New ‘yardstick’ aims to help HR teams understand the quality of jobs inside their companies

HR leaders looking to benchmark the quality of the roles inside their organization have a new tool on which to rely.

The new Where You Work Matters List, developed by the folks from the American Opportunity Index, offers research into the creation of high-quality jobs by major US employers. The Schultz Family Foundation and the Burning Glass Institute developed the list and its research with help from the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, the Schultz Family Foundation’s managing director, told HR Brew exclusively ahead of the launch that he sees the new dataset as a useful resource for businesses to understand the quality of jobs inside their companies on an ongoing basis.

“We asked ourselves a basic question a few years ago,” Chandrasekaran said. “Which employers are doing best at creating jobs; that are helping people rise; that are creating economic opportunity and mobility for their workers?”

Government data helps illuminate national employment levels and wage trends, albeit a bit tenuously lately. Some employer branding programs and pay-to-play survey companies help companies highlight strong workplace cultures.

“We looked out there at the landscape of other lists and assessments, and almost all of them are really focused on either corporate inputs…and in questionnaires they fill out from glossy magazines, or in small focus groups that might be conducted by various research and news organizations,” Chandrasekaran said. “In some cases, awards are bestowed because a company’s marketing org has cut a check.”

The project launching this month aims to close that gap. The public-interest dataset gathers “hundreds of millions of data points about American workers” from social media sites like LinkedIn, careers and jobs websites like Indeed and Glassdoor, and labor and market research. It’s not a corporate recognition program, Chandrasekaran said. Companies do not submit surveys or pay fees to participate. Instead, researchers use multiple sets of data to evaluate real-world outcomes for workers, and offer companies a grade.

“We can generate these apples-to-apples comparisons, and that enables us to really assess companies through the true outcomes of their workers,” he said.

Researchers analyzed career progression and compensation data of more than 12 million workers in 55,000 occupations at 1,750 large US employers. Workers were grouped into occupational clusters by company, allowing comparisons at both the employer and job-category level. The tools can help HR orgs understand how they fare as an employer based on three key outcomes associated with job quality: early-career, career growth, and stability.

“There’s some companies that are doing very well at this because they have made it a priority. They have invested leadership, attention, time resources in it, and other companies that are lagging in this space,” he said. “What this list reveals are those companies that are doing best at it, but even those companies [that] are doing best, maybe doing better in certain occupations than others, so it enables companies to see both where their investments are really paying off for them in this way, and areas they may want to pay more attention to.”

Companies earn ratings based on all three categories and are rated overall. Chandrasekaran told HR Brew the org is planning on updating the list at least annually.

“Every great HR leader and organization has reams of internal data about how their people are doing, some more than others, but, but everybody has their own internal data,” he said. “A challenge has been for many companies: How well can they actually see what their competitors are doing, both competitors in a sector, in geography, and in other ways, and how do their internal measurements compare with what they can see from their competitors? What we offer here is a benchmark, a yardstick of sorts, that companies can use to see how well they are doing overall and by occupation compared to any company they want a benchmark against.”