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Two mechanics talking about a safe working environment.Credit:
          
  Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock
  
      Printable PDF

Ensure a safe, healthy, and accessible workplace and offer job security. Minimize temporary or
contractor labor solutions, using such workers mainly to adjust for short-term needs. Assess and
schedule hours that are adequate and predictable.

Strategies and Actions

Increase job security.

Minimize part-time and contingent work, which can cause job insecurity and deprive workers of important benefits and protections. Be sure that part-time and contingent workers feel valued and that they are a part of the organization.
	Prepare the workforce for changing capacity and needs, and balance the needs of the workforce and the organization.
	Offer job sharing.
	Ensure organizational continuity.
	Plan to prevent workforce reductions and minimize the impact of any necessary reductions.
	Enact just-cause standards for employment, which would prohibit discipline and dismissal unless for a just cause or genuine business needs.Ensure that workers are physically safe.

Fulfill the requirement that all workers have the right to safe, healthy, and sanitary working conditions.
	Prohibit and prevent all forms of violence in the workplace, including verbal, physical, andgender-based violence, as well as sexual harassment.
	Regularly assess working conditions and promptly address safety issues to ensure workers’ continued safety.
	Ensure that the safety system addresses prevention, inspection, root-cause analysis of failures, and recovery.
	Support a worker safety and health committee.Ensure that workers are psychologically safe.

Assess/measure the workforce’s sense of psychological safety.
	Actively support workers’ sense of well-being at work.
	Actively ensure an absence of fear, intimidation, or neglect in the workforce. Have a clear system of reporting and remedy.Anticipate and respond with agility to reduce job strain.

Utilize ongoing assessments of work activity, intensity, risk, and need for flexibility to adjust or lessen worker stress.
	Anticipate high-volume times and adjust staffing to accommodate those times.
	Adjust workload, staffing, and pay based on location specific circumstances and reflect locality pay and complexity.
	Make staffing decisions to maximize product and service effectiveness and customer value and not to meet payroll targets.
	Be prepared to ensure coverage in case of employee emergencies and time off.
	Encourage workers to discuss burnout or fatigue and offer resources to reduce it.Protect workers’ data and information.

Establish clear data confidentiality and protection policies for workforce information.
	Regularly inform workers of information collection, surveillance, or monitoring and how information will be used, including for performance purposes (promotions, discipline, or dismissal).
	Give workers ownership over the data that they generate.Offer stable and predictable hours to all workers.

Assess and, when possible, meet workers’ hourly needs.
	Provide workers their schedule at least two weeks in advance.
	Schedule most workers consistently for more than 15 hours a week.
	Minimize deviations from planned schedules. Make last-minute management-driven changes rare).Offer flexible remote-work options.

Offer telework or remote work.
	Ensure that telework and remote work do not adversely impact career advancement.Job Quality Baldrige Style

See how Baldrige Award recipients demonstrate many of the strategies and actions recommended in the Job Quality Toolkit.
  Performance excellence, Assessment tools and services and Baldrige Framework and Criteria

    
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Created March 31, 2023, Updated April 1, 2023
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