To wonder why productivity in the U.K. is so low...

[coconuttella]

Germany are 30% more productive... Surely this is the key problem that need some addressing with our economy.... which in turn would support our schools and health service etc. What are we doing wrong, and how do we address it?

DH is German and we also recently watched a documentary where a family from the UK swapped with a German family for a week and the man actually went to work at his German counterparts Job ( I think in a pencil factory).
I remember this hoppinggreen. It was at Faber Castell. This must have been staged. The guy came wandering in late with a coffee in his hand, being amazed that everybody else was already at work, but surely even if you have never worked in a factory before you realize that you can't just wander into production line after your shift started.

The only way to increase productivity is to remove the availability of cheap labour to encourage investment and thinking.

No, that will just encourage companies to move aboard and futher decrease our productivity.

We need to actually give our workforce skills, so that they don't need to keep importing workers. Who would you employ, someone who left school after GCSEs who has no work experience after 5 years and won't do min wage work coz it's beneath them or someone from Eastern Europe who has been to university and has been working since in any job they can get? I know who I would be looking to employ.

There is a sense of entitlement here that I'm not sure exists in other countries. I know someone who runs apprenticeship schemes - which we are regularly told are like gold dust. But then when given the chance, people turn up late, don't want to work hard etc. I know someone who audited a large manufacturer's books in the UK and found a number of ghost employees - people on the books but not working. The management knew about it but didn't do anything because the union would have stopped production. It just wasn't worth it for them. How often do the tubes or train lines go on strike, so no one can get to work. On the other end of the scale, there is the ridiculous level of presenteeism. People can't take lunch breaks and have to hang around so late, they're not able to work efficiently because they're exhausted. Im not sure if our education system is geared towards the world of work, either. It's just not the subject areas but people just seem to be crammed full of facts, without it being put into context. Also, pupils are not taught to think critically, which I thimk should be a fundamental part of the education system. Nor are they encouraged to present to their class mates, which I think is a pretty useful skill for the world of work. The trouble is that so much of this is down to attitudes, which it is a really difficult thing to change. Finally, I can't remember a large IT system being introduced into this country which actually worked well or an investment in infrastructure that came in on budget. Maybe we don't have sufficient expertise at this level of project management to bring these huge projects in on time and in budget.

There is a sense of entitlement here that I'm not sure exists in other countries Yes I agree. Rightly or wrongly, I know a lot of families who have the perception that education isn't that important and if they dont get a job the state will sort them out.

I think that attitude is starting to change but it will take the pressure to be on for over a decade to entrench it and make people value a job, any job, even one on minimum wage.

Young people need to learn more about the expectations in the world of work. The basics like dressing appropriately for the role, being on time, showing enthusiasm, how to answer a phone and actually communicate with people, not being glued to Snapchat all day and not getting your mum to call in sick because you are feeling a bit woozy or tired.

DHs company have recently given up on apprenticeships because they were spending so much time just teaching them basic things there was little hope of them ever becoming productive.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place
of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their
households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They
contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties
at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

• Socrates

I do hate the generalisations.

MY kids are hardworking "young people" - they both have weekend work - from age 14 delivering leaflets and local newspapers - to age 16, Saturday job in a local coffee shop. Both are members of local cadet forces (1 air, other St John's) and give up their time freely. Both will do well in this world because they will put their back into any job - paid or not.

There is no "sense of entitlement" in this household - or many others of my acquaintance.

From my limited experience I think Germany has embraced capitalism. Everyone is pushing together to succeed.

Happy workers are productive workers.

lack of investment in techology and training and too mch use of phones and social mefia during work hours

can hyperventing apply to be minister for productivity if there is one..loved your post!

I live in NZ now, and the difference in work culture is palpable. In my experience, Kiwis are simply more focused on their work, and have more confidence in themselves to solve problems. Others mentioned presenteeism. I do see that here too, but a good deal less. Also, Kiwis' basic literacy and numeracy tends to be better, although I fear this is going to change as the government has spent the last 15 years rogering the school system.

Productivity is low here too, but that is because NZ's main income earners are low-value (e.g. food production, tourism and so on). You can work really hard in such industries and make little profit. And as the high-achieving individuals often tend to leave (not least to the UK), and the customer base is small, it's hard to establish high-value businesses here, although it does happen to a degree.

Also there's less of an expectation of deference from management here. The UK is much more hierarchical and management much less approachable. I expect that makes for better decisions here, although I have nevertheless witnessed some ginormous cock-ups, which I suppose happen everywhere from time to time.

Many companies have far from transparent accountancy structures and claim they make less money than they do. Several large companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars of mysterious fees to their European/foreign companies in tax havens. We will only get an accurate measure of the UK's productivity I think when we leave the EU

Lack of enthusiasm from workers who are sick of low pay, low pay rises and poor working conditions.

Several large companies pay hundreds of millions of dollars of mysterious fees to their European/foreign companies in tax havens. We will only get an accurate measure of the UK's productivity I think when we leave the EU
Sorry, what ?

How will leaving the EU have any impact on UK and international GAAP reporting standards

brexit dreamworld posts strike again

Not only that, but productivity is not the same thing as taxable profits. One would expect the two to align, but they don't have to.

London's a big spider in the centre of the tax haven web anyway.

Labour hoarding - save number of workers as 2007 as it is expensive to fire and re hire and same/lower levels of production.

Entitled people who think the world owes them a living.

Wales, Scotland and NI - significantly less productive than England.

Lack of training by employers. No tax incentives for this.

Poor transport infrastructure.

These are a few reasons but there are many more and it should be addressed.

The culprit is British management style and culture, followed closely by British ideas about leadership.

We seem to have a culture whereby we install unworkable management structures and then put the wrong people in leadership positions, usually through using completely daft methods of recruitment and suitability assessment.

And because of this, there is never a cohesive understanding of the fundamentals of the business or enterprise that cascades throughout the entity.

We also have a culture of perceiving jobs as "task-based" roles that fit into a hierarchy, rather than a more organic perspective of perceiving jobs as "zoned" roles that are all integral to specialist day-to-day operations.

So you get an external candidate being hired to be a manager because they have management experience, but it will be management experience in an industry that does not map well onto the hiring business's activities, which means the manager then imports a lot of inappropriate ideas and doesn't fully understand how the business has to operate and won't listen to people underneath because of the rigid nature of the hierarchy.

Meanwhile, someone who has an in-depth knowledge of the activities of the business will not get promoted because they have no management experience.

Or you will get stupid positions created, like "Head of IT and HR" and no-one on an executive board will see a problem with that.

I suppose the easiest way to describe it would be "David Brentism" ... not the aspect of the character that is offensive or egotistical per se, but the fact that Brent is a manager that categorically does not engage with the actuality of running a branch office of a paper merchants in terms of day-to-day processes or systems.

Shit wages?

PickingOakum makes some very valid points which can be summarised as follows: the managers don't manage and the workers don't work.

There's also a big mistrust of capitalism here, probably founded in a total lack of understanding about how it works. So you can't discuss wealth creation, profitability and productivity without someone bemoaning "fat cats" and "greedy shareholders" whilst clearly not making the link to workers' pay and the rather uncomfortable truth that a sensible business will only pay people what they're worth to the owners of the capital.

Throughout most of my adult life time until very recently (I'm early forties) it was quite possible to see one's standard of living rise all the time without actually improving one's own output. We managed to export a lot of our inflation in the nineties and noughties by off-shoring manufacturing, we've kept services inflation in check by importing hordes of cheaper forrin workers, Gordon Brown borrowed money like it was going out of style from 2000-07 and threw it at us instead of investing it, not to mention that many of us sat back and watched our houses rise steeply in value then cashed it in and congratulated ourselves on our brilliance. For a significant proportion of Brits, the increase in wealth between 1997 and 2008 was nothing to do with how much wealth we actually created through our own efforts.

Those days are now long gone - the only ones who will ever see an increase in their standards of living are the ones who increase their productivity and output.