If you happen to be in London on Wednesday 21st October, the Employee Well-being Forum might be worth a visit. The programme boasts that “at this event you will hear a wealth of best practice case studies offering practical advice to improve wellness strategies and decrease absence and stress in the workplace through the recession”. Hmmmmmm…. That the Forum is taking place at Canary Wharf* is an irony that won’t be lost on many of the delegates, I’m sure…

I notice that Unilever is represented – you’ll remember we spoke about them in the last posting about costs and benefits of well-being. And Nic Marks from the fabulous New Economics Foundation,which gave us the (Un)Happy Planet Index (how efficiently we use resources to generate well-being) and the National Accounts of Well-being (personal and social well-being in 22 European countries). Apart from that I can’t see any connection between this forum and Positive Psychology….and you can’t talk seriously about well-being without talking about Positive Psychology, can you?

If anyone reading this is going to the forum I’d love to have your feedback.

*Venue:

CCT Venues-Canary Wharf
Isis Building – Thames Quay
193 Marsh Wall
London, E14 9SG

Thanks to garethr for the image

You’ll be interested to know that in July, the independent think-tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) published the European Happy Planet Index of carbon efficiency and well-being in the EU.

It reveals that Europe is less carbon-efficient at delivering well-being (measured in terms of the happy, long lives of its citizens) than it was over 40 years ago. This might come as a surprise to some people – after all, as a whole we are wealthier than ever.

The good news is that some European countries are doing pretty well in terms of high levels of well-being (a combination of how satisfied people feel with their lives overall, and their life expectancy at birth). Those in the North such as Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland, as well as Switzerland, report the highest levels of subjective life satisfaction. Interestingly, Iceland and Sweden also have some of the lowest per capita carbon footprints, despite being amongst the richest nations. As a result, Iceland tops the European Happy Planet Index, followed by Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.

And the bad news? Some economically-advanced countries feature pretty poorly in the Index. Take the UK for example – it comes 15th out of 30 in rank order for both life satisfaction and life expectancy. It also has the 4th largest per capita carbon footprint in Europe, behind Luxembourg, Estonia and Finland. As a result the UK ranks 21st out of 30 overall in the European HPI, only slightly ahead of ‘transition’ countries such as Bulgaria and Lithuania.

Countries like Germany, Finland and France don’t fare much better either, coming 15th, 16th and 18th in the Index respectively.

So what can we conclude from this? Quite simply, as I’m sure you already know deep-down, consumption is not the main route to well-being. If this were true, the poorer countries would always feature at the bottom of NEF’s league tables, but they don’t.

What the report also shows us, however, is that it is not impossible to be prosperous, happy and green. Perhaps we should be looking towards countries like Iceland and Sweden for some answers?