Over the last several decades society - and work - have become more complex, more complicated - with vast increases in rules, regulations and associated bureaucracy. This has created entire layers of employment focused on managing this complexity. In both the public and private sectors, millions are primarily engaged in navigating rules sand ensuring compliance.
There seems to be two major views about the impact of the increasing use of AI on the productivity of organisations. One school of thought suggests that AI can streamline processes and systems, enhance knowledge and skills and generally have a positive impact on productivity. . The other ays that AI will simply reduce costs
We all know that productivity growth has slowed over the last decade. There have been numerous shocks to the global economy and trading system - the biggest being the financial crisis and the COVID epidemic - and catalysts such as advancing technology have lost their impetus as dramatic change (in the technology) has slowed. Of
Politicians in the UK have been going on about 'growth' for some time now. All major political parties have 'growth on their agenda and claim that they are the party that can deliver this growth. Now you and I know that growth - in this context - is really a shorthand for productivity since
I read a lot of papers and articles about productivity - or more usually, about the lack of productivity. Most Western nations have had little productivity growth over the last few years. Many of these articles will make some kind of diagnosis - what has gone wrong or what needs putting right. Occasionally I
There has been much debate over the relative productivity effects of working from home (WFH) versus office-based versus hybrid working. Companies who sought to reduce property expenses by switching to WFH have generally been disappointed by the resulting productivity delivered and quite a few have tried to encourage or even insist upon return to office-based working (RTO). Employees,
It is often said- probably because it is true - that small businesses are the bedrock of a healthy economy. Business leaders know this; even leaders of large businesses, for their businesses were small once. One assumes that political leaders also know this - for they are reminded of it regularly when discussing growth strategies. Yet politicians
During the pandemic many people changed jobs - though some people also lost jobs. Quite a lot of the changes invalid a switch to a different ,location and/ or to a different industry as people sought out jobs they thought might be secure until at least after the pandemic. The situation has been rather like that
This is a statement you will often see in the UK press (and those in other countries will see similar statements with their country replacing the UK.) IBu is it true? Well, firstly the statement is normally made because someone has read the latest official productivity statistics. This shows that in the aggregate, output per worker
The UK does not have a good record on employee training and development. Compared to many other developed countries the skill levels in our workforce are low. Government incentives to train and develop employees are not strong. - and many employers are fearful about giving employees skills which increase their value to competitor organisations. "Train them