Good Work Should Be Good For Us — But Is It?
I’ve been to enough conferences to know that the phrases that stick with you aren’t always the keynote headlines. Sometimes it’s the throwaway line in a panel session, said almost as an aside, that you’re still turning over in your head on the drive home.
At CIPD Scotland recently, that phrase was this: good work should be good for us.
Simple. Almost self-evident. And yet I couldn’t shake it.
Because when you actually sit with it — when you hold it up against the reality of most people’s working lives — it starts to ask harder questions than it answers.
So what is “good work”?
The CIPD’s own Good Work Index has done serious thinking on this, and most frameworks point to similar things: fair pay, job security, a degree of autonomy, opportunities to develop, connection to purpose, and relationships built on trust and respect.
But I think good work also has a feeling to it. You know it when you’re in it. There’s a sense of forward motion — like you’re learning, contributing, becoming slightly more capable than you were last month. There’s a quality to the relationships. People notice your work. You feel, in some genuine sense, that you matter to the enterprise you’re part of.
And perhaps most importantly: the work doesn’t cost you more than it gives back. That balance — between what we put in and what we take from it — feels like the heart of what “good for us” really means.
The boosters
Some things make good work more likely to flourish, and they’re worth naming.
Great managers, first and foremost. I know we say this constantly in HR, and I know it’s almost a cliché — but the evidence is overwhelming and the lived experience confirms it. A manager who pays attention, who gives honest feedback with genuine kindness, who creates space for people to do their best work — that person is a multiplier. They make average jobs feel meaningful.
Psychological safety matters too. Work is good for us when we can bring our real thinking to it — when we can flag problems, try things, fail occasionally, and not spend our energy managing how we appear. The mask is exhausting. Taking it off is energising.
Purpose and clarity help. Not the laminated values kind, but the genuine sense that what you’re doing connects to something real — a customer, a community, a mission you actually believe in.
And flexibility, done well. Work that accommodates the full complexity of a human life — not just the bits that happen between 9 and 5.
The barriers
Of course, if boosters were all we had, this would be a much shorter and more cheerful piece.
The barriers are real and often systemic. Work that is relentlessly monitored erodes trust. Work that is purely transactional erodes meaning. Organisations that tolerate poor management behaviour — however commercially successful the culprit — send a very clear message about what they actually value.
Workload is one of the quieter barriers. Not dramatic enough to make it onto a risk register, but the slow accumulation of more-with-less, the permanently full inbox, the meeting that could have been an email — these wear people down in ways that don’t always show up until they really show up.
And inequity. Good work isn’t equally distributed. Access to development, to interesting projects, to sponsors who champion you — these things depend far too much on who you already know, how you present, and whether your face fits. If we’re serious about good work being good for us — all of us — then this has to be part of the conversation.
And then there’s AI
I want to tread carefully here, because this is a space where confident predictions tend to age badly.
The hopeful version goes something like this: AI takes on the repetitive, the administrative, the cognitively draining — and frees people up to do more of the work that actually energises them. More thinking, more connecting, more creativity. That’s genuinely exciting, if it plays out that way.
But there’s another version worth honest acknowledgment. If AI is deployed primarily to reduce headcount, intensify surveillance, or deskill roles without reinvesting in people — then it risks hollowing out the very things that make work good for us. Connection, craft, the satisfaction of figuring something out. The sense that your judgement is valued and trusted.
The technology itself is probably neutral. What matters is the intent behind how it’s used, and the values of the organisations making those choices. Which brings us, in a slightly circular way, back to the question of what kind of work we actually want to create.
I don’t think AI is the fundamental threat to good work. I think the threat to good work is the same as it’s always been: short-termism, and not taking people seriously enough.
It almost always comes back to the manager
Here’s what I keep returning to, though. Across all of these boosters and barriers — the throughline is almost always the same person.
The manager.
Not the strategy document. Not the engagement survey. The actual human being who shows up in your one-to-ones, notices when something’s off, gives you the honest feedback you needed even when it was uncomfortable, and makes you feel like your development genuinely matters to them.
Research consistently tells us that people don’t leave organisations — they leave managers. And by the same logic, people stay, grow, and do their best work because of managers. The manager is, in many ways, the proximate cause of whether work feels good or not.
Which makes it all the more striking that so many managers are set up to fail.
Promoted because they were brilliant at their job. Handed a team. And then largely left to figure out the people bit on their own — through trial, error, and the occasional painful conversation that probably could have gone better with a little more preparation.
We wouldn’t do this with any other skilled role. We wouldn’t hand someone a complex technical brief and wish them luck. And yet with management — which is genuinely one of the hardest things to do well — we routinely treat it as though competence should arrive fully formed the moment someone gets the job title.
It doesn’t. It never did.
Great managers are grown
This is the belief at the heart of GrowHow Learning: that great managers aren’t born, they’re grown. And that growing them doesn’t require a six-month programme or a significant budget — it requires consistent, practical, human learning experiences where managers can build skills and, just as importantly, realise they’re not alone in finding this stuff hard.
GrowHow runs 90-minute live sessions — focused, accessible, built around the real challenges managers face. Managing performance. Engaging and retaining people. Having difficult conversations. Coaching. The skills that don’t come naturally to most of us, that nobody formally taught us, and that make an enormous difference when we actually get them right.
It’s not about turning managers into HR professionals. It’s about giving them enough — the right frameworks, the right conversations, the right confidence — to show up well for their people.
Because when they do, work becomes better. Not just more productive — though that too — but genuinely better. More human. More sustainable. More like the thing that phrase was pointing at.
Good work that is actually good for us.
Whose job is this, anyway?
As HR and people professionals, I think we have to own this more visibly — both the aspiration and the accountability.
It’s easy to be the function that facilitates whatever the business has already decided. Harder, and more important, to be the function that asks: but what does this mean for people? What does this do to the experience of work here?
That phrase from the conference isn’t just an observation. It’s a standard. And someone has to hold it — in the boardroom, in the people strategy, and in the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure managers have what they need to do right by their teams.
I’m still sitting with the question, honestly. I don’t think good work is a destination — more a condition we have to keep actively tending to. But I know that tending to it starts with the people closest to it.
And more often than not, that’s the manager..
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