Job Quality and Wellbeing

Job satisfaction improves wellbeing – but what factors determine job quality and can they be quantified? These were the questions we set out to answer this summer with the help of @OrhanMcDonald who joined us for a six week placement facilitated by Economic Futures.

The research was based on data from the Scottish section of the UK Working Lives survey kindly provided by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. It used regression analysis to consider the relationship between different aspects of job quality and job satisfaction.

The findings showed clear positive relationships between job satisfaction and characteristics like work-life balance, and career development. However, the most important factor was how meaningful people feel their work is. It seems that believing you are doing something worthwhile really matters as far as wellbeing is concerned.

Another important finding was that it is not just job quality that matters, but how well your job suits you. The implication: the wrong job can be as bad for wellbeing as a bad job.

With this project however, what wasn’t found was almost as interesting as what was.

For example, the research found no strong relationship between wellbeing and factors like autonomy at work or having a voice in the workplace. It also found no definite relationship between income and job satisfaction.

The findings of the research are in many ways intuitive. You feel better when you believe you are doing something worthwhile and how well a job suits you usually matters more than how well it pays. What research like this adds is the ability to quantify these factors independently.

This matters because the better we understand what drives job quality the more effective our efforts at designing policies to improve it will be.

Improving job quality has been moving up the policy agenda for some time. Fair work has long been part of the National Performance Framework used to assess societal progress and September’s Programme for Government included an explicit commitment to improving workplace wellbeing.

One of the ways the Government hopes to achieve this is through the introduction of a four-day working week. The ability to identify and isolate the factors that determine wellbeing will be critical for evaluating its success.

The Government’s commitment to improving workplace wellbeing is welcome and timely. What makes it particularly interesting is the explicit connection being made to productivity.

This connection has long been recognised in academic and business circles. The evidence is strong and clear: happy staff do better work and this is good for both productivity and customer loyalty.

The evidence is strong and clear: happy staff do better work and that is good for both productivity and customer loyalty.

September’s Programme for Government shows this connection is also recognised by the Government. This bodes well for individual wellbeing and national economic performance.

You can read the full research report by clicking the link below. If you would like to talk to us about this or related work on the wellbeing economy please get in touch.