Workplace well-being constitutes only one major domain of business well-being. Other major domains include the well-being associated with the other stakeholders—customers, competitors, citizens, and shareholders of the business world. The construction of work- place well-being hopefully will serve as a model for other similar complex constructions. These domains of well-being form the basis for the development of indicators or indices associated with specific domains. The indices can be independently measured or they can form a composite index of business well-being. The function of the business well-being index can be used to identify, monitor and assessed the conditions of the business world. As such, it has important policy implications for government, corporations and society. People spend the bulk of their waking hours in workplaces of different shapes and sizes. How these workplaces are organized and managed have profound impact on people’s life and well-being. It is found that people’s life satisfaction is deeply affected by their job satisfaction. And people’s job satisfaction depends largely on their workplace well-being. It is also found that happier employees are more productive employees. The challenge for business is develop and maintain workplaces conducive to people’s satisfaction and hap- piness. The concept of workplace well-being proposed in this paper is a first step to lay out the major components of a workplace that are intimately associated with the well-beings of those working in it. Components including job characteristics, job roles, organization justice, person-organization fit, family-organization conflict and organization citizenship behavior are closely related to employee’s workplace well-being. How these components are designed, structured and managed presumably have identifiable and substantive effects on employees’ work lives. I have argued that workplace well-being should be understood against the values and ideals that shape and sustain it. The set of integrative values identified for Chinese communities is particularly critical to help secure sharper focus on the workplace components articulated in this paper as well as to provide fuller contents to the individual well-being components. Future work may include a more developed mea- sure of workplace well-being that has the related measureable indicators constructed for the individual well-being components. The development and implementation of workplace well-being index for corporations has its policy implications. With the help of such a measure, corporations have a more effective way to identify, measure and record the well-being of their employees, and through the well-being information indirectly secure the knowledge about how well the organization is managed. The data of the workplace well-being indices can provide valuable and timely information for managers to monitor and understand the well-being of the employees on a regular basis, and to alert them to potential problems within the organization so that remedial work can be done in a speedy manner. For employees, the well-being data can provide them important information about their own workplace sat- isfaction as well as the well-being of their fellow workers, and for them to plan responses as they see fit. Who should have access to this information is up to the corporation’s own discretion. Some may decide that the information is for internal consumption only, or only for management use. Others may try to make the information available to a wider group of stakeholders. If corporations were to make the information public, society would have a
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better idea of the well-being of the employees of those corporations, which would enhance their corporate image. This may help to attract valuable business partners, good employees as well as ethics-conscious consumers, thus enhancing corporate competitiveness. On a societal level, government may partner with trade groups and industry associations to launch awareness campaign to help corporations understand workplace well-being issues and to provide knowledge and consultancy support in devising workplace well-being implementation. Providing tax incentives for corporations that develop and implement workplace well-being measuring, monitoring and reporting may be a possible way forward. NGOs may also help in stimulating debates in this area, and promote social learning by bringing in the ideas and best practices to corporations and the public. States have responsibilities to their citizens’ well-being of which workplace well-being is a major component. The idea of developing a workplace well-being index and business well-being may be considered as a positive input to the recent development of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Greater China. One key element of CSR is the social dimension of responsi- bilities of which employee’s welfare is a major component. The idea of workplace and business well-being may provide valuable information to the formulation of the detailed contents of this element of CSR. On the other hand, workplace well-being study may also share similarities and common goals with recent dignity at work movement (Agassi 1986; Bolton 2007; Coats 2005; Hodson 2001; ILO 2005). The two areas can learn from each other through sharing of ideas and findings, as well as research agenda.