Building Jobs That Matter with Professor Carol Atkinson

What if most workplace well-being initiatives miss the real issue—not how people feel at work, but how the job itself is designed?

In this episode of the HRchat Podcast, host Bill Banham is joined by Carol Atkinson, Professor of Human Resource Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, to rethink what “good work” actually looks like in practice. Beyond pay and benefits, Carol argues that dignity, voice, stability, and meaning must be built into roles from the ground up.

Drawing on research across adult social care, SMEs, and gender equity, Carol explains why transactional basics (fair pay, predictable hours) must be paired with the relational experience of work—and why free fruit and yoga apps won’t fix excessive workloads or chaotic schedules.

We explore how learning labs bring academics, policymakers, and practitioners together to co-design solutions that actually get used, including conflict-management tools developed during COVID. The conversation also tackles job security in an AI-shaped labour market, zero-hours instability, the structural drivers behind the medical gender pay gap, and what practical menopause support really looks like day to day.

If you care about HR strategy, job quality, employee voice, and the future of work, this episode offers a clear roadmap: design better jobs, raise the floor through smart policy, and listen to the people doing the work.

In this episode, we cover:

• What “good work” really means beyond perks
• Transactional vs relational elements of job quality
• Why job design is the foundation of well-being
• AI, insecurity, and the limits of job tenure
• Zero-hours contracts and the hidden costs of churn
• Employability through learning, skills, and confidence
• Learning labs and research-to-practice impact
• COVID-era conflict-management interventions
• Structural drivers of gender pay gaps in healthcare
• Practical and cultural menopause support at work

Transcript

Welcome And Topic Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to the HR Tech Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts, and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work. Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.

Defining Good Work

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, listeners. This is your host today, Bill Bannham. And in this episode, we're going to explore one of the most important and often misunderstood topics in the world of work, and that is what good work actually looks like and how organizations can create it in practice. And I'm absolutely delighted for the first time on the show to be joined by Professor Carol Atkinson, Professor of Human Resource Management over at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Carol's work sits at the intersection of academic research, public policy, and real-world employment practice. She's a member of the Centre for Decent Work and Productivity, leads major National Institute for Health and Care Research projects on employment in adult social care, and has previously led the Adult Social Care Learning Lab within the Economic and Social Research Council Good Employment Learning Lab. Carol's research spans adult social care, SMEs, gender pay gaps, and menopause in the workplace. And she also plays a key role shaping national and regional conversations, sitting on Greater Manchester's Good Employment Charter Board and advising the government's health and social care committee on workforce commitments. Somewhere in all of this, she gets time to sleep. Carol, hello. It's a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thank you very much for joining me.

SPEAKER_03 1:49

Hello, delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

So let's we've got a lot to go through today. Um I I I've I've I've got a bunch of questions for you. So let's let's get straight in uh by setting the scene. What is good work, Carol? You you've you've spent much of your career researching good work and high-quality employment. From from your perspective, what actually defines good work and how does that differ from the way many organisations still think about job quality?

Transactional Vs Relational Work

SPEAKER_03 2:17

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And the starting point is to say there isn't actually one widely agreed definition of good work. There's lots of different frameworks. Um, a really well-known one is the International Labour Organization's um framework on decent work and economic growth, CIPD, Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, also have a few dimensions of good work, and various other models exist. So it can look different depending on which of those models that you're looking at. But central to many of them are things like adequate earnings or fair pay, fair working time or flexible work, possibly work-life balance, um, training, um, career opportunities, social dialogue, that's international labour organisation. We might call that voice, the opportunity to be involved and to be heard at work. So there's lots of different ways that we can think about it. But I think that many organisations focus on what we might call the transactional elements of good work. So they think about am I offering secure work? Am I offering good pay? Um, am I offering training? And clearly those things are really important. But equally important are the more relational aspects of work, and by that I mean, do I feel valued here? Do I have good relations with colleagues? Am I respected? Um, is my work meaningful? And that one is is really important. So we have this kind of split between the more transactional and the more relational elements, and perhaps there is less of a focus often on that more relational side of work. We kind of think do we get our T's and C's right? You know, what do our policies and practices look like? And less about is this a meaningful experience. I mean, it's important to say that that will be different for everybody, we all have our own different needs, but on the whole, we're trying to think about creating work that matters to people, where they feel valued and where they will feel respected. And I think it's really important to recognise that job design is central to that, and that a lot of the things that we see emplo organisations promote as an effort to create good work, their well-being programs, focus on perhaps the symptoms of poor job design rather than actually creating well-being. So things I'm quite skeptical, for example, of things like free fruit and gym membership, they're treating cis symptoms of poorly designed work. And what we need is to make sure work is well paid, people have a voice, or fairly paid, people have a voice, and that work is good and meaningful.

SPEAKER_01 5:23

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazette.com. And now back to the show.

SPEAKER_03 5:45

That's okay, you can take Satsuma.

SPEAKER_02 5:48

As a quick follow-up, uh, one thing I don't think you mentioned uh as part of that um analysis of what good work really means is job security. We're we're obviously long gone past the days when uh people have a job for life in most instances. But I I I do wonder, is job security a key indicator of good work? And and how can any particularly white-collar employer possibly offer that in today's world of AI that's increasingly replacing tasks and replacing people?

SPEAKER_03 6:18

Job security is really important. But allied to that is um sort of employability. So if job security is compromised, and I think perhaps it's compromised a little less than we might think if you look at the typical length of service statistics that we see, but if it is compromised, what's really important is that we are training people, developing people so that they have current skills, so that if they need to move around in the labour market, they feel confident to do that. But I do think that we could do better in many instances in offering job security, and you've just referred there to white-collar workers, um, and my answer responds to those. But also, if we look at other sectors, a lot of my work is in adult social care, as you'll know, and high use there of zero hours contracts. Now that's a different form of insecurity. In theory, it's a permanent job, you're not likely to lose your job, but the practice of it is you never know from week to week how many hours that you'll be working. There's no guaranteed hours. One week you might work 40 hours, another week you might work 10, and some weeks you might not work at all. And the instability there is financial, you don't know what you're going to earn in any given period. And of course, you know, maintaining rent or mortgage, putting food on the table, all those things are very difficult with that kind of insecurity. And again, I would often challenge organizations that adopt those kinds of contracts. They're held out as being flexible for the organization, and clearly they are. However, they also often have significant costs in terms of difficulty in recruiting, difficulty in retaining, to an extent where possibly those costs outweigh those benefits. Again, it might change for groups. So you might have students, for example, who particularly want zero hours contracts, but for many sections of the labour market, that lack of security is really important and actually much more within an organization's gift to address than many would suggest.

Student Hopes And AI Reality

SPEAKER_02 8:31

I don't know if you know this about me, Carol, but um, in addition to um doing the pod and uh running uh different HR events such as Disrupt, uh, I also um uh run a bunch of AI summits, usually at universities around the UK. Um we started doing those in Norwich. We've hosted the last couple at the University of the Arts there. Um the most recent one we did was in in November, and it was interesting because up until then it's all been terribly positive around um AI's impact on the workforce. You were just speaking a moment ago about students. I'm I'm keen to hear from the conversations that you have with the with the students at Manchester Met. Are they optimistic for their career um chances once they graduate? Are they are they very worried that um actually so many of these entry-level jobs are taking away their opportunities? What what what what's what's the feeling that you that you're getting?

SPEAKER_03 9:30

It's a really interesting question, and I think there's a range of views on that. So just this week there was a labour market analysis by Charlie Ball saying actually there's very little evidence at the moment those entry-level jobs are being taken away by AI, and possibly this year is make or break, you know, that investment in AI might come through, and we might see those jobs disappear. Um, but actually, if it doesn't come through this year, then it may be less likely to come through. That might cause problems in other ways, and that vestment in AI might then be seen to be overpromoted and a recession might follow. But I think it's the jury's still really very much out about those entry-level jobs, but I know there's a real insecurity about that. Um, that said, if you talk to younger people, some of them say, well, yep, AI can do certain things, but there's other things that it can't do. So you still need people to help interpret AI to help apply it effectively. So that might create other jobs and other challenges. Um, I think it's a pretty mixed bag. I can't give you a definitive answer on that. It depends who you talk to, where they sit in the debate, what their views are. There's certainly a lot of concern about it, but there's certainly also a degree of scepticism around it, and we'll see who's right as it as it plays out.

How Learning Labs Drive Change

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Okay, very good. Thank you very much. Uh let's talk about learning labs and real-world change. You you've led learning labs through the ESRC Good Employment Learning Lab. For listeners unfamiliar with that model, how do learning labs work and why are they effective at turning research into real organizational change?

SPEAKER_03 11:08

So they're based on a principle called engaged scholarship. The person who sort of launched that is called Van der Ven. Um, but that's been widely developed since. And what that means is that you're bringing together into a space, be it a real lab or be it um a virtual space, a whole range of stakeholders. So you've got academics in there, but you've got policymakers, you've got practitioners, and together you are designing real-world research questions. What are the sort of wicked challenges? What are the real problems out there? So rather than academics sitting on their own thinking, what is it that we think is important? You actually bring people together in a process to do that, and then you design ways of addressing those questions, again, involving those partners. Um, and that means that you get findings that are important, but you all also have a mechanism to take those through into practice. So we did that in the Adult Social Care Learning Lab, in fact, the whole Good Employment Learning Lab project, and we worked with um stakeholders in Greater Manchester and in Adult Social Care to say, what challenges are you really facing at the moment? And in adult social care, this was through COVID. One of the things that they really identified was conflict management. So, partly from the idea of um an enforced shift to remote working, and how do we manage conflict in that situation? But also in adult social care where there was still lots of face-to-face working, but real work intensity, intensification, a real need to work differently, but without necessarily having had the time to think about that and work that through. So challenges were emerging as you know, as we worked. How do we deal with the conflict that emerges from that? And we designed a set of interventions to help line managers work in that way. We worked with line managers on those, and then we had a look at how effective that had been. So that was a really engaged approach, and I think that's coming through more in policy now. So one of my current projects is National Institute for Health and Care Research Funded, and it's called Care Work, a Research Workforce Partnership. And it's quite unusual, and it's a five-year project. In the first 18 months, we're funded to work with um practitioners and policymakers who are actually collaborating in the project, and we are spending 18 months working with the sector saying, What are the key issues here? What is it that we need to research, and then how are we going to do that? And the last three and a half years of the project, we then go and do that research. But again, at the end of that process, our findings are co-created by people in practice and policy. So the idea being that they take those away and implement those, and that we have this kind of real-world view on our work. It can be quite challenging, you know. Academics think in different ways, um, work on different timescales. So if you think about a typical business and management problem, you might want that solved in six months. Um, lots of research projects take far longer than that. So it's kind of working to bring together language and timescales and helping people develop that mutual understanding. So there's a real skill to that, but the payback for that is that there's some really important research findings that have real-world impact and meaning and can go away and influence that change.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

Carol, you've researched gender pay gaps, uh, menopause in the workplace, as I mentioned in the intro, uh, topics that many employers still struggle to address meaningfully. Where do organisations most often get this wrong and what practical steps actually make a difference?

SPEAKER_03 15:00

Okay. So I'll take gender pay gaps first. So we our work was with doctors. Um, and so you might expect highly skilled, highly qualified men and women would would earn similar amounts of money. But actually, if you look at gender pay gap for medics, it's about 20%. It changes depending which group you're looking on, but you know, whether it's GPs or hospital doctors, but you say roughly 20%, and that's quite shocking, isn't it? Where you've got highly skilled, highly qualified people who you think might work on equal terms. But when you underpick unpick that, a lot of it is around training and career structures, and so medicine notoriously has really long hours, it has really inflexible training programs. There have been attempts to tackle those issues, but as a gender pay gap shows, only partially successfully. So we see women possibly working part-time, taking longer to train, possibly not finishing their training. Does happen to men as well, but on the whole, it's more women. So you see them not taking up the senior-level jobs, you see them not moving into consultant roles, but taking other kinds of medical roles, and that's how the gender pay gap emerges. So, what we need to do is to go back to workplaces and think about how we design them, and we need to design them so that women can train and have the career opportunities on the same basis as men, and that is a fairly fundamental redesign in many organisations, but particularly in medicine, which is a very sort of male model of operation. So there's some real sort of brass tack things, but one of the things that um came out of our research was how long the medical pay scale is or was, it spanned 20 years. So if you had maternity leave, if you had a career break and you missed a couple of increments, you would never catch up with your male peers, so you would end up always being paid less than the men. Um so we recommended that that pay scale would be reduced, and we were delighted that in 2024 it was. Um in a way, it's also fundamental cultural in that you need to create environments where you can have those difficult conversations, open, inclusive environments. And again, that's kind of some fundamental change. So to address the silencing, the stigma around menopause and other sensitive topics. But in other ways, it's there's some fairly straightforward things that you can do, but that many organisations just don't think about. And so, for example, that might be um just making cold water available, good access to toilets, good ventilation, desk fans, adapting uniforms, those kinds of things are fairly straightforward, and for many, not especially costly things to do, but can make a huge difference to a woman in menopause transition. Um, but it does also go back to that cultural change, that kind of because we've done a lot of work in the police service, which again is very masculine, very male-dominated, and that whole kind of thought that you might be able to talk about something as sensitive or personal as menopause is really difficult. You know, real threat to women doing that, a real sense that they are making themselves vulnerable. Um, and so that kind of cultural change is also needed alongside those more straightforward uh changes.

Policy Shifts And Reasons For Hope

SPEAKER_02 18:46

Carol, I've got so many more questions for you, but we're almost out of time because we tend to keep these episodes for about 20 minutes because that's what our listeners like for this show. But I do want to ask you two more questions before we wrap up for today. Um next is looking ahead. Let's talk about what gives you hope. Uh looking at the future of work in the UK specifically, what what developments, whether in policy, practice, or mindset, give you the most optimism when it comes to creating better, fairer, more equitable workplaces?

SPEAKER_03 19:15

Okay, so there's a I think there's a number of things there. Um one is the current government and their approach. They've got the a make work pay agenda, as you'll know. The Employment Right Act went through right at the end of 2025. Lots of that is about setting those basics, those transactional things that I talked about, but they are really, really important. So reduce use, for example, of zero hours contracts, uh, removal of waiting time for sick pay, and really interestingly, they're looking at a fair pay agreement for social care. So setting up sectoral collective bargaining mechanisms, and it's a test bed, and if it works, it will roll out to other sectors. So, at that kind of more basic level, that gives me um some optimism, but of course, future government it may not be successful, and future governments um could overturn it. Um so that those things need to be balanced as well. Another thing is the changing attitudes of generations. So people coming into the workplace now, or having fairly recently entered the workplace, tend to have quite different values, want to be treated differently, think believe different things are important. So that kind of work-life balance, that dignity, that inclusivity, we see a far greater demand for that from the workforce. So, this kind of bottom-up pressure might also create change. And then finally, we've talked about AI and its potential um impact, but nevertheless, it we that doesn't get away from the fact that we do have a shrinking workforce. You know, our demographics, we're an aging population, we've got a shrinking workforce, and actually a top-down organizational imperative to recruit and retain good people might drive through some much needed change. Um, so again, and again, AI could derail that remains to be seen. But kind of top-down, bottom-up legislative, there is a bit of a move, a bit of a shift at the moment to create some optimism around this idea of good work becoming more important and more widely available.

Connect With The Guest And Closing

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Okay, you're leaving me today feeling positive. Thank you. Um, I think you and I got to got to this conversation today um purely through cold outreach on LinkedIn on my part. Um, so thank you firstly for replying to me. If if folks would like to connect with you, is that the best way to shoot your notes on LinkedIn? Do you want to share your email address? Are you all over cool socials like TikTok and Instagram? Tell us more.

SPEAKER_03 21:58

So on LinkedIn, so please do look on LinkedIn. But equally, if you look at the university webpage, you'll find my email address. We do make our email addresses public. So it's very easy to find me and to contact me. So yeah, I'd be delighted to hear from people.

SPEAKER_02 22:10

Wonderful. That just leaves me to say for today, Professor Carol Atkinson. Thank you very much for your time.

SPEAKER_03 22:17

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

And listeners, as always, until next time, happy working.

SPEAKER_00 22:25

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette? And remember, for what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media, and visit hrgazette.com.