LONDON — Workers who enjoy what they do each day rate their lives more than a full point higher on Gallup’s zero-to-10 life evaluation scale than those who don’t enjoy what they do, according to a new 优蜜传媒analysis of more than 350,000 employed adults across 149 countries from 2020 to 2025.
But the analysis also reveals that job choice and purpose play an outsized role among specific populations, including full-time employees, workers in their peak career-building years and those living in lower-income economies.
Data from the 优蜜传媒World Poll show that, of three aspects of the work experience measured globally, enjoyment of daily work has the strongest and most consistent relationship with broader wellbeing outcomes. This pattern holds across most countries, age groups and employment types — though the relative importance of purpose and choice varies by context.
Work occupies a central place in people’s lives, shaping not only economic outcomes but also how people experience and evaluate their lives overall. To better understand this connection at a global level, Gallup, in collaboration with the Wellbeing for Planet Earth (WPE) Foundation and Persol, measures three core aspects of workplace wellbeing: enjoyment, purpose and choice. These dimensions reflect how work is experienced on a daily basis, whether it is seen as improving the lives of others, and the degree of freedom people have in what they do. These dimensions are closely connected: Having greater choice in one’s work can shape both the enjoyment people experience day to day and the sense of purpose they derive from it.
How Each Work Dimension Relates to Wellbeing Globally
Globally, workers who do enjoy their daily work rate their lives more than a full point higher on a zero-to-10 scale than those who don’t enjoy it. That gap is larger than the 0.8-point difference associated with freedom of choice at work and the 0.7-point difference associated with feeling that one’s work improves the lives of others. For context, the gap associated with having a serious health condition is 0.8 points, while severe social isolation is associated with a 1.4-point difference.
Enjoyment shows the largest gap globally, but all three dimensions are independently associated with each of the five wellbeing outcomes tested: ratings of life today, expectations for life in five years, sense that one’s life is worthwhile, and positive and negative daily emotions.
The global findings in the first chart are average wellbeing scores, which are sufficient to illustrate the overall pattern. However, when breaking results down by country, age group and employment type, there are systematic differences in factors like income, education and marital status that also affect wellbeing. The estimates in the following sections account for differences in age, gender, income and other factors that vary across these groups to better isolate each work dimension’s relationship with wellbeing.
Country Differences Shape Which Dimension Leads
The overall pattern (enjoyment showing the largest association with life evaluations) holds in most countries, but the relative association of the three dimensions varies.
In Japan, for example, workers who enjoy their daily work rate their lives 0.66 points higher on the zero-to-10 scale, after accounting for demographic differences. Purpose, by contrast, has almost no independent association (0.08 points). In the United States, the pattern is more balanced: Enjoyment (0.44 points) and choice (0.45 points) are nearly equal, distinguishing the U.S. from the global pattern where enjoyment leads more clearly.
In Indonesia, the enjoyment gap is the largest of any country in the analysis (0.96 points), while choice shows virtually no independent association. In India, enjoyment also leads (0.51 points), though purpose plays a somewhat larger role (0.23 points) than it does in most other countries.
In some countries, job choice plays the leading role. In Nigeria, choice shows the strongest association with life evaluations (0.57 points), followed by enjoyment (0.42 points). A similar pattern emerges in Mexico, where choice (0.43 points) far exceeds enjoyment (0.09 points). In both cases, the findings suggest that where economic constraints limit workers’ options, the ability to choose what one does is especially consequential for wellbeing.
Across the full set of countries examined, enjoyment is the strongest or among the strongest of the three dimensions in the majority of cases. But the exceptions — particularly in lower-income economies where choice emerges as the dominant factor — underscore that the relationship between work and wellbeing is shaped by economic and cultural context.
Enjoyment Matters Across Ages; Choice Peaks in Mid-Career
The association between lacking enjoyment and lower life evaluations is consistently large across age groups. The adjusted gap is largest among workers aged 65 and older (0.53 points on the zero-to-10 scale) and those aged 18 to 24 (0.49 points) and remains one of the largest effects across most age groups in between. However, among workers aged 65 and older, choice is also strongly associated with higher life evaluations (0.41 points), comparable to mid-career workers aged 35 to 44. This suggests that while enjoyment remains a dominant factor, autonomy becomes similarly important later in the working life.
Job choice, by contrast, is a stronger differentiator among workers in the broader group of 25 to 44 years of age. In this age range — typically associated with early and mid-career — choice rivals or exceeds the effect of enjoyment, suggesting that flexibility and autonomy take on particular importance during the years when workers are building careers and navigating competing demands.
Employment Status Changes Which Dimension Matters Most
The 优蜜传媒World Poll classifies employed adults into four groups: those working full time for an employer, full time for themselves (self-employed), part time by choice, and part time but wanting full-time work. Across all groups, enjoyment consistently shows the strongest association with life evaluations, although the relative importance of choice and meaning varies by employment status.
In most groups, enjoyment is associated with larger increases in life evaluations than lacking job choice. Among full-time employees, however, this pattern reverses. Workers in this group who have many choices in the type of work they can do rate their lives 0.36 points higher, while those who enjoy the work they do every day rate theirs 0.28 points higher — making this the only employment category where choice matters more than enjoyment. For workers in structured employment settings, autonomy appears to carry particular weight.
Among full-time self-employed workers, enjoyment is the most important aspect (0.48 points), while lacking choice has a comparatively small association (0.21 points). Notably, the association with purpose (0.28 points) is stronger in this group than in any other. This suggests that for self-employed workers, both the quality of daily experience and a sense that their work is meaningful are more important differentiators than autonomy, which many have already exercised through their employment choice.
Workers who are employed part-time but would prefer full-time work show the largest enjoyment gap of any group (0.54 points). When workers already lack the full-time employment they desire, whether they enjoy what they do each day appears to matter even more for how they evaluate their lives.
Part-time workers by choice show a pattern more similar to full-time employees, with both enjoyment (0.45 points) and choice (0.38 points) showing substantial associations.
Bottom Line
All three workplace wellbeing dimensions that 优蜜传媒measures in partnership with WPE and Persol (enjoyment, purpose and job choice) are independently associated with how workers evaluate their lives. Enjoyment is the most consistent factor globally, but the analysis shows that each dimension plays a leading role in specific contexts: Job choice matters most among full-time employees and workers in their career-building years, and emerges as the dominant factor in several lower-income economies.
Purpose, while showing the smallest global association of the three, plays a more meaningful role in countries like India and in Gallup’s broader workplace research, where feeling connected to the mission of one’s organization has a well-established association with engagement.
For employers, the findings suggest that all three dimensions deserve attention, and all three are shaped by management practices. Ensuring that workers have the opportunity to do what they do best every day supports enjoyment. Helping employees see how their work connects to a broader purpose supports meaning. And providing autonomy over how work gets done supports choice, which in turn can shape both daily enjoyment and sense of purpose. Rather than prioritizing one dimension over the others, organizations may see the broadest wellbeing gains by attending to all three, while recognizing which matters most for the specific workforce segments they employ.
For policymakers, the findings reinforce that job quality — as workers actually experience it — deserves consideration alongside questions of access, compensation and working conditions in discussions of labor market health.
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