UK Staff are some of the most productive in the world

There are many employers who think that their employees spend too much time on facebook, texting their mates and drinking coffee, however, contradictory to these opinions the Global Productivity Report published this week shows that UK workers are more productive than most other countries around the world.

Nicholas Crafts, Professor of Economics at Warwick University, believes that around 85% of an employees working time should be productive, that is contributing to the goals or objectives of the company.  Now although the UK didn’t acheive that level, it did have an unproductive time percentage of 26%, and was only one of two countries to increase productivity during the last year.

The results of the study were as follows, for unproductive time as a percentage of the working week;

• Australia – 22.9%
• UK – 26%
• France – 37.4%
• USA – 38.8%
• Brazil – 39.8%
• Germany – 40.2%
• South Africa – 41.8%

Causes of Unproductivity are belived to include poor management operating systems, poor frontline supervisions, communication problems, and a lack of workforce and management skills.

What is interesting here is that the responsibility for majority of these causes is held with management rather than with the workforce.  Consultants accross the board agree that to improve productivity you need to improve management, and that managers need to spend more time getting out there supervising, and giving feedback, and less time in meeting and administration.  In many companies employees are promoted because they have good techinical skills, because they are good at their job.  This does not necessarily indicate that they would be good at managing, and therefore training needs to be given to all employees being promoted into management and leadership positions to teach them the importance of managing and supervising properly.

And this is worse in the UK as traditional management structures put in lots of layers of middle management and line managers.

The survey also showed that the UK workforce was rated as the most motivated in the world, so if this could be combined with proper people management skills then UK workforce would be a power to be reckoned with.

Surviving Recessions – The Media’s Responsiblity

The BBC have run a story about AE Harris, a Birmingham company that have survived an amazing 10 downturns, including recessions and even the great depression.

The company started 128 years ago making Jewellery and now made laser cutting and tool making equipment and software.

Company Chairman, Russel Luckork said “I sincerely hope that I will not have to reduce my workforce this time and I will be fighting tooth and nail to make sure that doesn’t happen. I think we have enough irons in the fires with our customers to make sure that we keep all our people in employment.

I don’t believe that it will be a deep recession, I think it will be a shallow but I think there’s a danger of talking ourselves into a deeper recession.”  ”My advice to companies that are struggling at the moment is to draw in your horns. You have to cut salaries, remuneration and costs. However ruthless it may seem you have to stay in business. The good times will come again. In my experience when there have been bad times, there have always been good and very lucrative times just round the corner. You just have to survive and stay patient”

Russell story highlights a number of important points.  In the recessions and even depressions up until the 1970’s most people got their news from either the daily newspaper, a daily edition of the news on the television, or maybe both.  Meaning that the news that was reported had happened, usually the previous day.  The 1980’s brought with it the “news updates”, and satellite feeds,  which meant that news was reported as it was happening.  Most people will remember the Iranian Embassy Seige as the turning point for the “live” reporting. 

Now we have 24 hour news channels, that have 24 hours to fill with news each day. And this means that the media now fill most of this with speculation.  They no longer report on the press release that has been made, but instead discuss, speculate and even interrogate people on the expected contents.

We will all have known about stories & situations where the media only reports the negative, the doom and gloom, and Russells fears that the media may worsen the recession through continued negative reporting is a very real risk.

Markets are volatile things, as is business confidence, and that is just the key to it all – confidence.  Businesses, investors, buyers, employees need to be able to build up that confidence, that things will get better, that things are getting better, and so we need a media that can bring confidence and good news back into the arena.

The media will argue that they report what people want to hear, so do we really want to hear only the doom and gloom stories.  Some news stations have been running “redundancy totalisers” this week, to show the numbers of jobs lost.  Can we lobby these stations into running the same kind of stories when the economy starts to pick up again?

Fantasy Couriers has commissioned a poll of UK small business to find out what the real situation is, is it all as bleak as the Media are portraying, or is it just that old chestnut that bad news sells more copies than good news.

We will keep you updated.

The Top Ten Things That Hardworking Families Pay For.

Today the Prime Minister said

“Let’s never forget we are talking about households that are paying higher fuel bills as a result of global oil prices,  we’re talking about small businesses that are lacking capital because of a global financial crisis, we’re talking about couples and families that cannot get mortgages because of a global crisis, we’re talking about families and communities hit by unemployment because of this global financial crisis.”

This is good news from our Prime Minister who has acknowledged that during this difficult time his priority must be to “do what I can on the side of hardworking families”.

Is this the recognition that tax payers have being looking for years, the “hardworking families” that Gordon Brown is talking about are the normal, everyday, real people that pay the mamouth bills that this country pays every year in providing vital services to everyone, taxpayer, or not.

The top ten- So where does tax payers money get spent?  Here’s a quick guide through 2007-8 estimated expediture.  Are you happy with how your money is being spent?

1.   We spend over £103 billion a year on the National Health Service, this works out at £1,490 per person per year.

We have one of the best health services in the world, with some of the worlds highest skilled doctors and nurses at our service.

Are we as tax payers getting the service that they pay for, or are we having to pay for private treatments because the health service is snowed under with non-contibuting patients from other countries getting free treatment, and others that use the NHS to service their addictions problems?

Do you think that you should only get out of the health service what you put in?  Should treatments be restricted to the people that have paid for it?  And who should come first in the queue tell us what you think?

2. We spend £100bn on Social Services and other forms of Social Protection. 

And this doesn’t include pensions.  £27bn of this is personal social services, another £35bn relates to sickness and disability, £28bn goes on families, and £22bn goes on unemployment and social exclusion.  These are all huge numbers which would explain why policies which look to cut back on incapacity payments, and get people on benefits back to into work are always top of the election manifestos.  Do you agree that this is an area where easy savings can be made?

3.  We spent £79bn on Pensions & Old Age

Again, the UK stands tall in the world in providing a standard pension that everyone is entitled to, regardless of their financial status.  Many groups argue that the pension is too low, and can’t properly support an elderly person who has this as their sole means of income.  The stock market crash has wiped billions off the values of stocks and shares, and with it billions off peoples personal pension funds.  And together with an aging population this figure is only set to rise.  Can we continue to afford to pay everyone a pension, regardless of their other sources of income?  Do you think that Fred Goodwin (Lately departed RBS head) will truely appreciate his £90.70 a week or do you think it would be better spent elsewhere?

4. We spent Just over £70 billion on Education and Training each year, that’s £1,160 per person per year.

Falling class sizes, choice of schools, record exam pass rates every year, more people attending university than ever before……  The Government has spent a lot of money over the last decade on improving education, infact 20% more than 5 years previous.  Do you think we are getting value for money out of the eduction spend?

5. We spend £34bn on defense spending.

This is three times more than the total annual spend on the environment.  Should be be protecting our environment through military defense? Do you this those priorities are correct?

6. We spend £32bn on public order and saftey

Included is this £2bn on managing immigration claims and £5bn on the prison services.  The law courts cost us another £9bn.  Are we paying the costs of being a lawless society?

7. We pay £30bn on interest on government debt.

This is equivalent to £500 per person in the UK.  But given the bank bailout this is likely to rise next year.  We may be lucky, Northern Rock has already repaid 57% of it’s government loan, but how long are we going to be paying interest on the debts used to finance the banks.  Tell us what you think.

8. We spend Just over £21 Billion a year on transport.

Just over £6 billion a year that is spent on our roads, upgraiding them to be safer to drive on. The government is also spending over 20 milliom on road safty. Of this, £15 million was used to support all of the activity on the THINK! campaign. this covers media spend, PR work, sponsorship, partnership work creative work, e-communications and evaluation. The budget is spread across a number of issues such as drink-driving, child road safety. £3 million per year is spent on paid advertising for the THINK! Drink Drive Campaign. About £850,000 per year is for the THINK! Christmas Drink Drive Campaign. And  the rest of the money is spent on public transport,  bus, railways etc. Tell use what you think.

9.  We spend £21bn a year on things we never see.

£5bn gets spent on International Aid, should charity begin at home? Is it time we started looking after number 1? and what could we use that money for that would benefit the tax payers – after all, that’s more than we spend on under 5’s education, or over half of the secondary school budget each year.   This could provide state funded childcare for all of the those hardworking families who see huge amounts of their weekly pay disappear in childcare costs.  An amazing £16bn gets spent on legal, executive and non departmental bodies and organisations.  What do they do with it?  Who knows?  We don’t even know who they are?  Our guess is that this must be the civil service pay!  Tell us what you think, maybe this is the number that everyone jumps on as “wastage”.

10. We spent £12bn on Housing

This must be a minefield for the government, large amounts of houses that are occupied by people who may have never worked, or may never intend working for some reason.  Should we accept this, or should we ask our councils to do something about it.   Should tenants be evicted, and not given other accomodation, if they fail to look after and maintain their properties propertly, and made to pay the bill for fixing the property up?  Do you think that priority should be given on the waiting lists to the hardworking families that Gordon Brown is talking about, instead of them ending up down the bottom of the queue behind those with no earned income.  Even newly arrived assylum seekers are assured of accomodation somewhere or other.  However many working families find themselves stuck on the list for years and years in damp and inadequate accomodation simply because they don’t have enough “points”.

This is the top 10 areas of exenditure as extracted from the Functional and Economic Category Analysis of Public Sector Expenditure, April 2008, table 5.2 Total Expenditure on Services by sub-function 2007-08 estimated outturn.

Can We See The Light At The End Of The Tunnel?

So, todays question must be have we reached the turning point yet? Has the government helped avoid certain financial crisis?  We all hope the answer is yes. If our government had not stepped in to help our banks out this would be most certainly a different day for all of us. 

We live in a society that has taken it for granted that they can afford everything, and infact we were somehow “entitled” to the WAG lifestyle that we saw splashed across all of the magazines. 

We can only hope that after LENDING just under £50 billion pounds to our banks, that’s just under £1000 pounds per person in the UK,  that thing will get back normal as soon as possible.

The Prime Minister has said that the investments are assets and “not just money being pumped in” and that the government intends to sell our investments at some time in the future when the banks are making profits again. 

The prime minister is very confident that our banking system will be back to normal in the next week or so and “we should now put in place new structures and rules for the future. We cannot simply be a short- term rescue deal to paper over the cracks.  Only a surgical approach is to get to the root of the problem will now work and ensure that the problems do not return.”   Stating also that the government will also work very closely with all the british banks to ensure that small businesses get as much assistance as they need, and to get lending back up to the level that the economy needs.  

The markets have rallied, George Dubbya has followed suit, and for a few hours anyway, things have been stable and calm.  Lets see what happens at 14.30, and hope that what we have here is the turning of the corner and the start down a path which will slowly lead us back to normality. But maybe this time a more normal version than we had before.

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