In our view, the biggest and most important factor determining productivity levels is management quality – the mix of their energy and drive, the strategies they follow, the choices and investments they make, the processes they require others to follow and the working atmosphere they create.
Hence it was good to read the following extracts from an article by David Peetz, writing for Australia’s ‘The New Daily’ and entitled:
Want to lift workers’ productivity? Let’s start with their bosses
David Peetz is the Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow at the Carmichael Centre at the Centre for Future Work
- Business representatives sit down with government and others to talk about productivity.
- Who, according to those business representatives, will need to change the way they do things?
- The elephant in the room is that it is business that has the biggest influence on productivity.
- Certainly, it has a much bigger impact than workers, who typically get the blame when things go wrong.
- The factor that most shapes how productive workers are, we must remember, is the technology they work with.
- It is management that is responsible for the decisions about what technology a business introduces, and how.
- Workers often do not have much of a say.
- It is not workers who make the decisions about how much money is available for investment.
- It is not workers who make the decision about which particular technologies to buy, install and use.
- It is not workers who decide how much money should be allocated to the training of workers to use the new technology, or how those workers should be deployed.
- It is management.
- Sure, there is lots of evidence that, when workers have a say at work, productivity is higher.
- But managers often don’t give them a chance to have more than a token say, if they have any say at all.
- Any attempts by governments to legislate that workers decide or influence decisions on those matters are opposed by business bodies in Australia.
- How much effort workers put in to their job also shapes productivity.
- But lazy workers don’t last long in jobs these days, and most restrictive work practices went out the window in the 1980s.
- If a business continued to use workers who do not put effort into their job, the finger would very quickly be pointed at the managers who decided to do that and to not have the performance management systems that would overcome that problem.
- Some characteristics of workers do make a difference, but they are often still matters in the hands of management to control.
- Output will be better with an educated and skilled workforce.
- If people can do more things with their brains, they will be more productive.
- Yet management decides on the qualifications demanded of successful applicants for jobs.
- Management decides how much pay to offer to attract qualified workers to apply for and fill skilled vacancies.
- Management decides on the training provided to workers.
- Management decides on job quality which, studies show, is positively related to performance.
- Management decides on how much a business pursues diversity, equity and inclusion practices, which have also been shown to benefit innovation and firm performance.
- So it’s no surprise that a couple of years ago the Productivity Commission, after looking at OECD evidence, said that “the productivity gains from upskilling managers could be three times higher than for upskilling workers”.
1 comment
Isn’t the irony that managers set the very metrics of productivity — yet the wisest saw those measures were flawed, and walked away before AI exposed their emptiness? What can be counted will be automated. What remains is the unmeasurable: creativity, connection, meaning.
So who is wiser: the manager guarding gold in the fortress, or the one who saw it for what it was — fool’s gold — and left it behind?