Osborne’s 2016 budget painted a pretty grim picture back in March when it came to the UK’s productivity puzzle.

It has become so bad he all but threw in the towel when he officially downgraded the already weak forecasts for productivity growth.

You can read his full speech here.

But is Osborne right to give up so soon?

We already produce less than 30% per hour than workers in the US, Germany and France. Or put a different way, they could take every Friday off and still achieve more in the working week than we do!

That is shocking, right?

So who or what are the culprits for this poor productivity? The answer is many whose and whats, but there is one thing that we can easily fix. Poor management.

The numbers show that poor management accounts for as much as a quarter of the productivity gap between us and other countries. You can read more here.

So what can we do?

George may have thrown in the towel but that does not mean we have to! We seem to have already achieved higher levels of employment and we already work some of the longest hours in Europe. So logically we need to be focusing on other areas. Of course, one of the most logical steps is to train your managers, and to look at your organisation design, which we can explore a bit more:

  • Adjust your structure – Take a step back and look at your organisational structure. You might find that you have a flat structure which sees employees with more personal responsibility and less (or no) levels of management in between. This can cause confusion among employees and managers alike as employees have no one to report to and managers have less upper-level support. Read more about organisation design here
  • Managers need the power to be leaders – Give them more responsibility for delivering results and ensure they have a good understanding of what it means to be a great leader. Tell them how their behaviour impacts the business. Read more about management training.
  • Align your business goals – If we’re employing more people to work longer hours but still producing less, we’re either incredibly inefficient or perhaps it’s our goals that are at fault. If the goals set by managers for employees do not align with the overall strategic objectives of the business, then any work they are doing could potentially be counterproductive. Therefore, top teams need to set meaningful objectives that flow appropriately down through the levels of the business.

We have helped many of our clients to train their managers and improve their organisation design. To find out how you could improve your business with Reality HR on your side, give us a call on 01256 328 428 or arrange a convenient time for us to call you back:

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