What makes a good job “good?”
The Two Sigma Impact team believes that helping companies create not only more jobs, but better jobs, can unlock previously untapped sources of value. Defining and quantifying what actually makes a job “good,” however, has long been a challenge for data scientists, managers, worker advocates, and others.
That’s why Two Sigma Impact set out to define and measure what a “good job” is, in a standardized, scientific way that is useful to investors and companies, and that is broadly replicable over time and across industries. The result is the Good Job Score (GJS) Assessment Tool, Two Sigma Impact’s core metric for evaluating job quality at companies.
A novel approach to gauging job quality
The GJS is derived from the voices of workers and serves as a novel data source (alongside the more traditional financial and operational metrics) that provides a consistent quantitative measure of a previously hard-to-define concept. A company’s GJS informs the value-creation strategies and tactics that the Impact team seeks to align on with management teams, to grow healthy companies.
Impact worked with Two Sigma’s Sustainability Science team, which provides data science expertise for ESG and social impact efforts, and a professional services firm, to develop the GJS Assessment Tool through rigorous research and methodologies—outlined in this paper—aiming to ensure it effectively measures a company’s job quality and fills measurement gaps in this space.
The team also sought to ensure that the tool is unbiased across employee demographics and characteristics, valid across multiple sectors, and easy for companies to deploy and track over time.
A valuable tool for investors, management teams, and workers
The Two Sigma Impact team believes the GJS Assessment Tool can prove valuable to three core main stakeholder groups:
- Investors, to help inform company valuations and investment decisions, and to help them hold management teams accountable for job quality once they have invested.
- Company management teams, to enhance data-driven understanding and accountability that point the way to action. Impact believes it also can serve as an early warning indicator that provides the ability to understand disparities across employee cohorts on different job dimensions, enables benchmarking vs. competitors, and can help demonstrate return on human capital investments.
- Workers, to better advocate for their needs with objective metrics and benchmarks, and to make it easier for workers to choose the best employers—further heightening management accountability.
Next steps
Two Sigma Impact has open-sourced the tool, making it freely available for companies to use to help measure and improve job quality within their own organizations.
To learn more
- Visit goodjobscore.com to better understand the GJS methodology and scoring, or to begin implementing the GJS at your company.
- Download Introducing the Good Job Score Assessment Tool below.
