A Resilience Perspective on Quality Jobs and Performance for Purpose-Driven Companies in the US

Investing in employment quality can be beneficial for employees, corporate performance, and investor returns. We use a resilience-based quality jobs framework to assess employment quality for companies included in B Lab’s B Impact Assessment (BIA) database. The SVEF framework includes four dimensions of employment quality: Security, Viability, Equity and Flexibility. Security is the dependability of a continued job. Viability refers to a company’s reputation and how it relates to its community. Equity refers to fairness, diversity and inclusion. Flexibility is freedom of choice, degree of options, and potential mobility. Indices for Security, Viability, Equity and Flexibility were created for 4,847 assessments, which represent 3,934 companies, to provide relative scores along these dimensions of quality jobs for the period 2015-2020. There was significant variation in scores among these companies and also between industries. Regression modeling was used to better understand the relationship between quality jobs and company outcomes. Companies were classified as having high, low and no job growth according to their assessment responses. An ordinal regression model suggested that a 1-point increase in the average SVEF score is associated with a statistically significant 2.7% increase in the odds of being in a higher job growth group. Similarly, logistic regression models indicated that higher SVEF scores were associated with lower job attrition rates, higher employee satisfaction and higher employee ownership.