The Quality of Work Life of Australian Employees – the development of an index

Abstract

Thirty years ago an international conference was held in Los Angeles on the Quality of Working Life, papers from that conference subsequently appeared in a book, with the same title, edited by Louis Davis and Albert Cherns. At the time the interest in developing a meaningful measure of the quality of work life was, in part, a reaction to the extent and rapidity of change, especially technological change, that workers were facing. There was also a strong view that the experience of work can also “encourage positive… attitudes of citizenship and build a more just and humane society”. The pace and scale of change in organisations over recent years has brought about a renewed interest in the issue of the quality of people’s work lives. (Kirby & Harter 2001, Bohl et al. 1996). Invariably, different interest groups concentrate on a range of indicators in assessing the quality of peoples work lives. While job insecurity and declining working conditions are of paramount importance to employee groups, perceived employee dissatisfaction and the concomitant effects on productivity and on-costs are of concern to employer groups. Needless to say the measures to include in a quality of worklife index are not without controversy. In addition, there remain significant methodological challenges to overcome in constructing robust measures that can effectively operationalise the indicators.