European Working Conditions Survey 2024

Eurofound carried out the fieldwork for the latest edition of its European Working Conditions Survey (EWCS) during 2024. The EWCS 2024 provides a comprehensive picture of the everyday reality of men and women at work. In order to future-proof this unique tool for European comparative analysis on working conditions and to look at how trend analysis could be maintained, in parallel to the face-to-face interviews for this survey edition, Eurofound also implemented an experiment for an online questionnaire for the first time.

The 2024 edition of the survey provides data to be able to continue to:

• assess and quantify working conditions of both employees and self-employed workers across the EU Member States and beyond on a harmonised basis

• analyse relationships between different aspects of working conditions

• identify work situations that are of concern and/or groups at risk, as well as monitoring areas of improvement

• monitor trends by providing homogeneous indicators on these issues

• contribute to European policy development, particularly on quality of work and employment

As the newest edition in Eurofound's longest-running survey, the EWCS 2024 aims to ensure continuity of the survey analysis, accurate and timely findings and high-quality outputs, as well as adaptability of data collection methods for the future.

• Continuity of survey analysis: Comparative analysis, rich set of indicators, job quality at the heart, different working situations, quality of working lives

• Quality of findings and outputs: Relevance to users, quality of the questionnaire and finalisation process, quality of the translation, quality of the survey production process

• Adaptability of data collection: Comparability over time but also new questions dealing with 'the future of work that we want', findings solutions to collect high-quality comparative data on job quality in a changing data collection environment

The main emphasis of the preparatory work was on maintaining trends to ensure comparability over time in job quality and key indicators on quality of working life, incorporating gender mainstreaming. New questions have been developed to cover the key policy and research agenda around the future of work, including the impact of COVID-19, digitalisation and decarbonisation at work.

A study was commissioned on how to transition interviewer-administered, cross-national surveys to an online mode, with particular emphasis on the EWCS, and another on cognitive pretesting using cross-cultural interviews and web probing.

A comprehensive pilot test took place in all countries from September to November 2023 which provided valuable information to ensure the fieldwork implementation for the main survey is of the highest quality. Following the pilot test a small number of changes were made to the questionnaire and the online design was finalised, based on tests to assess the most appropriate methodological approach for the push-to-web survey.