Next to our health and close relationships with family and friends, nothing matters more to us than the quality of our working life. Now ask yourself this. Last time you considered a job offer, how much did you really know about it? Did you know how happy others in the organisation were with their own jobs, how ‘family friendly’ it was – even how safe it was compared with other firms?

Its odd isn’t it, that if you want to see a movie or read a book, or buy a washing machine, there’s a wealth of independent information about nowadays to an extraordinary degree on the internet. But if you had to choose between working for – say – McDonalds and Burgher King, or KPMG and PWC, you couldn’t find too many independent sources of information let alone ‘reviews’ of their performance in generating rewarding, satisfying jobs. Most readily available information would come from promotional material.

We can do much better. We don’t need to hire an army of government careers advisors or workplace inspectors. After all, we’re only trying to make an established and competitive market better informed. We could start by using important information that’s already available. Good workplace safety usually goes with good management high productivity and satisfied workers. So we should publish individual workplaces’ workers’ compensation premiums benchmarked against industry and economy wide averages as a ready proxy for workplace safety. We could do so on a central website and we could require firms to give their employees and prospective employees this information.

We can do much better still. We could require firms to periodically survey their own employees in an agreed standardised format and publish those results in a similar way. Employees would be asked the questions that matter most to others wondering whether they’d like to work in their workplaces. Is the work satisfying? Is management flexible in accommodating out of work commitments, responsive in encouraging and acting on employee feedback? Does it provide effective career paths through the workforce? Are managers well chosen and competent? To encourage candour, individual employees would not be identifiable from the data that was built from their answers.

Right now this kind of service is offered to firms by a host of Human Resources firms and even the Australian Bureau of Statistics which is in a particularly strong position to reassure employees in the integrity and confidentiality of the process. Compared with a lot of government intervention in the labour market and elsewhere, this would be cheap and light handed indeed. And facilitating good information flows in markets is one of the core functions of government.

Right now firms do try to keep their workers happy – they want them to stay. But once the veil of ignorance was lifted, the rewards to the firms who best met employees thirst for job satisfaction and the penalties for poor performance would intensify dramatically. The high visibility of good performers would enable them to take the pick of the job seekers.

Those who want a balance in their lives between work and family commitments could say goodbye to their endless battle with hostile corporate cultures and join workplaces of like mind. Those keen on a more Darwinian struggle to the top could head for the Darwinian end of town.

And the management skills that produced the high work satisfaction ratings would likewise be on show for all to see. Who knows what miracles might happen? Managing people well might become as important within corporate Australia as financial control. In short we would have a vigorous and efficient market in job satisfaction – like we have already for less important things in our lives, like the market for consumer goods.

And that’s before we count another huge benefit. If job satisfaction came at the expense of productivity – a few tea breaks here, a slower assembly line there – then those decisions would have been made freely to purchase more job satisfaction, and so in general to the benefit of all involved in the choices made. Undoubtedly some would accept wage reductions for happier working lives.

But all the research suggests that for all but the most menial jobs (and many would argue even there) there are strong synergies between job satisfaction and productivity – and the higher the skill level, the stronger the effect. Given this, improving the market for work satisfaction will boost productivity.

Its hard to think of a better example of a ‘new’ approach to economic reform for which the community thirsts and politicians scramble – economic efficiency and productivity improvements that also enhance human wellbeing. Prosperity with a purpose no less!

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