Job Quality Narrative Research — Playbook and Community Engagement Memo

Job Quality Playbook

This playbook, developed by A—B Partners as part of the Institute’s Shared Success project, offers findings and recommendations on how best to communicate the importance of job quality to owners of small- and medium-sized businesses.

For instance, quality jobs can help to:

1. Validate business owners as leaders. Investing in job quality offers a way to build status in the community.
2. Offer support and control for their work. Offering quality jobs is a way to take control and build internal leverage to manage tensions that they face.
3. Build a competitive advantage. Offering quality jobs is an attainable practice that opens doors for good talent to stay and make the business more competitive.
4. Leave an impact. Quality jobs can improve employees’ lives so they can thrive and give back to the community while bolstering the business’s reputation.
5. Across these strategies, the playbook describes the visual content and best practices to elevate these messages, along with “dos” and “don’ts” that small businesses and their intermediaries can use to ensure their outreach is effective.

Here is the Job Quality Narrative Research — Community Engagement Memo. It lays out the contours of this research, including context, opportunity, approach, findings, and recommendations.

Community Engagement Memo

The COVID-19 pandemic marked an inflection point in the way we relate to work. Americans’ collective reassessment on the purpose of work — and the role it should play in life — inspired record numbers of people to change jobs, start new businesses, and organize within a resurgent labor movement, and it left business leaders and commentators struggling to understand these changing workforce and cultural dynamics. Workers and customers alike are gravitating toward businesses that prioritize job quality and afford employees stability, mobility, and respect.

Against this backdrop, growing numbers of business leaders — especially those in small- and medium-sized businesses, who employ about half the US workforce — increasingly recognize that improving job quality is critical both to building a more equitable economy and to bolstering their own success. To that end, the Economic Opportunities Program collaborated with A—B Partners to understand business perceptions of job quality, identify strategies to encourage adoption of job quality elements, and define recommendations to involve financial intermediaries in this process. This memo, generated as part of EOP’s Shared Success project, lays out the contours of this research, including context, opportunity, approach, findings, and recommendations.

Here is the Shared Success – Job Quality Narrative Playbook.