Introduction

Quality of work-life has attracted a lot of interest in the last decade. Measurement of work-life satisfaction, stress at work, and psychological health at work has become a part of a healthy human resources management. Moreover, prevention of psychosocial risk factors has become a major concern in many European countries (France, Belgium, etc.) However, very few assessment tools allow providing an organisational diagnostic based on the employee’s goal seeking behaviour in different areas of work life as well as an indication of the employee’s psychological health.  The Quality Work of life systemic inventory (QWLSI ©) is based on the Aristotelician notion of pursuit of happiness as the main goal of our life and on the system control analysis. This later theory allow the measurement of the gap between the person’s desired goal and her actual condition in 34 work life domains, the level of these goals as well as the relative priority given to each. It also measures the dynamic of improvement or deterioration of the process of goal attainment. The model allow defining quality of work life as followed: Quality of Work-Life, at a given time, corresponds to a condition experienced by the individual in his or her dynamic pursuit of his or her hierarchically organized goals within work domains where the reduction of the gap separating the individual from these goals is reflected by a positive impact on the individual’s general quality of life, organizational performance, and consequently the overall functioning of society. The QWLSI© provides profiles that permit comparisons of a group of employees of an organization to a database of near 3000 workers of many different types (health professionals, managers, policemen, firemen, teachers, etc.) originating from Canada (Québec), Belgium and Switzerland.

Participants: One hundred thirty one workers were recruited in a professional school, over a 216 eligible workers. To be eligible, workers has to work at least 35 hours a week.  Recruited workers come from nine different sectors in the school: professional continuing education, regular professional training, pedagogical support, human resources, administration and technological services, financial services, material resources, lodging and cafeteria services and special training programs.

Instrument

The Quality of work life systemic Inventory (QWLSI ©) was used, via internet (http://www.qualitedevie.ca), to evaluate quality of life at work. This instruments covers 34 items grouped in 8 subscales: Financial: income, fringe benefits,  income security, Career path: possibilities for advancement, transfers, professional development and training, Work schedule: work schedule, flexibility of the schedule, leave for family reasons, Climate with colleagues: feelings of belonging, competitiveness, relationships with co-workers, conflicting roles, Climate with superiors subscale: relationships with superior or employees, relationship with employer or management, comments and evaluations, internal communications, Physical characteristics of the environment: workplace, equipment and tools needed for job, Factors influencing appreciation of tasks to do : efficacy at work, time available to perform the tasks, correspondence between competence and type of job, autonomy, variety of tasks, affective load, physical demands, involvement in decision making, Clarity of roles in the organization, Support offered to employee: Part of my workload covered during my absence, Repartition of work during an employee’s absence, facilities (daycare, restaurants, etc.), relationship with union, employee assistance plan. The QWLSI provides four global main scores:  goal score (level of individual goal), the quality of work life score (gap between the actual condition lived by the person and his goal in each domain), the importance score (level of importance of each domain) and the speed score indicating improvement or deterioration occurring in each domain.

In addition of these global scores, a profile is provided presenting the quality of life score of the 34 items on a graph that allow to identified work life domains that constitutes psychosocial risks factors (large gap between goal and condition lived) and domains that are protective factors (small gap). Another profile gives information about the level of goals for each item. This profile helps to identify if the objective level of domains are too high (generating stress overload) or too low (sign of demoralisation). The “importance score” profile allows to analyse level of priorities. Too many domains at the same high level may create conflict and stress, too many domains having very low importance may suggest a climate of demobilisation in the organisation. Finally, the “speed score” profile helps determining which domain is in a process of continuing deterioration and therefore needs prompt and efficient intervention to prevent organisational crisis.

Profiles of each school sectors will be presented and compared to the profile of the entire group of respondents. Psychosocial risks factors will be highlighted as well as protective factors that contribute to workers job satisfaction. Finally, correlations between QWLSI  global scores (multiple regression), and psychological distress,  and burnout (exhaustion and disengagement) were respectively:  0,47, 0,45 and 0,49 (all p