In this chapter, we outline the main and emerging issues in the measurement of workplace well-being, considering positive and negative markers of well-being. The chapter has four main sections. First, we present a brief history of major developments in the measurement of well-being, providing an overview of prominent concepts in the field and contextualising the other sections. Second, we outline recent developments in how to establish monetised benefits from changes in well-being, which can inform policy makers and organizational decision makers on cost-effective interventions to improve well-being. Third, because one of the core elements of well-being, affective experience, is highly volatile, we consider issues in assessing the dynamics of well-being. Finally, we examine variability between people in well-being and why between-person variability might matter.

The social welfare function (SWF) framework includes a well-being measure w(∙), for converting outcomes into vectors (lists) of well-being numbers.These well-being numbers are interpersonally comparable.This chapter discusses the construction of the well-being measure.It supposes that w(∙) operates on individual “histories,” a history being a combination of an attribute bundle a and a preference R.That is w(∙) = w(a, R).This setup is quite general.It encompasses preference-based well-being measures (namely those that assign well-being numbers to histories containing different bundles but the same preference in deference to that preference), as well as non-preference based measures.The chapter covers both, although mainly focusing on the former.Here, two approaches are discussed: the “equivalence approach,” whereby an individual’s well-being hinges on her attributes and her ordinal preference; and the “vNM approach,” which uses lottery preferences rather than ordinal preferences.