All over the world, business areas face numerous challenges and opportunities that result from improving productivity, and Britain, in particular, faces a massive productivity challenge.
The numbers show how difficult it is for the UK economy to increase productivity, even though small increases were announced in April 2019. The impact of poor productivity on business is also transferred to household income.
In an environment of increasing employment and flexibility in the market, wage growth has also been slow. In order to increase wages and thus income and living standards, a higher output per employee is required.
How Can Britain Boost Productivity Growth Levels?
Productivity in the coming years will be more important than ever for Britain’s future economic growth and standard of living. Labour supply is unlikely to grow indefinitely, and due to demographic change, particularly the ageing population, about 90% of future growth will have to come from productivity in order to keep up with historical GDP growth rates.
In addition, economic and political changes and uncertainties, including Brexit and other geopolitical developments can slow down growth prospects. However, a comprehensive analysis of the UK’s growth potentials shows the solutions to Britain’s productivity challenge lies mainly on a focus on education and skills — among other significant changes — and support investments to build broad resilience for the future.
- Greater Investment in Education and Skills
The UK needs to set up an education and skills system that meets the needs of a rapidly changing digital economy – for managers, the existing workforce and young people still in training. Management skills are more important than ever for productivity with rapid growth in jobs.
This points to the central importance of retraining talent and offering official qualification programmes for existing employees. Further, those who have not yet entered the job market need to ensure that they are willing to take on extra training offered and try to improve their skillset.
- Increased Digitisation
The UK is one of the leading digital nations. According to current digital ranking, the digitisation potential is 17% in Great Britain, 18% in the United States and 12% in Europe. This makes them the second largest digitalised country in the world.
In a survey of British companies, most of them (52%) assume that digitisation will have a “moderate” to “very positive” impact on their business. Despite this optimism, the benefits of digitisation are not yet apparent in the UK’s productivity figures.
Digital workflows help employees to become significantly more productive, valuable and growth drivers. We find that advanced economies like the UK have a potential for productivity growth of at least 2% per year over the next ten years if policymakers and businesses take support measures.
A focus on improving the skills of the workforce, accelerating digital acceptance, and promoting investment and exports is crucial and initiatives have already been taken in some areas.
- Engaged and Healthy Employees
One of the key ways to boost your company’s productivity is to ensure that your employees are healthy and engaged with their jobs. Healthy employees lead to better morale and better productivity.
To help ensure that your employees are healthy and engaged, you can take simple steps to aid them. For example, you can easily and cost-effectively take steps to educate employees about the benefits of good health, and inform them of the various types of private health insurance they can invest in for themselves and their families, so that they will have you fast access to eligible health treatment when they need it.
You can also help to educate your employees on physical and mental wellness, with the introduction of company-based wellness programmes.By offering wellness strategies for your employees you are giving them the helping hand that they might need to take better care of themselves.