Lagging productivity has been one of the constant sources of discussion in British policy circles in recent years, so any attempts to improve matters have to be taken seriously. The recent Skills and Employment Survey suggests that most employees are only too well aware of changes they could make to improve their productivity, but their employer often doesn’t support them in making them.
The study publishes results every five years, and this year found that the kind of productivity improvements suggested by employees understandably tend to be implemented more frequently in organizations where employee involvement is higher. Such organizations are typified by high levels of employee autonomy, with ‘servant leadership’ evident and high levels of employee development.
Yearning for involvement
Perhaps understandably, most employees long for that kind of involvement, both in their own work but also the wider work of their organization. This yearning typically manifests itself both in having support in ensuring their skills are kept up to date, and also the opportunity to implement improvements to processes that they deem suitable. There were also clear changes in how employees interact with technology.
“Not so long ago, computers were only used by the most educated, but nowadays they have become a general purpose technology found in virtually all organisations and industries, and used by most workers,” the researchers say. “While this technology was being rolled out it meant that everyone had to become more skilled, but in the last decade the incidence of technical change at work has been falling, and since 2012 the required level of literacy and numeracy skills at work has fallen for the first time.”
Interestingly, the report also suggests that talks of a skills shortage may be somewhat exaggerated. It says that demand for skills in general has slowed considerably since the survey began in the 1980s, with some domains even seeing a reverse. This itself has placed a downward pressure on productivity, with both entry-level qualifications and on-the-job training reducing in recent years.
Rather worryingly, just 25% of respondents thought that their employer treated workers fairly, with this also likely to be having an impact on productivity and performance, as fairness can be connected with our willingness to go the extra mile at work.
“Britain has a longstanding labour productivity gap with international competitors, despite British employees working more intensively than many other nations. Our research seeks to understand the role of employees in sparking a much-needed reversal in this state of affairs,” the authors say.
“The big message coming out of our findings is that workers have great ideas about how productivity could be improved. Growth is unlikely to come from simply increasing the supply of skills; employers need to harness the views of their workforce and treat them fairly. This will give us a better chance of closing the productivity gap.”
