What does it mean to have a good job in the screen industries? Aside from an alarm clock and needing to pay the bills, what gets you out of bed in the morning?

In many respects, it can be hard to say, as jobs across the sector differ so wildly. The best (or worst) jobs in animation will look very different from those in gaming, VFX or production, not to mention distribution or exhibition. What’s more, the things that make a good job vary person to person, depending on our individual values, skills sets and interests. It even shifts over time, as our life stages and priorities change. For example, job security and a permanent contract might be your #1 need if you’re building a career, paying off student debt and trying to get a mortgage. But later on – perhaps you’ve seen kids leave home and have paid off your mortgage, or you need some slack to do that part-time degree you promised yourself – you might want fewer hours or more flexibility.

And yet, notwithstanding the differences, we can probably identify some common threads.

Let’s start with the end products you work towards. This wonderful sector creates amazing outputs that entertain and enrich people's lives, or challenge and mould society for the better. This is palpable right now, as we experience the buzz and celebrations of the London Film Festival. If screen professionals can see the line of sight between this and their daily work, that’s a rich source of meaning and purpose and a powerful motivator.

As well as the end product or purpose, there’s the nature of the work itself. Just as screen outputs enrich viewers’ lives, the creative processes of screen work can enrich the lives of many professionals. Of course, some jobs will inevitably be more fulfilling in this respect than others, but there’s no doubt that hordes of people are driven to work in the sector because at is best, the work is interesting and varied and gives opportunities to learn and master new skills.

And yet, the drive for creative work can be taken for granted. Not least because of another drive – the relentless drive to do more with less. The intensity of work, long hours, a lack of hours or unpredictable hours can all create huge pressure. A lack of transparency in pay and recruitment can leave people floundering or feeling insecure as they try to make a living out of their passion. Then there are managers. The good ones and the bad ones we can all remember for years to come. The great ones inspire. But managers who don’t have the bandwidth or training to manage well – to do fundamental things like build healthy and productive teams, give people a clear direction, keep them informed, provide support where it’s needed, help resolve conflict… well, how do you do these things as a manager when you’re under the cosh yourself?

The stakes are high. In summarising the landscape in unscripted television, the authors of a 2021 survey reflected that freelance workers, who face especially challenging conditions, ‘constitute the creative life-blood of the industry’. Getting to the bottom of improving work is crucial because it’s about people’s lives now. It’s also crucial for a sustainable and thriving UK industry that builds on past success for generations to come.

Over recent years, successive UK governments have tried to bottom out what good work, employment and people management look like and what’s needed to create the conditions that make this a reality. In particular, 2009 saw the publication of a review on the theme of ‘Employee Engagement’ and 2017 brought a review on ‘Good Work’. The former spawned a movement, Engage for Success, the latter informed regional and national policy. Both highlighted the vital role of employers as well as policy makers.

On the face of it, you can’t argue against ‘good work’ – what’s not to like? But it’s not a vacuous label. The idea presented a deeper challenge and shift in mindset, for managers, employers and government. The premise was that there’s been too much focus in the UK on job creation alone. Job creation is obviously vital for a healthy economy and society, but it’s not enough. We don’t just need more jobs in our industries, we need these to be good quality jobs, jobs you'd want for yourself and your family members, jobs you'd be proud to offer, jobs that help people build a career and that they experience as inspiring, enriching and enjoyable.

There’s a growing consensus on what might constitute ‘good work’. Much of the thinking draws on a decent body of research into job quality and employment conditions. Bringing this together, the CIPD, the professional body for HR, gave this description:

‘[Good work is] work that:  

• is fairly rewarded  
• gives people the means to securely make a living  
• provides opportunities to develop skills and a career and gives a sense of fulfilment  
• delivers a supportive environment with constructive relationships  
• allows for work–life balance  
• is physically and mentally healthy for people  
• gives people the voice and choice they need to shape their working lives’.

Sometimes it’s obvious what good work looks like and the challenge is not to identify or understand it, but to do something about it – for example, for managers to spend a moment considering their workers' perspective or properly taking it into account when planning. Other times it's more complex or opaque. It might depend on the context or individual preferences, as noted above. Or it might involve trade-offs.

For example, objective assessments of hotel cleaning jobs would class them as poor quality jobs – low pay, low skilled, heavy, routine, repetitive and dirty. But a study of hotel cleaners in Hawaii found that despite this, the hours and location still made it ideal work for surfers in Hawaii specifically for the waves, if not for the locals. Most of us make trade-offs of some sort or another in our careers – it might be flexibility in place of greater stability, or rewarding work in place of higher pay, or higher pay in place of better work-life balance. To some extent this is a reality we won’t overcome.

Still, we need to be careful about the trade-off argument. It can easily slip towards a hard-nosed line that a job is better than no job, and we’re back at square one, looking only at job creation and ignoring job quality. We need both.

In 2023, the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre led by Newcastle University published a report on what good work should look like across the creative industries. Work Wise for Screen now builds on this with the ambition of sharing insights and galvanising action that improves jobs within the screen industries. To meet industry standards for working conditions, but also to go beyond these to build healthier, more productive and more diverse workforces in other ways too.

In broad terms, areas we’ll be exploring include:

• Contracts, including pay and terms of employment, all of which should be fair and the basis to securely make a living.
• Management, both people management at a team level and leadership higher up in organisations, and considering both the skills managers need and the particular nuances and sensitivities they need to be aware of –perhaps especially in managing freelancers.
• Welfare – workers’ mental and physical health and work-life balance, including employers’ legal duty of care and the nuts and bolts of how workload, emotional demands of jobs, work schedules, industry pressures and other factors interact, and what resources and support are needed to manage these and avoid burnout.
• Skills and careers, including formal training, informal development through coaching and mentoring, and how jobs are designed to enable people to put their skills to use and experience fulfilling work. The screen sector needs to look at the pipelines for current and future talent, from education that prepares people to enter the industry, to career pathways within it. The pressures of the day make it easy to place people’s development to one side, but we ignore this at our peril – especially given the need in the screen industries to adapt to unfamiliar situations and create creative solutions.
• Relationships, which should be safe, respectful, healthy and productive, and swiftly repaired (where possible) when they fail. In this high pressure,  fast-paced sector, there will always be safeguarding issues and risks of bullying and harassment, so we need a constant focus on dignity at work, effective team building and conflict resolution, as well as holding poor behaviour to account.
• Diversity. Questions of equity, diversity and inclusion run through all the above, as it’s about how job quality is distributed. After all, good work should be accessible to everyone. But it’s also worth attention in its own right, as barriers to opportunity manifest in different ways for different groups of people. Understanding these barriers in context is key to ensuring equality in our organisations.

Another aspect that runs through these areas is workers having a meaningful voice. Whether it’s the ability to negotiate pay and contracts or influence management practices and working conditions elsewhere, open dialogue is often necessary to understand priorities and the key to finding innovative solutions.

But dialogue doesn’t only need to happen within organisations. Challenges that exist industry wide call for collective reflection. This is where Work Wise for Screen comes in. At times it may be as straightforward as sharing good practice that others can learn from. Other times you might feel pressures or constraints that seem not just stubborn but unmanageable. But it can always help to discuss, or reflect on expertise and others’ experience.

Work Wise for Screen will be a growing set of resources aimed at informing and inspiring good people management practice in the screen industries. It also sets out to be a living breathing forum – a meeting point for managers in animation, distribution, exhibition, gaming, production and VFX. Many factors shape our working lives – from market conditions, to HR practices and people management skills, to our own actions as workers. Exchanging knowledge and insight into how these work in context needs time together.

Work Wise for Screen is an opportunity to take stock – to take an honest look at your industry, its strengths and weaknesses, assets and gaps, opportunities and risks. That will involve grappling with thorny issues, which of course is often what’s needed for genuine improvement. But it’s also an occasion for aspiration and building momentum, and for people like you to help lead industry-wide change. Get involved! Help create a legacy of not just more jobs, but decent jobs that form the backbone of a thriving, sustainable industry.