The UK is successful in many areas - it has a large, successful renewable energy sector, a whopping great financial services sector and a large tech startup sector. Yet UK productivity does not reflect these advantages. Skills seem to hold back UK industry - many firms are finding it impossible to recruit the skilled or experienced
We have known for many years that some of us are larks and some of us are owls. Well, this simple categorisation has been confirmed by experts (2007 study published in Personality and Individual Differences) who suggest there are actually four of these states - called chronotypes. There are evidently four chronotypes: Lions, dolphins, wolves and bears. Lions
Many people have been working from home during the pandemic. In fact many of them are still working from home for at least part of their working week. For most of these people, this has been great for their work-life balance. They have been better able to balance the demands of their work with other responsibilities
Can we raise productivity by doing less? Well, if that lesser activity has a greater impact, then Yes, We Can. You need to shift the mindset of your managers to concentrate on key results and key impacts, rather than counting units or activities or hours worked. Focus on these impact activities and you start to
If it aint broke, don’t fix it. That’s a useful slogan in some circumstances - but not in business. If you expect the status quo to deliver success, you are likely to be disappointed - or you are in some sort of niche situation or industry. If you aim to maintain the status quo, you
Is productivity improvement a hard or soft skill? Is it better, for example, to consider and analyse hard performance data or approach improvement from a softer, behavioural stand point. This is definitely not an ‘either …. or’ scenario. Hard and soft skills are complementary. When we change elements of a process, a system, a procedure or a
I have written a number of blog posts relating to working from home including ones that describe the difference in view of effectiveness of WFH as perceived by employees and their managers. Managers who think staff working from home are not always productive sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to monitor what they think is productivity. They
We know there is a disconnect between the views of employers and employees on the productivity of working from home. Employees are happier and believe they are more productive; their managers are not so sure. Now it seems, that some of those employees are indulging in what has been termed ‘productivity theatre’. They make sure their mouse
Lots of US sports articles talk about productivity of a team, or a quarterback or other star player. Of course, they don’t understand the meaning of ‘productivity’. What they are talking about is ‘performance’. The two are linked but they are not synonymous. Productivity is a ratio of output to input whereas performance relates to output
The UK has a new monarch and a new Prime minister- one avowedly committed to economic growth as the way to climb out off the abyss we are in. But, as yet, apart from the long-espoused commitment to tax cuts, we have seen little evidence of what will create that growth. Where is the infrastructure