What the Solution Measures

The main scales and facets are:

• Psychological Health: Includes the following facets: Resilience, Positive Outlook and Physical Health.
• Job Satisfaction: Includes the following facets: Supervision, Supportive Colleagues and Engagement.
• Workload

When used at a group or organizational level, the EWQ can:

• Provide an audit of occupational stress and adjustment in employees.
• Identify specific jobs, departments and teams where there may be problems to do with workload, job satisfaction or psychological health.
• Measure the impact of organisational change programmes and stress management programmes.
• Evaluate employee counselling and Employee Assistance Programmes.
• Provide data to allow benchmarking of individuals or teams relative to organisation or industry norms.
• Provide longitudinal assessment of employee wellbeing through the use of annual surveys.
• Over time, measure the effect of programmes designed to improve employee wellbeing and job satisfaction.

Theories of Stress

Within the EWQ, two occupation-related variables of job satisfaction and psychological health are assessed. The former is largely determined by the job and working context, whereas psychological distress is affected by many factors apart from an individual's work, including their personal life, genetic predisposition and previous work experiences. Working conditions affect job satisfaction and psychological health, and in turn these factors affect an individual's behaviour in relation to work. People with low job satisfaction and low engagement give less of themselves at work and are more likely to contemplate leaving to find alternative employment than people with high job satisfaction.

There are many theories of occupational stress that try to link these and similar outcome measures to specific causes: all the theories have their strengths and weaknesses though only offer partial explanations that don't fit all people or circumstances and indeed, it is unlikely that any single theory or model could, because of the complexities involved in understanding the relationship between working conditions and human health.

The EWQ in Context

The EWQ is unique among occupational stress questionnaires, because it measures the core dimensions that are essential for occupational use, with very little risk that the three core measures are overlapping or confounded with each other.