How Do You Define a Good Job?

I had a chance to connect with seven different focus groups facilitated through the leadership of Wendi Copeland, Chief Strategy Officer at Goodwill Industries International. Copeland was kind enough to connect me with five different regional career center managers across the United States, including folks from Charlotte, NC, Los Angeles, CA, as well as the entire state of Georgia. 

We had over 60 people, all seeking jobs, participate in seven one-hour sessions with equal representation of people presenting as men and women. We had young people as well as many 50+ perspectives represented. Each group was compensated for their time.

The groups varied widely in their phase of their jobseeking journeys: Some were just about to transition out of incarceration; other interviewees were Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) clients, mentally and physically disabled clients, Americorps students, or GED learners. These groups brought a wide range of life experiences and diverse backgrounds to the table. 

I asked each of these seven groups a similar set of questions around how they understand their own skill sets, where they need more guidance, and where they encounter some of the greatest pain points, barriers, and challenges as they try to navigate a way forward. The first question, however, that I asked every single group was: How do you define a good job? 

Their answers were surprising. I had assumed that the first few responses would be related to good pay. But in all seven groups, the concept of remuneration only emerged much later in the conversation. One recurring priority was: Safety. They wanted to feel safe at work. Safety was connected to their own physical wellbeing but also their mental health and self-care. 

After safety, participants rallied around the idea of security and stability — not just seasonal work. They expressed wanting “to live, not just exist.” They wanted work that wasn’t stultifying, repetitive, or just a dead-end job. They didn’t want to hate doing their work and struggle to be positive or feel motivated. Some even expressed the desire to work from home at times.

For others, the concept of good work was deeply connected to leadership: Does the company leadership have a strong sense of ethics? Do they cultivate good morale? Do they recognize that employees have lives outside of work? And are there opportunities to grow within the company? Is it easy to understand the realistic rungs to move up the ladder? Money was ancillary to all of these concerns.

I couldn’t help but think about these interviews as I read a Harvard Business Review short piece on how the more lucrative the job, the greater the flexibility. The basic gist was that as researchers looked at job postings and their related salary bands: the higher the salary band, such as jobs that paid over $100k or $200k per year, the more likely those jobs were to offer remote work opportunities. Thirty percent of jobs that paid over $200k offered remote opportunities compared to only three percent of lower-wage roles that paid less than $30k per year. 

In addition, the higher the job candidate’s degree qualification, the more opportunities that would be opened up as flexible remote options: PhDs could find a posting 29% of the time that was flexible vs. only 2% of flexible jobs for those with only a high school degree. These numbers make sense in terms of the assumptions we have about the differences between knowledge work and work that requires a physical presence.

More importantly, however, what these numbers point to is an increased freedom offered up to workers to make some kind of decision about how they’d like to work. To be able to choose whether they work from home today or go into an office is a luxury, a freedom, a sense of latitude. Trust is built into a system in which a worker has certain choices about how they engage with work on a given day. 

We have to remember all of this as we design more inclusive pathways to promising opportunities. A good job can often include flexible or hybrid working options, but a good job also includes some softer aspects connected to safety, wellbeing, creativity, growth, and the freedom to make choices and make decisions.

Economic mobility isn’t just about moving up in pay and being able to accumulate wealth. A path to prosperity includes feeling safe, feeling motivated, and feeling empowered to make choices. 

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Dr. Michelle R. Weise is the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet and serves as an outsourced Chief Innovation/Learning/Impact Officer for businesses and higher education institutions.