The need to inform policy making and society’s deliberations with indicators that go beyond traditional measures of economic growth is so widely recognised today that we may fail to appreciate how much distance the statistical community has travelled since 2009, when the Stiglitz‐Sen‐Fitoussi Commission gave heightened visibility to long-standing concerns about the limits of GDP as a welfare measure. Since then, the statistical community has been engaged in a dual process of both making the best use of statistics that already exist to provide a parsimonious but comprehensive view of the conditions of individuals, regions and countries, and laying the basis for the statistics needed for tomorrow. These Guidelines, developed in the context of the OECD Better Life Initiative launched in 2011, represent a milestone in this journey.

These OECD Guidelines aim to support the measurement of the quality of the working environment among official statistics. They describe the conceptual frameworks that have underpinned the measurement initiatives undertaken in this field in the past, discuss their operationalisation and methodological issues, and propose different survey modules that could be included by national statistical offices (NSOs) into their regular household surveys.

These OECD Guidelines aim to support the measurement of the quality of the working environment by official statistics. They describe the conceptual frameworks that have underpinned the measurement initiatives undertaken in this field in the past, discuss their operationalisation and methodological issues, and propose different survey modules that could be included by national statistical offices (NSOs) in their regular household surveys. In particular, the Guidelines are intended to:

This chapter sets out the scope and goals of these Guidelines on Measuring the Quality of the Working Environment, and the rationale for their production. It provides a definition of what the working environment is, and discusses its importance for both workers’ well-being and firms’ productivity.

This chapter provides an overview of various policy initiatives that have focused on the broader notion of job quality and at how the concept of the quality of the working environment features in them. It then describes existing data sources and measurement initiatives in this field, identifying a number of gaps.

This chapter considers the relevance for policy development of well-designed data to map and monitor the quality of the working environment. It presents evidence about three issues of importance for designing and implementing adequate policies. First, it examines whether there are significant inequalities in working conditions between different groups of workers. Second, it assesses the implications of the quality of the working environment for workers’ psychological and physical health and well-being with the help of the three main theoretical frameworks used in research. Third, it reviews evidence on how the quality of the working environment affects workers’ attitudes to work and their performance on the job.

This chapter presents some principles that underpin the measurement of the quality of the working environment proposed by these Guidelines and describes how these principles can be operationalised. It argues that the quality of the working environment should be defined in terms of a number of job characteristics that could be observed by a third party at the level of individual workers. Other approaches to the notion of the quality of the working environment used in the literature, such as job satisfaction and the person-job fit approach, should be understood as measuring not the quality of the working environment per se, but rather how the working environment, alongside a range of other factors (such as earnings and personal circumstances), might have an impact on workers’ well-being.

This chapter describes the key dimensions and detailed job characteristics encompassed by the broad concept of “quality of the working environment”, explaining how and why they contribute to workers’ well-being. For each dimension and characteristic, the chapter presents questions from existing international and national surveys on how these dimensions have been operationalised and describes the extent to which questions from different international surveys produce consistent results across countries.

This chapter discusses how information on the quality of the working environment should be collected. It reviews the role of data sourced from surveys and administrative records as well as from surveys of workers and employers. It notes the importance of collecting data that cover the characteristics of both jobs and workers and that are relevant to employees and self-employed workers. The chapter also reviews evidence on the impact of survey modes and the interview sites on the quality of data on the working environment collected through surveys. The chapter draws on state-of-the-art methodologies adopted by national and international initiatives such as the European Working Conditions Survey, the British Skills and Employment Surveys and the French Enquête Conditions de Travail to discuss the various issues that should be considered when designing a questionnaire to assess the quality of the working environment.