This six-step guide can help employers assess their employees’ financial stability and make an actionable plan to strengthen financial wellness. The foundational step includes assessing employee wages and benefits to ensure workers are earning a livable wage. The following steps guide employers through various financial wellness solutions, including how to implement and evaluate strategies and solicit feedback. This guide is written for employers, but it could also be used by workforce development professionals or worker advocates who work closely with employers.

This guide is designed to help support employers to implement an income advance program for employees in partnership with a financial institution. These programs provide small, same-day emergency loans to help workers weather financial emergencies and reduce stress. The tool includes an online resource library and a virtual peer group for information and support. This tool can be used by employers and the practitioners who advise them.

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 resource includes an at-a-glance overview of commuter benefits targeted at employers. A more comprehensive guide is available as a paid resource. Employers and the practitioners supporting them may find these resources useful for launching or enhancing a commuter benefits program.

This assessment is a tool to help employers (primarily >150 employees) benchmark their talent management strategies against those other employers are undertaking and to determine where to focus practice change efforts. The topics covered in the survey include recruiting, hiring, retention, advancement, and more. A separate resource section also provides a variety of business-facing tools. Practitioners who work with businesses could direct them to this tool and even walk them through it.

This PDF provides a helpful model for assessing business practices. Employers are asked questions about the quality of their jobs through factors such as diversity, benefits (e.g., paid leave), health support, and flexible scheduling. Although some questions are specific to New Mexico’s policies, this application may be used as a model for organizations interested in assessing job quality for current and potential employer partners. This tool could also be used internally for employers who would like to assess their own practices.

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.