Employee attitudes and management quality - the key to productivity

Bad management is the most widely experienced drag on company productivity, according to HR practitioners surveyed by IRS Employment Review, published by LexisNexis Butterworths.

The research also shows that employee attitudes can make or break a company. HR practitioners cite this one factor more often than any other as the cause of upward pressure on productivity, and almost as widely as a possible cause of downward pressure.

Other significant boosts to productivity can come from having the right company structure in place and from employeesí skills. Statutory employment regulations and trade union attitudes were seen as less significant.

The standard of management exerts a more significant downward pressure on productivity in more companies than recruitment and retention difficulties or employee attitudes.

The survey covers 41 organisations, which together have 37,000 employees. Of these, more than half have formal measures of employee productivity, while an eighth use informal measures.

More than half cited quality of management as a cause for concern. But even though it is the most widely cited drag on productivity, it ranks only in third place when employers named the single most significant cause of downward pressure.

Other key findings include:

Employers measuring employee productivity use an average of three measures taken at several organisational layers. But just half measure productivity across the organisation.

Output per employee, labour cost per unit of output and time taken per task are the most frequently used definitions and measures of productivity.

UK employersí preferred measure is labour cost per unit of output, which focuses on production costs. The government, however, prefers to compare UK productivity with that of our international competitors using a measure of output per hour worked. Here, the UK lags behind countries such as France, Germany and the USA.

Just half of employers that recognise trade unions involve them in productivity-raising initiatives.

Only a third of respondents mention using consultants to help improve productivity or membership of Investors in People.

IRS Employment Review managing editor, Mark Crail said:

Our research suggests that employers are taking a fairly introspective view of productivity and are more likely to benchmark internally between departments than against external competitors or comparators.

And, although most organisations believe that their productivity has increased or remained stable in recent years, many are concerned about the impact of poor management. This, together with the governmentís determination to boost UK productivity levels generally, suggests that it is an area ripe for change.