Beyond wages: what makes a good job?

People’s wellbeing at work is influenced by various features of their jobs, including autonomy, intensity and prospects. Researchers use surveys to track these dimensions of working life and measure their contribution to social progress. Many of them cannot be improved through economic growth alone.

This article is part of an upcoming collection on good jobs by the Policy Hub for the Huth Initiative for a New Political Economy.

When it comes to work, it’s obvious that pay is a very significant factor for most people. But modern studies of job quality reveal the high importance too of several other characteristics of the working experience beyond wages.

A further six dimensions matter. First, there is the job’s future prospects. Work that is secure and offers chances of promotion helps to mould the employee’s identity and allows them to plan for the future. Workers doing insecure jobs suffer stress and ill-health – and they cannot plan ahead easily (Green, 2020).

Then there is the working time quality of the job, which comprises not only its duration, but also its scheduling and variability. A good job is one without ultra-long hours or unpredictable shifts, where there is some control over start and finishing times, and where it is possible to take time off for home-life emergencies. Being able to ‘switch off’, rather than always being connected to work, is also important. Each of these factors can affect how well work fits with other parts of life, affording people a good – or bad – a work-life balance.

Job autonomy is also important, linked with its skill requirement. A good job is one that allows the worker some influence over how their job is organised and the tasks that they do, and where they have the skills to use this leeway well. It affords the employee meaningful experiences and keeps them engaged and productive. This freedom is capped by the requirements of the job and the need for management control. Yet too much monitoring and too little task discretion are proven negatives for employees’ health (Duijts et al, 2007).

Another intrinsic dimension is work intensity. A good job keeps the employee hard at work, since hanging about doing nothing is boring and unsatisfying. But a common problem is the opposite, where work pressure gets too high, causing stress and, in the extreme, psychological burnout. The worst combination is a job with very high work intensity and low job autonomy (Zhou et al, 2024).

The social environment of a job is also critical. On the positive side, supportive managers and colleagues can improve the experience of work. On the negative side, workplace abuse – whether that’s bullying, sexual harassment or violence – quickly erodes the quality of a job. While such abuse is only experienced by a minority of the workforce, around one in seven workers in Britain report some form of abuse every year (Green et al, 2026). It can be highly traumatic for the people in question.

The final dimension for assessing job quality is the physical environment, covering the extent to which people must work in hazardous working conditions or face ergonomic posture-related risks.

Why measuring good jobs is important

Over the past few decades, there have been significant advances in our knowledge of what makes a job ‘good’. Taking lessons from psychology, economics and sociology, there has been a rapid expansion of research looking at how these dimensions of job quality affect our health and wellbeing.

Take, for example, prospects. We now know that job insecurity, especially when combined with low social security, is a serious mental health hazard, and leads to a substantial loss of life satisfaction (Green, 2011). Indeed, research from South Korea finds that those who fear job loss have a 25% higher chance of experiencing depression (Kim et al, 2017).

Turning to the social environment, many studies show the beneficial effects of good social support from managers and co-workers on worker wellbeing. Similarly, the detrimental outcomes of bullying and other forms of abuse are now clear. The consequences are both economic and psychological, and they can be both short-term as well as sustained. One study finds that women who are victims of workplace violence lose over 20% of their earnings five years later (Adams-Prassl et al, 2024).

Research also focuses on the experience of meaningful work. This includes settings where workers report that they are doing important work that matters, or that their work is useful to society, that they share the values of the organisation for which they work, and that they have a sense of belonging and can have valued social relationships at work. A strong sense of meaning is found in workplaces where managers allow and facilitate employee initiative and reasonable participation in decision-making that affects their work.

Together with hundreds more studies, this new field of research shows that not only pay but all six other dimensions of job quality (listed above) are important for the health and wellbeing of those in work across the world.

Combining indicators of all seven dimensions into one index of job quality allows researchers to see the relative importance of work, as compared with other aspects of life. For Europeans, if we compare those whose jobs are around the median level of job quality to those with jobs in the lowest 10%, there is a large gap in wellbeing (see Figure 1). That gap is similar in size to the difference in wellbeing between people who are in good and bad general health, yet very much larger than the spread associated with education, age or marital status.

It is the same story around the world – including in Australia, South Korea and the United States. Perhaps this should not be surprising, given that working people spend on average nearly a third of their waking lives at work. Europeans spend less time each week than Americans and Asians, and they take longer holidays – but everywhere work is a big part of people’s lives. The large differences in wellbeing associated with job quality suggest that much more attention should be paid to this area of life when assessing countries’ economic and social progress.

Figure 1. The comparative importance of job quality

Source: Green et al, 2024.
Note: Estimated differences in WHO-5 Wellbeing Index scores among employed Europeans.

Given the wider significance of job quality, long-running panel surveys around the world should start collecting much more data on the underlying dimensions. There are also many more details that researchers need to uncover. For example, we know that there are some risks associated with night work, but to improve regulatory oversight, we should learn more about the different effects of permanent versus intermittent night working, and how risks could be mitigated.

How can we monitor and track job quality in the economy?

The best way to track job quality is to ask workers – the people doing the jobs. Of course, it is important to put questions in neutral ways, tested by survey experts, in nationally representative samples. There may be some biases, but these can be controlled and allowed for. To track changes over time, the same questions must be posed in identical form at successive dates. The world-leading European Working Conditions Survey has been doing this every five years since 1990, with increasingly comprehensive coverage.

Britain last took part in 2015 and left the programme because of Brexit. The country should consider participating in the next survey in 2030. For now, it relies mainly on the British Skills and Employment Survey series, last carried out in 2024.

Figure 2 presents this approach. Ιt shows a modest increase in an index of working time quality in Britain, especially for men. The rise in the index has been caused by a few factors: the proportion of people who are working excessive hours (more than 48 per week) has fallen (from 13% to 8%); the proportion who report that it is not difficult at all to take time off to deal with personal/family matters has risen from 33% to 41%; and the proportion who agree or strongly agree that they could decide the start and finish times of their work has risen from 29% to 36%. Much of this improvement is associated with the increase in home and hybrid working, which was accelerated through the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns.

Figure 2. The evolution of working time quality in Britain

Source: Green et al, 2024.
Note: Standardised index, where 0 = average working time quality across the sample. Higher values indicate better working time quality.

Tracking how the different dimensions of job quality have been changing this century reveals several predominant trends. On the plus side, pay has improved in real terms with economic growth in most countries in the global north. In a large majority of countries, the physical environment has also improved – partly because of less dependence on hazardous industries like coal mining, but also because of regulatory improvements such as widespread bans on workplace smoking. Prospects have improved since the depths of the global financial crisis of 2007-09.

But other dimensions have shown only patchy improvements. In particular, up until the pandemic, work intensity had become steadily worse in most countries. Across Europe, lockdowns reversed that trend for men, but work intensity continued to deteriorate for women at least until 2024 (Eurofound, 2025).

Can we rely on economic growth to improve job quality?

One might have expected that all aspects of jobs would improve as the economy grows. After all, we would not expect to find a well-paid executive to be exposed to serious workplace hazards. Remarkably, however, while economic growth supports wage growth, it is only loosely associated with changes in job prospects and in working time quality. It is not related at all to any of the other four non-wage dimensions.

This suggests that we cannot rely on conventional macroeconomic policies to deliver progress in job quality. Rather, what matters more is how new technologies – most recently, artificial intelligence (AI) – are brought in, how organisations are managed and jobs designed, and how well employees are engaged.

Employers can make a difference by involving employees as their organisations evolve. Indeed, research shows that the employer for whom you work makes a big difference (Bryson et al, 2025). Company leadership and management training could help to instil a climate of good job quality across all its dimensions. Trade unions, works councils and governments with their regulatory powers can also affect many dimensions of job quality, other than just the pay bargain.

Now that we have learned the importance of these non-pay dimensions of job quality, the designers of social surveys and statisticians should come together in a collective effort to understand how we are progressing in Britain and elsewhere. Under the auspices of the United Nations and the European Commission, several countries are now combining to collect data about job quality. The challenge will be to use the latest science to help design policies for better jobs across the spectrum – the prize being a healthier and more productive workforce.