Expiration 6/30/2025
Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP) Job Quality Self-Assessment
FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS
Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.
The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program (BPEP) offers several tools to assist organizations striving for performance excellence, which is a key part of the Baldrige Program’s mission (public law 100-107). Businesses in all sectors can benefit from using the Baldrige Framework and its derivative tools. The Job Quality Toolkit Assessment (JQTA) is based on the Job Quality Toolkit (JQT) which was designed for small to medium sized enterprises that wish to increase the quality of the jobs they offer. The JQT provides many strategies and actions that employers may take to increase their organizations job quality. During development and implementation of the JQT, we learned that there was a need for a shortened, more focused instrument to assist organizations in pinpointing specific areas where they might want to focus their job quality improvement efforts.
Over 40% of the US labor market’s jobs are considered low quality, and the vast majority of those jobs are offered by small to medium-sized employers. There is little information or assistance available to assist these employers who are now facing significant labor shortages, across sectors. Factors related to job quality are driving many of the labor market shortages. The information collected will be used to give participating organizations specific feedback on where they might focus their job quality change efforts. Also, the aggregate data would provide benefit to all business by providing insights into where organizations self-report their biggest challenges, and successes, with offering quality jobs. With the data collected, BPEP would be able to create focused, problem specific solutions for small to medium enterprises.
Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties, pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.
The job quality toolkit assessment pilot project was a collaborative effort that came out of the Job Quality Toolkit development efforts. DoC and BPEP partnered with a contractor (Matt Fieldman, Executive Director of America Works) that provides networking and support services to all MEP Centers and their clients. America Works hosted a few webinars for MEP Centers (50+ attendees each) on the Job Quality Toolkit. The MEP centers indicated that the toolkit would be better understood and received by their client businesses if it had a short assessment that could be done first.
A small, pilot version of a job quality assessment was created and launched by America Works in November 2022. The instrument is 32 questions with 5 lickert-scale items assessing agreement with statements. There are eight areas of assessment that correspond to the eight drivers articulated in the Job Quality Toolkit. Approximately 80 businesses have elected to complete the self-assessment. Respondents took a range of 10-30 minutes, to complete the self-assessment. The respondents receive results that indicate where in the Job Quality Toolkit the respondents might focus their attention and efforts. This illustrates that the assessment fills a need for organizations.
Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.
BPEP will host the Job Quality Toolkit Assessment on the BPEP products and services page on their NIST.Gov website.
Based on previous use of the self-assessment pilot of America Works, the estimated response for NIST’s launch of this tool kit is estimated to be 200 respondents, given NIST’s level of visibility. The survey will take 30 minutes per response.
Because no personally identifiable information is collected, there are no Privacy Act implications of Privacy Impact Assessment requirements. Additionally, business information collected does not ride to the level of business identifiability.
Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.
Results of the self-assessments will be used to improve the next version of the Job Quality Toolkit. The results will also inform the creation of better, targeted support tools. For instance, guidance would be tailored to appropriately address specific issues with businesses of differing sizes. The results could provide sector-specific guidance that could solve common problems or perhaps even help businesses avoid them in the first place. There is a vast amount of business growth data that deals with securing or obtaining more capital, or even creating better quality products. Based on our research, the types of insights that the Job Quality Toolkit Assessment would provide do not currently exist or are not freely available to the millions of small to medium sized enterprises that drive our US economy.
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| File Title | OMB Control No |
| Author | Darla Yonder |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2024-07-20 |