Overview
Recommended actions provide the specific steps that a workforce or economic development agency can take to implement job quality in their local area. The steps are intended to provide both guidance and inspiration by highlighting a variety of options including how to support job seekers, businesses, and their own operations.
Federal agencies and nationally recognized experts are thinking about and experimenting with new ways to understand and measure job quality. The US Department of Labor, the University of Buffalo’s Job Quality Index, and the Urban Institute are good examples of work now underway to track and measure job quality. As American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funds roll out, federal agencies such as the US Department of Transportation and U.S. Department of Commerce are also looking at how quality jobs can be created and measured.
Keep things simple. Focus on a meaningful but manageable number of metrics that prioritize what matters most to workers, what your agency can impact and what you can measure. Which metrics you settle on will depend on the focus of your strategy. Here are potential metrics for your economic or workforce agency:
70% percent of job placements from workforce investments are in quality jobs. Data are disaggregated by race and gender and other priority demographic groups
100% of agency full-time employees working on agency funded projects are in quality jobs
80% of all contracts have living wage and stable scheduling requirements consistent with our standards
There are year over year increases in the number of workers in the jurisdiction who have formal representation (e.g., union) or an ownership stake in their company (employee stock ownership plan, worker cooperatives, etc.)
Support is provided for 100 companies in service sector jobs to shift to stable and fair scheduling practices, improving job quality for at least 1,000 workers.
For more sample metrics, check out RFA’s job quality metrics database or read this article from Brookings. To learn how a government agency handled the entire process, from defining job quality to setting metrics, read this report from the United Kingdom. Below are some tools to see how other organizations track job quality.
The Good Jobs Institute: The Good Jobs Institute launched a scorecard, pay analysis template and a diagnostic to help businesses understand current performance, set goals and track progress for employee basic needs/ stability, customer satisfaction and operational performance. This tool can be used by workforce and economic development business service staff to assist businesses in addressing job quality considerations within their organizations.
The University of Buffalo School of Management (NY): The university manages the US Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI), which assesses job quality in the United States by measuring desirable higher-wage/higher-hour jobs versus lower-wage/lower-hour jobs. The JQI results also may serve as a proxy for the overall health of the US jobs market, since the index enables month-by-month tracking of the direction and degree of change in high-to-low job composition.
The Aspen Institute (DC): The institute launched a tool called Working Metrics to track equity and job quality data at the business level, including job growth, retention, earnings and benefits by gender and race. Throughout 2021/22 Results for America has been piloting use of the tool with a variety of state and local Workforce Fellows to learn more about how it can best be leveraged both for internal purposes and as part of an agency’s procurement process.
B Lab (PA): B Lab is a nonprofit network that created the B Impact assessment, which allows an organization to determine where there are gaps via a self-assessment in the areas of governance, workers, community, environment and customers. This includes exploring information on job quality features such as benefits, worker voice and purpose.
With key metrics identified, define what success might look like and how progress could be tracked. Consider:
What “success” looks like in the short term (1 year), medium term (3-5 years), and long term (5+ years).
Whether the metric applies to all programs immediately or will be phased in. Keep in mind that a pilot or test-and-adjust approach may be helpful as you refine your goals.
Who needs to be engaged in order to successfully make change (programs team, technology department).
How you will collect perspectives of those the programs serve to inform data collection and analysis.
Inventory your agency's capacity, expertise and bandwidth to design and build the necessary data infrastructure. This may involve integrating data sets, implementing new software, overseeing changes to data entry protocols or providing executive-level leadership to help turn information into insights. Most agencies have existing staff with experience reporting data for specific programs but do not have a chief information officer, chief performance officer or chief data officer focused on executing on an agency-wide vision to increase job quality
You may encounter challenges during this work—that’s normal. Interested in learning how to address key challenges? Go here.
Starting with the job quality metrics identified in Step 2 above (Identify Meaningful, Relevant Metrics), create a data map outlining the different systems, sources and fields to which your organization has access that will provide the necessary data to support your metrics. List each data source (e.g., state income tax data, local business license data) and how you will develop data integrations, implement new software with partners (e.g., Working Metrics), change data entry policies and procedures and/or otherwise gain access to those data to complete your dashboard.
This worksheet is a great starting place for looking at your data. It covers everything from data elements to the quality and governance of the information. This Urban Institute report details possible data sources for common job quality metrics that can jumpstart your thinking about where data sit within your organization. See "Identify Meaningful Relevant Metrics" above.
Design and build your integrated reporting infrastructure to track progress on your metrics. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect; start with what you can do now. An initial dashboard can serve as a foundation for later work advancing job quality metrics.
Existing data, such as Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act systems of record, and new sources, such as partner State Longitudinal Data Systems, will likely be in the mix. You may need to use data visualization and data lake tools such as DOMO, Microsoft’s Power BI or Tableau to better understand how data intersect and to begin to turn the data into usable information. See this case study on how the workforce board in San Diego uses DOMO to address its data visualization needs.
Populate your dashboard as each system comes online. For inspiration, see Jobs for the Future’s Outcomes for Opportunity project, which developed a beta version of a performance dashboard with workforce boards. This initial dashboard is just a starting point and will serve as a foundation for later work on advancing job quality metrics.
One your dashboard is complete, you will want to establish your reporting and review cadence. See the Strategy intervention for more information on monitoring, continuous process improvement and policy and practice development.