Recommended Actions

Government employment programs have traditionally focused on job attainment as the primary metric of success. Expanding a workforce agency’s scope to focus on job quality acknowledges the reality that millions of Americans have been systematically funneled into jobs with poverty wages and few prospects for advancement. Recognizing the limitations of the traditional workforce development model helps to create the necessary environment for change. This includes expanding the way success is defined to capture an individual’s move toward self-sufficiency and economic mobility. To center equity in your work, learn more about equity here.

To lay the groundwork for your strategy, begin to develop a shared understanding of the operating environment in which your team is pursuing this work. This will require reviewing existing data and engaging key stakeholders in dialogue. See step 1, understand your environment in the strategy development template.

Consider the following:

• What job quality standards, requirements, worker protections and agency policies and practices are already in place (e.g., wage requirements, state or local scheduling ordinances, safety regulations, criteria for employer partners)?

• What equity and job quality commitments have already been made, how are they progressing and how might your project connect with them?

• What do you know from available economic and labor market data?

• What have you heard from your staff, partners, participants and/or residents about what job quality means to them?

• Which policies and practices at your agency support equity and job quality? Which programs and interventions may be hindering equity and job quality? Where are you unsure?

Be sure to break down programmatic data by demographics to reveal needs.

You can also do internal survey work with staff and contractors (and your participants) to understand your environment. We recommend an annual job quality survey of staff, contractors and program participants, modeled after this Gallup survey,  to benchmark results with national trends.

After understanding your operating context, you should develop a draft Job Quality Framework that defines the problem you are trying to solve, makes the case for change, and outlines the high-level job quality components you are focused on as part of your work. See step 2, develop a job quality framework, in the strategy development template.

A framework is often useful in communicating externally to funders, the workforce board, and policymakers who want to quickly understand the high-level why, what, who, and how of your initiative. Your framework may also include key partners you’re working with to effect change.

Review examples from other states with well-established job quality perspectives (California and Colorado) for inspiration. The San Diego Workforce Partnership and the National Fund also provide local government agency-level examples of a job quality framework.

Consider where your organization is positioned to have an impact. Remember that you can drive change through multiple “levers.” Key levers include the following:

• Procurement: Procurement can influence the quality of jobs and equity of access through the way in which the funds are used and for what purpose. Organizations can use procurement practices to directly fund job quality or equity related projects, to prioritize diversity and high-quality jobs in the organizations they choose to fund and through the procurement process itself as a means of advancing job quality.

• Empowerment: Empowerment practices provide the employees, partners, and customers of your agency with voice and representation. This lever can shift away from a practice of “designing for” to “designing with.” Empowerment practices recognize historical and systemic inequities and intentionally equip individuals to participate at the decision-making table in real and meaningful ways.

• Policy: Policy helps to set the tone for the agency and also defines the processes, structures, and requirements that influence what is mandated, incentivized or prohibited through regulations. Further, this lever can be a powerful signal to the community of the importance of job quality and equity, encouraging change within their organizations.

• HR Practices: Human Resource practices help agencies “walk the talk" on job quality and equity. Human Resources can set the standard for how employees are treated, not only at the time of hire, but throughout the employment life cycle. Internal HR practices are a good place to begin the journey of improving job quality and equity; a sound foundation in HR is essential for advanced work down the road.

• Monitoring and Enforcement: Monitoring and enforcement ensures workers are protected through existing laws and employers are held accountable for not following required job quality legal protections. This also includes monitoring job quality protections and contract requirements related to procurement policies, incentive programs, wage subsidy programs and other policies that go beyond federal, state and local labor law.

As you develop your framework, consider the following:

• Using terminology and organizing constructs that are well known and understood can help to connect your work to other efforts

• Frameworks are commonly represented as a visual that captures the universe of work with a few key terms

• Interactive examples such as case studies, video interviews with workers and quotes from employers can help substantiate why certain aspects of the framework are important

While the framework provides a high-level approach to your work and is helpful for communication and consensus building, further specificity is needed to set goals and serve as a starting point for policy and practice change. To address this, you will need to develop an initial draft of minimum standards that defines a quality job for your agency’s work. See step 3, Draft initial job quality standards in the strategy development template.

There are eight key principles to consider in establishing job standards: 

1. Earnings: Living wage provided through base pay, bonuses and profit sharing
2. Schedules: Stable, predictable and fair
3. Safety and Security: Proper classification and physically, mentally and emotionally safe environment
4. Benefits:  Health and well-being, education, wealth building and safety net support
5. Voice and Representation:  Formal representation, participatory management and employee engagement
6. Learning and Development:  Career paths, training and skill development, recognition and advancement
7. Environment and Culture: Use of skills, sense of connection and autonomy
8. Purpose and Meaning:  Meaningfulness, mattering and personal alignment

When developing your job quality standards, you should consider the following:

• What is the living wage for your area? We recommend using the MIT Living Wage Calculator.
• What protections should be in place for all workers?
• What are the primary safety and security concerns of workers in your area?
• What benefits are crucial for workers and what expectations are there about cost sharing and accessibility?
• What do stable, predictable and fair schedules look like?
• Are workers able to participate in unions? Do employee owned companies exist in your area?
• How might workers provide input into an initial draft?
• How might employers provide input into your draft?

As you review each of the eight components in the Results for America Job Quality Framework and decide what they mean for your jurisdiction, strengths and weaknesses in your existing organizational programs will emerge. You may notice, for example, that your data show disparities in addressing living wages for BIPOC communities (communities identifying as Black, Indigenous and people of color), yet your current wage subsidies target neither living wage jobs nor support for individuals of color. You may find that some industries in your community have large numbers of jobs that meet your criteria while others are lacking. 

Begin to establish the baseline number and percentage of good jobs for workers and employers served by your organization. This could include agency and contractor full-time employees, a specific industry (e.g., childcare, behavioral health, construction) and/or employees hired through a specific program (e.g., job placements through public employment and workforce programs like TANF or Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act [WIOA]). Take the extra step to disaggregate data by race/ethnicity, gender and other key demographics. Narrow the focus to data sets and issues that your organization (or your partners) is uniquely positioned to address (e.g., participants within TANF and WIOA funded programs, childcare workers).

Consider the following:

• What portion of existing jobs or job placements meet your minimum job quality standards? Where are those jobs situated (sector, industry, geography)?

• How many workers have access to those jobs?

• What are the characteristics of those workers?

• Which workers are left out?

• Which components of job quality are missing? Where do existing goals fall short (e.g., wage too low, schedules not considered)?

• Are your internal jobs high quality? What about those of your contractors?

Examine what existing initiatives, legislative or regulatory directives, worker organizations or prominent employers in your jurisdiction promote aspects of your job quality framework and/or initial job quality standards. This will shed light on which policymakers may be champions, where funding may be available and what partnerships will be critical to inform and advance your project goals. See step 5, build a broad coalition for good jobs and equity, in the strategy development template.

As the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act requires that many of these stakeholder groups be represented on the local and state workforce development board, conversations with existing partners can serve as a good starting point. State and regional planning documents can also be a helpful source of information.

Consider the following:

• Which elected officials are leading public policy and budget discussions about expanding job quality?

• Which government agencies have published job quality or equity commitments, policies or practices?

• How might your efforts connect with organized labor and other worker advocacy organizations?

• Who are the major business leaders promoting or modeling job quality in your community?

• What are other community, faith or academic leaders doing and saying about job quality?

• Where are funds being invested to support job quality (American Rescue Plan, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and state programs) and to what degree are you leveraging them?

• What sectors of your community are not prominently included in job quality discussions and how might they be better engaged?

• Which agencies or partners have data sources that you need to access?

Drawing on your job quality framework, standards and the baseline you established, outline specific actionable goals for your job quality strategy. These goals should be directly aligned with the projects and initiatives of your organization to make them relevant to your daily work. See step 6, establish job quality goals, in the strategy development template.

You may choose to focus on specific sectors, occupations or even components of job quality (e.g., earnings and benefits). Create a short set of goal statements that capture what you aim to accomplish and by when (e.g., allocate 75% of wage subsidies to quality jobs that meet agency standards by 2024 or create apprenticeship pathways in cyber security for 500 individuals  who identify as Black, Indigenous or people of color (BIPOC). Remember that goals are essentially visions for your organization that have quantifiable or qualitative results. Your goals will inform your priorities, guide your budget, influence hiring and skill building and define data collection needs. 

Consider the following:

• Consider relevant “levers of change,” both external (e.g., empowerment, policy, monitoring and enforcement) and internal (e.g., human resources and procurement)

• Align goals to key inflection points (e.g., deployment of funding, fiscal year, launch of new program and policy cycles)

• Structure goal statements in ways that are actionable (clear what caused the change), meaningful (easy to understand) and accessible (data can be collected and analyzed)

• Keep in mind that it may take multiple programs, funding streams or partnerships to achieve a given goal

A thoughtful data collection and reporting approach aligned with existing reporting infrastructure (e.g., local Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act [WINOA] Title I systems of record) is critical. See Data and Measurement for more information on how to implement robust data and evidence approaches. 

Crosswalk each goal to a specific data source or plan to collect data to ensure that you can track progress against your goals. Keep in mind that data may reside within your existing programmatic resources (e.g., WIOA case management system), internal systems (EEO and HR databases) or may require new collection through additional fields or surveys. 

At this point in the process, engaging your technology and performance management staff can ensure that you are aware of both what is currently available and any planned implementations. If data are managed by subrecipients, the state, or other agencies, consider including key staff in the dialogue.

For each goal, consider the following:

• What data do you need to track progress against this goal?

• Do you currently have access to these data?

• Are you able to disaggregate the data by race/ethnicity, gender, and other key demographic goals?

• If you don’t currently have access to the needed data, are there other government agencies or partners that may “own” or have access to these  data?

• If the data do not currently exist, is there a feasible way to begin collecting these data (e.g., representative survey or  a new field added to the enrollment record in your data system)?

• Do you have the technical expertise and bandwidth needed to design and build the reporting infrastructure needed for the long term?

Examine your programmatic and operational policies to determine where changes are needed. For policies or practices that touch subrecipients or partners, keep in mind that you may need to provide training or technical assistance as part of your rollout. 

Review your procurement process and determine where your job quality standards can be incorporated. See Leading by Example for more information on how to use procurement to drive equity and job quality changes.

Don’t forget to examine and update internal policies such as those managed by Human Resources or your data management team to align with your new job quality standards. You may also need to train staff to ensure that they are equipped to implement job quality through the scope of their work. See Leading by Example for more information on how to use your internal HR processes to drive equity and job quality changes.

Determine how you will communicate progress against job quality goals to key stakeholders. See step 9, measure and publicly report on your progress, in the strategy development template. 

Create a governance structure and cadence for tracking progress. Ideally you can leverage an existing structure (e.g., a workforce development board subcommittee, a city or county economic development subcommittee or community advisory committee or a specific task force pulled together by an elected leader). As work moves forward, you may need to adapt and adjust. A Plan-Do-Check-Act framework is a reliable methodology for continuous improvement. The National Fund for Workforce Solutions (NFWS) also offers a helpful Toolbox for the Systems Change Mindset. The quality improvement model from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement offers a simple framework for continuous process improvement to drive progress. This framework centers action around three key questions: 

• What are we trying to accomplish?

• How will we know that a change is an improvement?

• What change can we make that will result in improvement?

A logic model, which can be a great tool to measure progress, shows the relationships among resources, activities, outputs and outcomes for any program or initiative. While there are countless variations of logic model templates and guides for creating theories of change, Pacific Community Ventures' Our Theory of Change and the WorkAdvance Program Logic Model (p. 42) are two examples of models related to job quality initiatives.

Once your goals and success metrics are clear, establish a budget to meet each goal. Existing federal funding streams (e.g., Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, SNAP employment and training, TANF or community development block grants ) can advance many of the interventions outlined in the job quality playbook, but an effective long-term strategy likely requires diverse revenue streams to provide flexibility in the services you provide. The National Fund for Workforce Solutions’ report Co-Investment: Strategies for Resourcing Job Quality Initiatives explores funding challenges for this work and various solutions. These include employer contributions, fee-for-service models, incentive models, and philanthropic support. See also Diversifying Revenue Streams for specific steps and resources to address funding needs.