Job quality is a key driver in encouraging greater workforce participation. But how do we improve it in a way that encourages more people to stay in the workforce for longer?
If you thought the only answer was to pay employees more, you’d be wrong.
“The big mistake is the fact that, when we think about job quality, the first thing that comes to mind is pay, that it is a proxy for good-quality jobs,” says Barbara Gerstenberger, head of the Working Life unit at Eurofound, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.
Research into the issue by the organisation, which is based in Loughlinstown, Co Dublin, shows time and again that there is a lot more to a good-quality job than remuneration.
But unfortunately, job quality as a concept is itself poorly defined.
That’s because it encompasses all the characteristics of an individual’s employment on a day-to-day basis and how each of these impacts either positively or negatively on a worker’s health and wellbeing.
“A job that makes you sick, even if it is well paid, cannot be a good-quality job,” says Gerstenberger. “What we are trying to identify are indicators that capture objectively the quality of a job. We are looking for observable attributes. We’re not asking you how satisfied you are with your working conditions – which is also an option, and one that leads to interesting answers – but it’s not a very objective way of measuring the quality of a job.”
Instead, by taking the link to health and wellbeing as a starting point, it becomes easier to identify all the different dimensions of job quality.
“Again, pay is definitely one of those dimensions. But then you have the physical environment as well,” Gerstenberger explains. “That includes whether or not a person has to undertake strange postures, or lift heavy things, or people, are they subject to heat or cold, and so on.”
On top of that comes the social dimension of a job. “This is about the social environment you work in, such as whether or not you work with nice colleagues. If you ask young people especially what they are looking for in a job, very often the reply is around a good atmosphere, nice colleagues and a supportive boss,” says Gerstenberger.
Working time quality is another aspect that must be considered, including whether you work long hours, shifts or at night. “Again we have this link with health and wellbeing in that we know this is not good for your health, so working time is another dimension of job quality,” she points out.
The volume of work you face into daily, the pace at which it comes and the sense of agency you have around managing your workflow is another big factor to be considered.
“People want to be busy at work because being bored is terrible. But you don’t want it to be too intense, always chasing deadlines or having too many factors that impact on what you do, how quickly you do it, and how much of it you do. So work intensity is the next dimension,” says Gerstenberger.
“You want to be able to use your skills but you also want to have access to training if your skills are not sufficient or you are simply interested in broadening your skills. So the discretion you have to do this at work is another dimension of job quality.”
Finally, Eurofound also looks at the issue of job prospects and job security. If your job is fabulous, but precarious, or so highly specialised as to be practically irreplicable elsewhere, that can be a cause for concern.
“How likely would it be that you could find a new job of equal quality if you were to lose your job and are you afraid that you might be losing your job in the next six months? That’s what we capture in the ‘prospects’ dimension,” says Gerstenberger.
The sheer breadth of considerations at play puts pay into perspective in a way that will be particularly reassuring to small- and medium-sized businesses which often feel they can’t compete with deep-pocketed competition from big multinational employers.
It suggests that simply by making certain tweaks to job quality, they can boost their performance both in terms of recruitment and retention, in ways that are not pay related.
“Because of this multidimensionality, employers have so many levers that they can use in order to improve job quality – and not all of them are costly,” says Gerstenberger.
In particular, the working time “lever” is one that can be highly effective. For example, Eurofound includes a question in its European Working Conditions Survey that asks respondents how difficult they find it to take an hour or two off work at short notice for family reasons.
“When the kindergarten calls and the child is sick and the father needs to pick it up – can he leave for an hour to take care of this?” says Gerstenberger.
“Those respondents who say yes, that’s easy for me, then also respond, when we ask, that their work-life balance is good because they have this flexibility. Does it cost anything? Usually not. It’s really a question of a boss saying, ‘Yes, sure, go ahead. You won’t be able to concentrate in any case sitting here if you are worried about a sick child.’”
It’s why flexibility is such a valuable lever for employers.
“For example, in certain occupations shift work is just a fact of life; you can’t change it. But if you give your teams some autonomy about swapping shifts, that flexibility makes a huge difference to how workers perceive their job quality. Again, it doesn’t cost you anything.”
