Quality of Working Life (QoWL):
Free Survey and Benchmarking Tools
My academic colleagues, psychologists at the University of Portsmouth, have been researching Quality of Working Life (or QoWL for short) for many years. They developed a theory and framework for QoWL and psychometric tools for measuring it. They've now generously made these survey tools freely available along with a scoring key and guide.
Quality of Working Life is that part of overall quality of life that is influenced by work. It's more than just job satisfaction or work happiness, but the widest context in which an employee would evaluate their work environment.
It’s important because a good quality of working life is associated with better retention, engagement and lower absence. Quality of working life matters to employees. Most importantly, people make choices about who to work for and whether to stay based on judgements about the quality of the working environments provided by their (prospective or existing) employer.
The main tool is called the Work-Related Quality of Life Scale (WRQoL) and used all over the world by researchers for assessing and benchmarking QoWL. It's a psychometric that's been extensively tested for reliability and validity and has been translated into multiple languages (English, Chinese, Farsi, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Welsh). It's also short, which is a good thing! Below are the links to the tools for measuring quality of working life (QoWL):
QoWL is a much broader measure of workplace wellbeing that just looking at stress, although stress at work is one of the factors assessed.
The factors found to predict and explain QoWL are:
The most recent version of the tool, WRQoL2, includes a 7th factor: Employee Engagement.
The QoWL website has lots of background on QoWL if you're interested and want to explore the theory, framework or background research further. If you're interested in having us conduct a survey of QoWL in your organization, please contact me directly or use our contact form.
Quality of Working Life is that part of overall quality of life that is influenced by work. It's more than just job satisfaction or work happiness, but the widest context in which an employee would evaluate their work environment.
It’s important because a good quality of working life is associated with better retention, engagement and lower absence. Quality of working life matters to employees. Most importantly, people make choices about who to work for and whether to stay based on judgements about the quality of the working environments provided by their (prospective or existing) employer.
The main tool is called the Work-Related Quality of Life Scale (WRQoL) and used all over the world by researchers for assessing and benchmarking QoWL. It's a psychometric that's been extensively tested for reliability and validity and has been translated into multiple languages (English, Chinese, Farsi, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Welsh). It's also short, which is a good thing! Below are the links to the tools for measuring quality of working life (QoWL):
- This link gives background and conditions for free use of the tools. Essentially this is that you won't use the tools for commercial purposes.
- This link is where you can download the tools - WRQoL 1 is the original tool. It's also the shortest and has the most background research. It also has a full guide (you may need to scroll up the page to access all the tools, language versions and guides).
QoWL is a much broader measure of workplace wellbeing that just looking at stress, although stress at work is one of the factors assessed.
The factors found to predict and explain QoWL are:
- Job and Career Satisfaction
- Working Conditions
- Home-Work Interface
- General Wellbeing
- Control at Work
- Stress at Work
The most recent version of the tool, WRQoL2, includes a 7th factor: Employee Engagement.
The QoWL website has lots of background on QoWL if you're interested and want to explore the theory, framework or background research further. If you're interested in having us conduct a survey of QoWL in your organization, please contact me directly or use our contact form.