This training curriculum supports direct care supervisors to strengthen communication, critical thinking, teamwork, and problem-solving skills. Curriculum content includes improving active listening, learning how to ask questions, and giving and receiving feedback. While designed for direct care organizations, this curriculum has applications for practitioners across fields seeking to encourage supportive supervisory practices that are critical to job quality.

The Management Center created this library of tools related to equity and inclusion aimed at addressing internal practices and management approaches of organizations. Included are worksheets, resources, and case studies that have applications for organizations seeking further equitable opportunities and outcomes.

Workforce development practitioners can use this guide to build capacity to strengthen relationships with employers. Turn to page 8 for instructions on finding and using local labor market information to help jobseekers make educated job decisions and to inform employer engagement, and relevant programming. While the guide is designed for workforce professionals in the Chicago area, many of the listed resources are national or have equivalents in other regions.

The San Diego Workforce Partnership developed this list of seven actionable steps workforce development practitioners can take to assess and improve job quality. Strategies relate to spending, employer engagement, partnerships, building worker power, and measuring success. The Workforce Partnership also provides a job quality framework and a list of job quality indicators. Although designed for workforce practitioners, this tool can also be informative for others interested in strategies to improve job quality, including policymakers and economic development professionals.

This framework can help employers and their partners define job quality and design high-quality job opportunities in collaboration with workers, based on a menu of components of a quality job. The tool is built around three pillars that can help to attract and retain talent: foundational elements of a quality job such as wages and benefits, support elements such as training, and opportunity elements such as recognition.

MIT’s Good Jobs Institute created this framework to help employers seeking to improve worker experience, retention, and productivity to assess their performance across nine “essential elements” of a quality job. These include meeting an employee’s basic needs, such as through fair wages and a flexible schedule, and meeting “higher needs” such as personal growth, belonging, and recognition. While designed for employers, the framework has relevance for all practitioners seeking to define and assess job quality in an organization.

This guide can help managers and employee-owners at cooperatives, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), and firms seeking to improve democratic practices. Users may focus on specific topics within the guide, or they may follow it from beginning to end. It is divided into themes, with each section including activities, meeting tips, an assessment, checkpoints, and case studies.

This guide is designed to demystify and democratize the policy-making process, by sharing lessons learned during the Obama administration.

Toolkit distills lessons from interviews and convenings with both appointees and advocates about what worked and what we could do better. The guide is intended to aid advocates and organizers who want to use executive action to advance workers rights, or any progressive change.

Workforce intermediaries are uniquely positioned to help workers and businesses achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Employers desire a workforce development approach that will address their most critical pain points, whereas workers seek opportunities to advance their economic security. In recent years, a wave of organizations has worked to take a “both-and” approach. These pioneers have recognized that job retention and recruitment are often linked to poor job quality, and that worker voice and input are critical to their ability to meet the demands of a dual-customer approach.

Members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Talent Pipeline Management (TPM) network are among those embracing this approach and leading on job quality and worker voice. The TPM Academy equips employers and their education and workforce development partners with strategies and tools to co-design talent supply chains that connect learners and workers to jobs and career advancement opportunities. And recently, the Foundation and the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program developed a new curriculum focused on job quality to embed within the TPM Academy for businesses and business-facing organizations. The new course will be available this summer.

In this webinar, which took place on July 24, 2024, we hear from two members of the TPM network about how they have tapped into worker voice and worked with employers to drive job quality improvements.

This detailed assessment is a tool to help employers generate a report about their social and environment impact, including impact on workers, and to benchmark against peer companies. It includes measures of job quality, including compensation, benefits, safety, and worker ownership. Practitioners who work with businesses could direct them to this tool or even walk them through it.