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 tool provides step-by-step guidance for economic and workforce development agencies to think through implementing an employee ownership strategy. It details the different forms of employee ownership, linking out to resources that allow readers to deepen their understanding. It also contains a repository of resources and case studies for interventions to support employee ownership that economic and workforce development agencies are uniquely positioned to make.

This piece discusses the need for upskilling in the public sector workforce. Private sector workers often enjoy more investment in their skill development and the piece argues for more investment in public sector upskilling and addresses the barriers to realizing this goal.

This simple, user-friendly calculator serves as a tool to measure the income needed by a family to maintain an adequate standard of living in a specific community. It can calculate costs based on all counties and metro areas in the US and for 10 family types (one or two adults with zero to four children). Family budgets are calculated using seven components: housing, food, transportation, childcare, healthcare, taxes, and “other necessities.”

This calculator is a tool for estimating the living wage by US metro area, county, state, region, or at the national level. The living wage is defined as the wage needed to cover basic family expenses including housing, food, childcare, transportation, health, and other necessities, plus relevant taxes. The calculator estimates the living wage needed to support families of 12 different compositions (one to two adults with up to three children). Practitioners across fields can use this tool to benchmark compensation in local communities or firms against a wage rate that allows residents to meet minimum standards of living. Because the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a nonpartisan research institution, practitioners report that this tool has credibility with a range of audiences including businesses.

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.

The US Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI) is intended to reflect job quality in the United States, using data on weekly wages and hours for high wage jobs versus low wage jobs. Released each month on the same day as the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ US Employment Situation Report, it captures a distinct view of labor market health and offers monthly tracking of the composition of high quality to low quality jobs, using pay as a proxy for overall job quality. Historical data also documents a shift from jobs in manufacturing to services, as well as a shift within services from higher to low quality jobs.

This brief synthesizes existing knowledge on the landscape of benefits available to workers in the United States and the impacts of those benefits. It begins by defining workplace benefits and providing a brief history of their use. It then explores the connection between workplace benefits and job quality, mapping known impacts against key components of job quality. Finally, it reflects on opportunities for improvements in job quality and for future research.