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27 February 2008

Tool suggests stress has limited effect on our working lives

University method calculates quality of working life.

Psychologists at the University of Portsmouth have developed a new psychometric tool, the Work-Related Quality of Life (WRQoL), which apparently enables a company to build an accurate and detailed picture of its employees' quality of working life across the organization.

Don't stress out   
The team's psychological research findings challenge prevailing views about what really counts with regard to quality of working life. The What is Quality of Working Life?
Quality of Working Life is defined as a measure of how good your work is for you. It's more than just job satisfaction or work happiness, but the widest context in which an employee would evaluate their work environment.   
How is Quality of Working Life Assessed?
Quality of working life is assessed using the Work-Related Quality of Life (WRQoL) scale, a measure of employee quality of working life developed by Chartered Psychologists at the University of Portsmouth. psychologists concerned in the research are now launching a company, QoWL Ltd, to make the tool available to employers to help measure quality of working life in their staff.
  
Alan Bradshaw, director, QoWL, comments: "Stress at work may be less important than people think. Our results indicated that general well-being, working conditions, management support and relationships all appear to be more important factors than stress in determining quality of working life."
 
Public sector research
The psychometric tool was developed after 10 years of research with 15,000 public sector employees. "In some cases, it appears that workplaces where employees experience higher workload demands can also be those with a higher quality of working life. In these cases employees tended to have more autonomy and control in the workplace and often chose to work harder," says Bradshaw.
  
QoWL will undertake further research to explore the impact of pay, but so far the impact of pay on quality of working life appears to be complex. It ranked 14th out of 20 work and well-being related outcomes measured by QoWL as a contributor to quality of working life.

It may be the case that pay is less of an issue so long as pay is perceived to be reasonable, whilst dissatisfaction with remuneration may have greater adverse effect on overall quality of working life.

Measure employee satisfaction
This tool and others like it could have far-reaching effects on the approaches used by employee engagement practitioners.

If engagement specialists are able to use such methods or tools to establish what their most treasured employees appreciate most about their working conditions, communication practices and company culture, then presumably they'll have a better chance of retaining those employees for longer periods, because they know what factors help satisfy and engage those employees at work?

What do you think? Have you used similar approaches at your organization to beneficial effect? Discuss these issues with other comms practitioners by joining the Internal Comms Hub members' group on the Communicators' Network.

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