellbeing, based on the evidence
• Use the wellbeing evidence to better achieve outcomes, since wellbeing in turn improves productivity, health and pro-social behaviours

3. Appraising options

• Consider the full potential impacts
• Quantify wellbeing impacts and monetising where possible
• Reflect the impacts on different groups

1. A goal for society or progress like the HMT Green Book describes wellbeing as 'social welfare'.
2. A framework, often based ongoing conversation about what matters, using outcomes and indicators.

• community wellbeing and how it is linked to individual wellbeing
• community spaces and infrastructure
• social relations
• loneliness and social isolation
• heritage
• housing
• culture, arts, and sport
• inequalities in wellbeing, and the drivers of wellbeing inequalities
• using locally available data to improve wellbeing

• Make the case for putting wellbeing at the heart of palliative and end of life care and services, especially in Advance Care Planning conversations
• Provide a space for practitioners show their experience and insights of putting wellbeing the heart of hospice and palliative care
• Showcase research that can help policy makers and practitioners design better, wellbeing-focused services
• Bring together a collaborative network of interested practitioners, policy makers and researchers to share learning and ideas

Dying Well Conversations

This is a series of conversations about wellbeing and terminal illness which took place in April and May 2021. We are bringing together practitioners, academics and individuals to talk about what really matters to people with life-limiting or terminal illness, and how to develop support which puts their wellbeing - and that of their families - at the heart. 27.04.2021 - Conversations at the end of life

 11.05.2021 - A good place to die 18.05.2021 - Understanding and measuring wellbeing Summary of conversations - Dying Well: Wellbeing at the end of life Coming Up 

• We'll be publishing a series of blogs from research, policy and practice on wellbeing and terminal illness. If you have a study, story, or project to share please get in touch!
• Watch this space for a podcast too.

• student and staff wellbeing and mental health in higher education settings
• adult and young adult learning in community, work-place, and further education settings - you can also read more about adult learning below

Whether we have a job or not is the third biggest factor associated with our wellbeing, after our mental and physical health and our personal relationships.  

• a workplace wellbeing questionnaire
• job quality
• unemployment and (re)employment
• transitions from education to work
• retirement
• learning and training
• gender and employment
• progression and job security
• finding and keeping work
• belonging at work and organisational resilience
• team working

• Delivering National Public Mental Health
• Visual arts and mental heath
• Wellbeing training in healthcare settings
• Finding and keeping work
• Sport and dance for young people
• Teen mental health and educational attainment
• Student mental health
• WEMWBS Mental Wellbeing: Evaluation Deep-Dive

• music and singing
• heritage
• visual art
• sport and dance
• outdoor recreation.

• Having someone to rely on in times of trouble is the top driver of difference between high and low wellbeing countries.
• Our partner relationship is the second biggest driver of overall life satisfaction. 

Loneliness and wellbeing

Loneliness and social isolation

• Read Volunteer Wellbeing: what works and who benefits? You'll also find more recommendations for policy, funders, commissioners, and research on the resource page.
• Scroll down for a full list of  resources

• Volunteering is associated with enhanced wellbeing, including improved life satisfaction, increased happiness and decreases in symptoms of depression. Volunteering fits into the wellbeing cycle of communities. Either because volunteering leads to improved wellbeing for volunteers, or because when people feel well they are more likely to get involved. 
• Older people, the unemployed and those who already have chronic ill health and low wellbeing gain more from volunteering than others. Volunteering also has a buffering role for those going through life transitions, such as retirement or bereavement.
• Groups with the most to gain from volunteering face barriers to getting involved because of lack of opportunity. Ill-health and disability are particular barriers for low income groups.
• The intensity and demands of some volunteer roles may have a negative effect. The way volunteers are involved and engaged can enhance or hinder the positive wellbeing effects of volunteering. 

1. Being more inclusive.
2. Increasing connectedness.
3. Creating a more balanced volunteering experience. 
4. Making volunteering meaningful.

• See our Director Nancy Hey's Presentation at the OECD Putting Wellbeing Metrics into Policy Action 3-4 October 2019

• know about it, and can find it
• find it useful, and can use it
• can contribute to what is known.

1. Evidence review of What Works for Research Use
2. Public dialogues
3. Stakeholder engagement  Delphi approach to culture & sport programme led by Brunel University London
4. Methods Guide for our reviews 

Build your own briefing for your context:

• Covid:WIRED: Wellbeing Inequalities Research and Evidence Dashboard 

Read our briefings:

• The impact of the pandemic on subjective wellbeing inequalities
• Covid-19 and wellbeing inequalities: Housing
• Covid-19 and wellbeing inequalities: Employment and income

Read our analysis:

• What matters for our sense of purpose?
• What helped the UK cope with the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns?
• How has Covid-19 - and the associated lockdown measures - affected mental health and wellbeing in the UK?
• How has Covid-19 affected loneliness?

• Wellbeing and employment
• Wellbeing of men and women in the UK
• Wellbeing and age

• use and understand the wellbeing data and measures that now exist 
• develop the methodology for using wellbeing data and evidence in decision-making, including the field of wellbeing economics.
• increase the use of comparable measures across sectors and disciplines.