The power of short courses in transforming the workplace

In many universities across the UK, short courses are viewed as the noisy neighbour to the core business of teaching and research – very useful for raising revenue, but distinctly the poor relation. But I think we need to think about short courses in a more creative and positive way. That’s the lesson that my colleagues and I have taken from a five-year research project, focusing on the conflict resolution skills of line managers. 

The Skilled Managers research project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and began prior to the pandemic in 2019. It emerged from a growing evidence base that had identified poor managerial quality as a key contributor to the UK’s chronic problem of low productivity. Leadership development – a staple of executive education programmes – is arguably one of the problems, as it’s prioritised by many business schools over giving aspirant managers the skills they actually need on the ground. 

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• How higher education can do better at developing skills for the workplace

As a consequence, UK managers tend to avoid difficult conversations with their staff. Poor performance is ignored, problems are swept under the carpet, and conflict is allowed to fester and escalate. Conflict at work costs UK business £29 billion per year, £1,000 for every worker. We have long argued that a large portion of this could be wiped out if our managers had the skill and confidence to broker proactive resolutions. However, there is little robust evidence to support this argument.

We designed and tested an online skills intervention, Skilled Managers, via a randomised controlled trial squarely aimed at hard-to-reach managers, who would otherwise find it difficult to access training. Managers were given access to a three-hour online course. The content revolved around bite-sized videos, simulations and scenarios, and could be accessed via a smartphone app. 

While recruiting participants for management research is notoriously tricky, we were overwhelmed with organisations wanting to take part. Over 1,000 employers registered for a webinar explaining the project in just a couple of hours. Participants got their managers trained and detailed feedback on the impact. There is clearly an appetite for collaborating with academic research where there are benefits from taking part. 

The research involved 70 different organisations and over 1,000 managers. The feedback from managers was overwhelmingly positive. But, most importantly, our data showed that the Skilled Managers intervention had a significant impact in boosting more proactive and collaborative approaches to managing conflict. Among smaller organisations, four out of five managers told us that they intended to change the way they managed their team following the training. Crucially, these changes were felt by staff, with managers more likely to resolve conflict quickly if they had gone through the Skilled Managers programme.

Although we set out on this journey with a single focus on research, it became clear that business research can create practical solutions and products that not only work but also that managers and organisations want. We worked with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas) to develop a version of this intervention to be rolled out to organisations on a commercial basis, via the university’s Short Courses Team, whose expertise helped shape and scale the delivery of the programme.

This offered us the opportunity to maximise the impact of our research and generate revenues that could be fed back into future development and testing. To date, more than 400 managers have signed up for the course with overall revenues in the first year on course to top £100,000. This type of initiative also creates resources that can be used within universities and their partners to boost their own managerial capability. 

This comes at a time when organisations and managers are facing up to the challenges of sweeping changes in the regulatory environment of work and employment, through the Labour government’s Employment Rights Bill. Particularly affected will be businesses that don’t have the resources to access some of the more conventional offerings from business schools and commercial providers.

In this context, the Skilled Managers team are now looking to use results from this course to inform the development of additional short courses, which will help employers cope with a rapidly changing legislative and economic landscape. This could include courses that guide managers through disciplinary and grievance processes, negotiate with their staff and build better relationships with trade unions. Skilled Managers also provides an opportunity to develop a community of practice, comprising managers, HR practitioners and key stakeholders (including course participants). This would allow us to test new products and study the practice of managers in detail and over longer periods of time, deepening and exchanging knowledge. In this way, by bringing a more integrated model of research, learning and impact, universities can find some of the answers to the UK’s productivity puzzle.

Our experience suggests that opportunities are out there for researchers to use their insights to develop commercial learning interventions that can bring concrete benefits to organisations, individuals and wider society. For those who are interested in making this exciting leap, here are a few things we have learned along the way:

• Don’t just think about research impact, consider whether your research can have a commercial application and build this into the initial design
• Turn research findings and insights into interventions that you can test and trial – this allows you to generate robust publishable outcomes, evaluation data for REF impact cases and helps shape a commercial product
• Short courses are not simply a source of revenue – they can also provide a space where impact can be generated, and interventions can be further tested and refined
• Think about the look, feel and design of research instruments and interventions – you need to “sell” your intervention to potential research participants and also future commercial customers
• Include people in the research team who understand – and have the people skills needed to engage with – the target communities and markets for your intervention.

Richard Saundry is a leading academic authority on the management of conflict at work. He is currently working on the Skilled Managers project along with colleagues from the Centre for Employment Research at the University of Westminster. 

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