Transformative Learning & Development
L&D Studio
powered by AELIA
Insights
from global thought leaders
Interview with
Dr. Zofia Bajorek
Senior Research Fellow
Institute for Employment Studies
"We have undervalued line managers massively. They don't get enough training to do their job properly.
And if they aren't doing that job properly, then this shatters everybody else's opportunities to realise their full potential."
For me, learning and development is a really important part of somebody’s mental health and well-being at work. If people don’t feel that they’re given the opportunity to develop, to learn, to engage in something that they feel really valued or that they find valuable, people won’t engage with their work. They’ll begin to fall back, they’ll begin to disengage, so it’s really important that organisations show that they value their staff.
One of the ways in which mental health can be supported is this concept of good work; giving somebody the opportunity to have autonomy over their work, to decide what they might like to work in their hours of work, where they want to work. It’s the opportunity to have voice to say to their manager or their line manager what they find interesting, which area they’d like to explore more, or that they’d like to be promoted or to become a manager.
Managerial support is one of the most important interventions that an organisation can have. If you have manager support, they should hopefully be able to be having one to ones with you every week, every month, about where you see yourself, where you want to go, what excites you about work, what keeps you engaged, what keeps your well-being maintained. And then you're able to draw a learning and development plan, think about the steps that you need to get there (formal or informal training, mentoring, coaching).
I think it’s about managers and organisations having an understanding of what employees like to get from work. Work isn’t just a financial benefit for people; it’s a social benefit, it's an intellectual benefit, so providing people with learning and development opportunities and having those discussions with somebody at work about where they want to go and what they want to do is really important for maintaining somebody’s health and well-being.
Totally! Because if an organisation promises but then doesn't deliver, then that can actually be really disengaging. There needs to be an open and honest conversation between you and your line managers and maybe even HR about what is available.
I think things like these also need to be done within an organisation’s plan (where the organisation is going, whether there’s organisational change happening at the moment that you need certain or specific skills to be developed). Sometimes, it might not even be that somebody needs to go on a specific learning and development course. It might be that jobs just need to be crafted or redesigned slightly; people might already be in the roles but are not engaging in those skills.
Learning and development isn’t just about chucking money at people. It’s about understanding people’s fundamental skills and abilities that they can bring to a role and also making sure that they’re having the opportunity in the workplace to do that, that they can be looking at the fundamental concepts of somebody’s job design.
Are we using the person that we hired? Are we using the skills that they already have? And if we’re not, how can we do that? How can we look at somebody’s role, develop their role so that they are using the skills that they have? It is difficult, but I suppose the challenge in our organisations is whether we’re talking to our people and whether we’re managing our people correctly to understand what they want. Once these things are in place, you've got the building blocks to understand where you're going and what resources you need to get there.
It's an interesting one, isn't it? Because in the UK at the moment, I would argue that one of the learning and development challenges that we have in the organisations is to make sure that our managers are skilled enough to have those conversations. So it's not about learning and development for your staff. I would argue it's learning and development for managers at the moment to be able to have those conversations successfully. We have undervalued line managers massively. They don't get enough training to do their job properly. And if they aren't doing that job properly, then this shatters everybody else's opportunities to realise their full potential. We need people in the right place at the right time to have these appropriate conversations about learning and development, so I would argue that we need good data about what organisations want, we need good work so people feel happy and valued at work.
I've been very lucky, I suppose, in my career to have had a really excellent manager. I have had somebody who was able to have these conversations with me. He very, very sadly passed away this June, so we're all in mourning a little bit in the UK at the moment.
I was very lucky to have been mentored by him, he's been described in the press as a trailblazer for well-being because he fundamentally understood the importance of workplace mental health and workplace well-being. He is one of these people who practised what he preached.
When he hired me 11 years ago, he sat down with me and he said, you know, this is where you are now. What do you want to do in this job? What do you want to do in this role? And what can I do to help you get there?
"What do you want to do in this job? What do you want to do in this role? And what can I do to help you get there?"
What a question, right? How many people ask that?
Yeah. How many managers ask their staff, what can I do to help you get there? But then most importantly, do it. You can ask the question, but if you don't do it, then it becomes pointless. Like I said, in my journey, I've been very, very lucky to have had that line manager who has given me a little bit of freedom to discover what I wanted to do and where my interests lay. He gave me the opportunity to learn.
Although he gave me freedom, he also said, I still need you to do your project work, and he guided me through it. 11 years ago, I wouldn't be having this conversation with you right now because one of the first things I said to him was I don't ever want to do media or I don't ever want to do any presentations because I'm just too scared about doing it. He gave me tough love and showed me that doing media for example is part of my job. But we worked on it together, so it was gentle prodding.
But it was learning and development through asking me what I wanted to do, where my interests lay, where I saw myself and my career progressing over the next 10, 15, 20 years and giving me those nudges. Sometimes, it was very much tough love. Sometimes, it was “You've just got to do it because if you don't do it, you won't ever do it.”
It was having that opportunity to have conversations, to be able to discuss with him what I wanted to do, where I felt comfortable and where I didn’t feel comfortable. And where I didn't feel comfortable, we would talk about it, we would discuss what training and development I would need to do that, whether it was to go on a communication course or a coaching course to help me with anything that I was struggling with, whether it was going to some conferences so that I can learn some specific knowledge about an area of workplace research that I wanted to do.
Having regular, honest and open learning and development discussions with my manager over the last 10-11 years of my career has meant that I've been guided on every step of the way. That once again goes back to my point that I said before about having a line manager who's so conscientious and really wants to build you up and have these supportive discussions. That is a common challenge for any organisation.
In one of my first six months of working with him, he emailed me one day to say, if you don't feel like you can come to me with anything that's worrying you either in work or out of work, then I have failed you as a manager. We've been friends for 11 years now, and he knows everything about me. I'm totally telling you he never failed me. It was that authenticity, that authentic approach.
Having somebody who was also luckily just so involved in the world of health and well-being at work has shaped me to the researcher that I am now, and I understand that not everybody has that, but everybody will have a role model or somebody that they look up to or somebody in the organisation that provides them with strength and integrity of character. In a few years’ time, that’s the type of person I would like to become.