Report

Are we really serious about securing enhanced productivity, through our people?

This paper is the first in a series forming the Work Foundation’s Centenary Provocation Papers developed during 2019. Although produced before the onset of the Covid-19 crisis, each paper provides a range of invaluable perspectives on the challenges facing workers, businesses and policymakers in the UK at the end of the second decade of the 21st Century.

Written by Dr Peter Totterdill, and edited by Lesley Giles and Heather Carey, this paper explores how working and management practices can be transformed in order to tackle the productivity gap that has characterised the UK economy for more than a decade.

Drawing on evidence from Scotland and elsewhere in Europe, the paper argues that workplace innovation offers the kind of integrated approach that can not only drive radical and incremental technological and workplace improvements, but is also capable of engaging employees, and supporting better skills development across the workforce.

The paper also calls on policymakers and practitioners to embed the driving up of management and working practices as a priority across Government. This will involve providing the tools needed to better navigate a fragmented landscape business support landscape, working with existing recognised and valued products, and partners such as trade, professional and expert bodies, pooling resources and expertise to strengthen the narrative for change, and incentivise collaboration and industry co-ordinated action to drive a social movement. In turn, the paper argues that workplace innovation offers an important contribution to advancing business improvement, as part of this broad approach.