This is a synopsis of what I said at my talk December 1 2011 to the UCL Crucible Centre’s Café Scientifique group. |It was, in part, part of the UCL "Grand Challenge of Human Wellbeing". The aim was to discuss whether wellbeing could be measured, and whether there was any feasible way to improve it. Short version of the answer is, I fear, no and no.

Part of what I said has already appeared in the British Medical Journal, and on this blog: The A to Z of the Wellbeing Industry: from angelic reiki to patient-centred care.. Some of the new stuff seems worth noting here. I apologise in advance if some parts seems overcritical of UCL. I suspect it is just as bad everywhere else, but I can write only about what I know.

I’d better start as I did last time

Nobody could possibly be against wellbeing. It would be like opposing motherhood and apple pie. There is a whole spectrum of activities under the wellbeing banner, from the undoubtedly well-meaning patient-centred care at one end, to downright barmy new-age claptrap at the other end.  The only question that really matters is, how much of it works? 

The night before the meeting there were some relevant exchanges on Twitter. I’m with Margaret McCartney. The word wellbeing has been stolen for the purposes of making money. There is often about as much interest in finding out what works as there is in alternative medicine. Expect more of it under the present government.

Questionnaires

Not long after the talk, a relevant piece appeared in Times Higher education, on 15 December. it was by my colleague, Adrain Furnham (professor of psychology at UCL). Doubtless it was brought on by the barrage of emails badgering us to fill in the latest staff survey (I did). Two quotations give the flavour.

Where’s the ticked-off box?

"The staff survey is, of course, the province of the most hated, loathed and despised department in the university – human resources. The survey-wallahs go to great pains to get a good response rate. They appoint, recruit and bamboozle people into becoming survey “champions”, whose job is to get people to complete the damn thing. Nothing peeves, irks and frustrates the survey people more than a poor response rate. "

"Who sees the results? It is customary for a “client” and respondents to receive a report giving the headline results. But do these reports ever show the really bad news? Namely, the news that 87 per cent of people neither like nor respect nor trust their manager, that 74 per cent are very strongly not proud to work for the organisation, and that a staggering 94 per cent think the appraisal/performance management system is a pointless, time-wasting, bureaucratic exercise?".

Watch Barbara Ehrenreich on the positive thinking industry. She’s very good on the suggestion that positive thinking influences your fate through your immune system, It doesn’t. That’s the favourite mantra of every quack and snake oil salesman.

The YouGov poll on Happiness and Wellbeing

The YouGov poll starts with the usual unanswerable questions.

I still maintain that every day is a mixture of good and bad things. Any answer I give to questions like this is pure guesswork. At least you get to tell them what you think. The fact that on average people mark it around 7 is perhaps more a sign of guesswork than useful information.

I said that I disagree most with "A wellbeing index could accurately reflect the real standard of loving of the nation", but that’s the only strong statement that was allowed: The other 6 are all either wimpy or they endorse the silliness.

UCL’s staff survey

Recently UCL got its own customer satisfaction survey. Despite repeated reminders, fewer than half the staff bothered to complete it (the day before it closed, only 28% of the Division of Biosciences had done so). I can understand why.

Just like the last time. many of the questions were infuriating, because no answer seemed satisfactory without adding qualifications, and you couldn’t do that, There was a single free text box at the end. And, guess what, what people write in it will be kept secret.

This is a very odd question to ask academics. The only course in my area is the one that I and colleagues run, unpaid and with no support from UCL. HR have done nothing that helps my understanding of stochastic processes (though academic colleagues have done a great deal). A comment, below, hits the nail on the head.

“Agree? Great, staff development are doing a good job! Disagree? Clearly you need … more staff development courses!”

Well informed? Yes there are endless newsletters, though they increasingly read like PR rather than information.

Most people are terrified to stand up at a meeting of academic board or to vote against the senior management committee decisions (no secret votes there -you have to put up your hand). The same is true of Faculty Boards, though they have become rare. Perhaps that is why so few people go to them any longer. It will be interesting to see how this question is answered (if it is ever released).

Anyone can pass their ideas to senior management. I have done so quite often. I can’t, off-hand, think of any case where my suggestions have been acted on. I expect that is why most people don’t bother.

The question about relations between support staff and academics is equally unanswerable without qualifications. In my experience relationships have always been very good with lower rank people with whom you work and meet regularly. It is often not so good with senior adminisrators, too many of whom treat academics as a nuisance that gets in the way of their ambitions. Recent changes have probably made relations worse, because the centralisation of support staff means that you rarely know any of them personally. But there is no space on the questionnaire to say any of this.

It’s hard to answer question 5 too. There is a general perception that the main object of communication is to tell you what to do. Much of it is too vacuous to have any detectable meaning. A large amount of it is, i suspect, never read.

Question 6. The abolition of local tea rooms has reduced the ability to learn and share knoowledge. The one place we have is the Housman room. It is beyond belief that there was recently an attempt to abolish it. I gather that that threat has receded but it wasted a great deal of time to organise petitions. We are deluged with newsletters from one ‘domain’ or another, and though they have some useful information, they do not begin to compensate for face to face meetings which are now less frequent than formerly. As I wrote elsewhere, failing to waste time drinking coffee can seriously harm you career. The survey questions allow none of these things to be said.

Finally we come to ‘Overall perceptions’.

These are the hardest of all.

Yes, I’d recommend UCL as a good place to work, certainly better than Imperial. On the other hand it’s not as good as it was. One now meets colleagues less than at any time in the past. When you enter what used to be my department, you are greeted with a sea of locked doors. No office, no pigeon holes. no tea room. At times it feels as though you might as well be working on an assembly line in a car factory.

Am i proud to work for UCL?. Yes, very, at one level. It’s my sort of place. I couldn’t stand the flummery of Oxbridge, and godless heritage of UCL is perfect for me. But am I proud of some of the recent changes? No, I am not. There is, of course, no chance to explain these subtleties.

Question 3 is easy. Which department? My department was abolished, despite being the oldest in England, and consistently getting top ratings. Its morale used to make a wonderful working environment. .It’s hard to generate much sense of belonging to a huge grouping with a catchy name like NPP (that’s neuroscience. physiology and pharmacology), most of whose members you have never met. The separation of teaching from research has also reduced any sense of cohesiveness.

As for the last question, you must be joking.

Wellbeing and resilience at work

That’s the title of a web page from UCL’s occupational health people.

"Wellbeing is not just about being happy; it is also about having the resilience to deal effectively with change and unpredictability. We can all develop skills to help us when things are not going as well as we hope or expect."

When you click on the questionnaire you are taken to the absurdly long (195 questions) Robertson-Cooper resilience questionnaire, about which I already wrote a bit. You’d need a lot of resilience to finish it and would probably learn very little.

You are directed then to "useful tools" for improving your wellbeing and resilience. These too are outsourced, to the International Stress Management Association.

Let’s look at their valuable advice.

This is the sort of advice that’s thrust down your throat at every turn. It’s puerile and condescending to present us with diagram like that. I love the way that coffee is categorised with alcohol. That’s nothing short of pure quackery. The sort of thing you might have expected from a graduate in "nutrtitional therapy" (before Westminster closed it down).

The resilience diagram is equally peurile.

It’s hard to escape being lectured about wellbeing. It’s turned into a major soure of bullying and harassment. The best thing that could be done for my wellbeing is for the self-styled experts to get a proper job.

The UCL Grand Challenge in Human Wellbeing

This rather grand sounding project is one of the five Grand Challenges. They are, I think, well-meaning (though the more cynical views that I hear suggest that they are designed to get money from Bill Gates’ Foundation).

Quite a lot of money has been spent on them. So one must ask whether they have resulted in any work being done that would not have been done without paying a large salary to a "Director of Grand Challenges". Have they produced enough to compensate for the embarrassment engendered by the pretentious-sounding name?

The list of projects is interesting. Some are worthy enough, but would probably have happened anyway. None are particularly interdisciplinary, despite that being one of the alleged advantages. More to the point though, some of them seem to have little chance of contributing to anyone’s happiness.

One good one is run by Michael Marmot.

This is the sort of thing that Marmot is very good at. It doesn’t need a “Grand Challenge”. Marmot talked about it at the Café Scientifique on 5 Jan 2012. It was a really good talk. Of course it isn’t likely that it will actually achieve much, not least with Andrew Lansley as Health Secretary, but I wish them well. It’s very good that they are trying.

The Wellbeing intervention study.

This study will measure subjective wellbeing and salivary cortisol after two sorts of writing exercise. it will be randomised, but not blind. So, if there is any effect at all, it will have a better chance of establishing causality than most of the "trials" that HEFCE is paying Robertson-Cooper to do. What is much less obvious is how the results could be used, even in the unlikely event that one writing exercise made people happier or less-stressed than the other.

The body scanner project: wellbeing UCL.org

Although wellbeingUCL.org sounds like a UCL thing, the domain is registered at the home address of the UCL person who invented a 3D body scanner.

So far this interesting gadget has been used by the clothing industry. Now it is being offered to UCL people, as "a ‘proof-of-concept’ for national Wellbeing surveys”. Its certainly heavily sponsored. Before going into the scanner you are invited to do yet another questionnaire. The questions strike me as a bit odd, There are endless web sites that offer to manage wellbeing, Why Boots? Well they do happen to be a sponsor. I;m not sure that that’s a good idea, Boots are notorious for selling fraudulent "wellbeing" products such as "detox" nonsense and vitamin pills.

Boots are constantly being reprimanded by the Advertising Standards Authority, most recently over their advertising of homeopathic pills

.Here is a sample from the questionnaire.

And as for the idea that most academics can afford, or would want, a personal trainer. Word fail me.

The scanner is an interesting machine, but even its promoters don’t seem to have much idea what it could do for your wellbeing.

The museum object therapy study.

This is based on the somewhat unlikely premise that holding a museum object will make you feel better.

The AHRC gave a grant of £300,000 to test the idea. There were controls (in the form of photographs of the objects rather than the objects themselves), But as the authors themselves recognise, the design of the study did not allow any firm conclusions to be drawn. It’s really rather like the endless indecisive pilot studies that litter the world of alternative medicine. They usually show promising results, but the promise somehow never get confirmed if the study is done properly. But what really baffles me is what use it would be even if the results were positive? Would we see hospital wards overrun with museum people thrusting ancient objects into the hands of sick patients? If so, make mine a machete.

I can’t believe this is a good way to spend £300,000.

Conclusion

Wellbeing sounds good, but a lot of money is being spent on things that won’t improve it.

If you universities really wanted to improve wellbeing they would listen to Michael Marmot, and stop disempowering their employees.