Simon Easton and Darren Van Laar's article appears in eGoV Monitor in which they discuss how Universities might use knowledge of the quality of working life of their staff to decrease the likely consequences of recently announced budget cuts.
Research by QoWL over the last 12 years has used the Work-Related Quality of Life scale (WRQoL) to assess both stress and 5 other factors that have been found to predict and explain overall quality of working life. This research has highlighted the complex interactions between various aspects of an employee’s experience. For example, stress does not seem to simply increase or decrease as expected when changes occur in organisations.
The assessment of quality of working life has been seen as a way of gaining an understanding of the whole picture so that effective action can be taken to address stress and related issues at work. This examination of the bigger picture has arisen from observation that simple and straight forward endeavors to reduce stress at work often prove unsuccessful because the underlying causes need to be tackled if real change is to be achieved
