What We Do

Jobs don’t grow out of the ground like trees – companies build them for good or for ill. Decades of research demonstrate that bad jobs are bad for workers and businesses. “Job quality” refers to the range of characteristics that define a role, things like pay and benefits, but also supervisor support, opportunities for training and advancement, and autonomy on the job. The Job Quality Maps, developed for the National Fund for Workforce Solutions by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and WORC, are one of our foundational tools for quality job design solutions that meet business objectives and align business imperatives with KPIs.

No, WORC is a for-profit social enterprise dedicated to building a thriving economy where every worker has a job worth having. We partner with various organizations, including nonprofits, to help achieve their unique business imperatives through improving the quality of lower-level jobs.

No, WORC’s science-backed diagnostics are more actionable than an engagement survey – every survey item points directly to specific actions that will help achieve business goals through people. WORC moves beyond your typical employee engagement survey by delivering analysis with context-specific research and helping to co-create scientifically-validated interventions in a concise summary report.

No, WORC is a team of former academics who conduct rigorous, actionable, original research to help create high-quality jobs for both business and worker impact. Our research is funded by nonprofits and grants from charitable foundations to build unimpeachable, credible scientific evidence.

Impact investors know that purposefully seeking opportunities for social impact leads to financial gains for funds, LPs, and portfolio companies. WORC’s science-backed index scores help isolate drivers of value for improved financial and worker results that can be correlated with financial KPIs to demonstrate impact alpha. The results help streamline reporting and allow you to concisely demonstrate impact and value to your stakeholders.

When leadership teams struggle to solve human capital challenges like turnover, human capital operating partners can support value creation by offering portfolio companies targeted resources. We help portfolio companies diagnose risk factors and improve job quality to reduce turnover and improve engagement in verticals like healthcare, industrials, consumer, manufacturing, and others where lower-level workers are crucial to achieving goals. Funds can capture unrealized gains by treating lower-level workers as an engine of value creation, not a cost to be minimized.

When PE firms routinely stop at the C-suite, they are leaving unrealized gains on the table. Our original research, conducted with support from the Ford Foundation Mission Investments team, demonstrates that human capital management in large private equity value creation is all about the C-suite — until it isn’t. Where lower-level workers are the fulcrum for executing a specific value creation strategy, firms can catalyze additional value by focusing on human capital management at the bottom of the org chart.

Yes, WORC partners with nonprofits that are implementing job quality innovations with employer partners through program evaluation and impact measurement. Our partners include Jobs for the Future, the National Fund for Workforce Solutions, Talent Rewire, Climb Hire, the Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance, the Chicagoland Healthcare Workforce Collaborative, and The Resurrection Project.

The rise in sustainable energy jobs has provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create an industry full of good jobs – or bad ones. Without a specific focus on capturing maximum value by ensuring lower-level workers are engaged and committed to their employers, sustainable energy companies are likely to both leave money on the table and replicate bad job practices. Decades of scientific evidence demonstrate that Better Jobs Mean Better Business® and a focus on job quality gets you there.