The Aspen Institute has announced the launch of Good Companies/Good Jobs, an initiative to encourage and equip business leaders to enact strategies that produce outstanding outcomes for their businesses and frontline workers.

Building on Aspen's relationship with the Hitachi Foundation, which closed its doors at the end of 2016, the initiative will work with business leaders, particularly those running or managing small and midsize firms, to establish conditions — including pay, benefits, hours, training, quality of supervision, the design of jobs and work environments — that produce favorable business outcomes while expanding economic opportunities for workers. To that end, the initiative will work to incentivize companies to consider and prioritize job quality by providing tools to quantify, benchmark, and report key business and frontline worker outcomes.

"In today's economy, the prevalence of 'good jobs' is diminishing," said Good Companies/Good Jobs director Mark Popovich and Maureen Conway, VP for policy programs and executive of the economic opportunities program at Aspen, in a blog post. "At the same time, many businesses are doing better than ever. Businesses can and should do more to create high-quality jobs and improve existing jobs. What's more, businesses can benefit from doing so."