What Corporate Leaders Should Know About Our New JUST Jobs Scorecard

At JUST Capital, we’re always working to help business leaders create as much value as possible for their stakeholders. We know that the American public particularly wants to see leadership on worker issues, so today we’re releasing the JUST Jobs Scorecard, which gives companies a clear path forward on how to become a leader on just jobs.

The Scorecard assesses transparency and performance on specific job practices and integrates insights from experts from across sectors. It equips company leaders with the data and analysis to determine which areas of good jobs align with their own business strategy. It includes feedback from more than 20 Russell 1000 corporations, as well as expert input from academic institutions such as Harvard Business School, foundations like Families and Workers Fund, and nonprofits including the MIT-based Good Jobs Institute. 

There’s a lot of data in each company’s Scorecard, and we invite you to explore them yourself. In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing more insights focused on what’s in the Scorecard, along with the trends and emerging leadership we’re tracking through the underlying data. 

For now, here are the four things that senior corporate leaders need to know:

1. There’s opportunity for leadership. Only six companies among America’s largest companies earned the “Leader” designation in Overall Performance (scoring 3-3.99 out of 4). While that’s a step forward from our initial, company-facing private launch of the Scorecard in 2023 when only one company earned the Leader designation, it highlights that there’s emerging leadership on job quality disclosure and practice, but plenty of space to become an early adopter. And we see no company achieving top marks – disclosing policies and practices that meet the leading threshold across all metrics. 

2. Leadership looks distinctive. While overall performance on the Scorecard matters, it’s not the only rubric for gauging workforce impact. Companies have different employee populations, and both employee needs and company priorities that are unique to the organization. Each company is also on its own journey towards transparency and performance across job quality metrics, and the Scorecard allows you to see where you stand on yours – and what path you might take towards your intended area of leadership. The takeaway? Each Scorecard metric is individually meaningful and uniquely applicable. Each topic area provides an opportunity for performance leadership across relevant metrics. So leaders should be thoughtful about where and how it makes sense to invest in transparency and performance improvements.

3. Company leaders should get started now. Because your competitors most certainly already have. We are seeing significant improvements in disclosure and performance even in the two years we’ve been tracking. An investment in workers is a clear path forward to generate business value through connections to productivity, retention, and resilience. And in a highly politicized environment, a clear workforce strategy is a win-win-win, for competition, high-road employment, and regulatory pressures.

4. Whatever your industry or your priorities, there’s a path forward. Leadership on good jobs isn’t confined to one industry. In fact, there are eight different industries represented among the ten top-performing companies overall. While some industries have higher average performance, the difference isn’t all that significant: variation exists across every industry, which in turn means that every company has a chance to lead among peers. The same is true for job quality priorities. While a few specific metrics already track leading disclosure or practice from a majority of companies, that’s the exception, not the rule. Instead, most metrics show variation within and across industries – so focus on where you need to lead for your workforce and organizational priorities and build from there.  

What the scorecard is:

• An amalgamation of the foundational disclosures and practices that define good jobs, built from 14 prominent, cross-sector job quality frameworks and definitions and informed by dozens of corporate, academic, nonprofit, and foundation leaders. We’ve built a well-grounded resource at the intersection of what a good job looks like, the priorities of the American public, and the state of company disclosure. 
• A tool for business leaders and others to understand the emerging and established metrics indicating job quality disclosure and performance leadership.
• A tool for companies to understand how they perform on transparency and performance metrics tracking good jobs against leadership thresholds and peer benchmarking.

What the scorecard isn’t:

• This Scorecard isn’t a ranking or a top companies list – we’re looking at each company independently against a set of metrics, some of which are included in our Ranking, informed by experts, company leaders, and the American public. The Scorecard identifies and celebrates a broad range of types of leadership and points towards the right next steps each company can take to improve on its individual journey: a true tool to be used for prioritization, decision making, and investing in workers.
• While we’re celebrating the Overall Performance Leaders, the Scorecard is not particularly focused on overall leadership. We’ve been intentional about creating six categories of good job metrics, because we know that each company has a different set of priorities for jobs, workforce and company priorities, and different ways to measure progress and success; we want this tool to be flexible enough to accommodate every company’s realities, strategies and future objectives.
• It doesn’t use internal company data or rely upon an opt-in company survey, nor does it use external, outside sources like crowdsourced data (e.g. Glassdoor or other feedback sites). We do occasionally work with these types of data to create metrics, such as our wage estimates developed in partnership with Revelio Labs, but have not done so here.
• The Scorecard should not dictate job quality assessment and discussion at companies: instead, we intend it to be a helpful supplement to guide internal conversations, external disclosure, and public leadership.

The JUST Jobs Scorecard was built to support companies on their path toward improved disclosure and performance in providing quality jobs. To unpack your company’s performance, learn more about implementing the Scorecard, and connect with JUST resources, peer cohorts, programmatic Initiatives, and partners, please reach out to corpengage@justcapital.com.