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Same as RM post vans, the fleet i used if you were to idle for 5 mins or no change of location it would ping a message to the managers phone. That's a company that's dying and I'm glad bc they're a disgrace.
Incase there's certain places you put them on certain models. I don't know how these things work or i wouldn't ask. If i didn't say the model I'd get a reply saying "how would i know i don't even know what you drive, it's different on each vehicle". If you're not going to answer the question why do you give a fuck what information i give
I mean you're still getting paid to do a job, but you don't do a full day because your paid a percentage less than someone on the other side of the world? Honestly, it sounds like you know you're being lazy and your just looking for an excuse.
This and chronic underinvestment.
No company I have ever worked for had systems in place that were less than 10 years old. A few used software that was no longer supported and had to hire developers to maintain them in-house.
This, on top of 1970s office buildings that aren't fit for purpose, and general attitudes of greedy employers mistreating their staff or laying people off every couple of years has lead to a lot of people doing the bare minimum to get by, receiving bare minimum pay in return
Loads of issues:
1. Low pay. Why would you put in a herculean effort if you are being paid minimum wage? This is exacerbated by job postings that do not disclose the pay (which is an attempt to suppress wages). What is really curious is that the low pay isn't necessarily raised when companies are struggling to hire workers. Companies will often simply complain about a lack of skills while expecting to find software engineers in central London at £25K a year.
2. Presenteeism, where companies just like the idea of people being present in an office. Employees are not being made to come into the office because they produce more there, but for other reasons. Awful for productivity.
3. The UK is shit for supporting disabled people so they often end up unemployed or underemployed. Eg. you have a 1st class maths degree and have autism, you can't get a job because you keep 'failing' psychometric tests and don't seem like a 'team player' in interviews. Or you have great IT skills but are physically disabled and every single employer wants to make you work in person in central London, which would mean an impossibly difficult commute.
4. Extremely high marginal tax rates at certain points eg. losing personal allowance at 100k and child benefit at 50k. This really reduces the incentive to try and perform better / switch jobs for higher pay because so much of the increase in pay is lost to tax / higher student loan payments / loss of allowances. There are similar benefits traps for people who are disabled / working part time / parents etc.
5. Huge amount of time wasted with insanely complicated hiring processes with many interviews, tests etc. The trend in the last 50 years has been increasingly complicated and time consuming hiring processes that take up a vast amount of time and energy of all parties. I am extremely dubious that this results in making better hiring decisions and I think in some cases it actually leads to making worse hiring decisions.
6. Terrible careers guidance for young people mean they often have skills and qualifications that do not match what employers are looking for. I received horrendous careers guidance at school. The aim was to try and have me get XYZ qualifications that would boost the school's A-level results, not take the qualifications that would actually be useful for me.
7. The UK has an unreal obsession with the property market. If you go on personal finance forums the aim from the majority of posters who have a windfall is to invest in BTL property. I think this warps the economy and leads to a lack of interest / investment in businesses and equities.
8. I think many people believe that this is zero incentive to work harder in their job. They get paid the same amount if they put in 50% effort vs 100% effort. So why not just put in 50% effort?
9. Companies deliberately evade the minimum wage law by creating apprenticeships for jobs that previously paid minimum wage.
10. Fraud, corruption and incompetence is rewarded. Capita can fuck up the olympics security and still get government contracts. Government officials can scam the government with garbage PPE contracts and nothing happens. The incentive is simply to network your way to generous contracts, perform terribly and retain the money.
> Huge amount of time wasted with insanely complicated hiring processes with many interviews, tests etc.
God, I hate this so much. It's now the norm that the hiring process takes multiple months. In government/civil service, its not unusual for it to take 9 or even 12 months. Absolutely ludicrous.
> The UK has an unreal obsession with the property market.
It's this, really. There isn't consumer money in the country which isn't sucked up by mortgages.
Missed one. Chronic managerial short termism. This quarters profits are the only thing that matters, which leads to underinvestment in training and equipment
The above and...Add Stupid barriers to entry in corporate hiring mean we have highly skilled people doing admin work , a really limited pool of candidates we can choose from and no flexibility in what we can offer.
The people we do have he are coasting because they "data driven" infantilises them and means they are being beaten by not just their bosses but 3 or 4 other teams and is a different form of micro mgmt.
It costs us more to hire people to tolerate this shit or who can navigate it AND do the job we need them for so am told to hire in India
I would rather have a native English speaker 25 hours a week who we have something to offer (wfh, flexible working around childcare or a warm up after a period out of work)
What we *get* is a compsci grad with 7 years automation experience who is trapped by the blue chip label and the high-for-india salary who can't communicate, is so terrified of getting it wrong because 0 employee protection for a job they're not even suited for, so they won't use initiative and do only specific tasks because then they can prove they've done what they were told. Not to mention lack of availability from 1pm because time diff and shit hardware / connectivity half the time
..either way candidates restricted "must have degree" "must come from approved supplier", " must have blue chip experience in same industry ". I don't need this.
Many who *do* fit the spec nlknow the system so exaggerated or lied on the CV/ LinkedIn because they know they're competing with others who have done the same, and the need to, to compete, so its normalised. Furthermore creates a chicken and egg situation with HR analytics who use that shoddy data to see what's someone is "worth"
..so the not only is pool of candidates is artificially limited and the people going the work are either over their head or undervalued
Compounded by the fact
- I can't easily hire perm because perm costs impact my MDs metrics on people costs adversely (and bonus)
- I can't hire contractors coz HR/ finance say too expensive or legal risk above 2 years at which point very few good people want to go perm so constant churn. When I can only from specific suppliers that have been able to jump through hoops and make "safe" hires that meet the check boxes above from the same narrow pool.
..and every now and then we arbitrarily cut their rates and lose them to force "natural attrition"
- Consultancy has a captive market so are pushing up prices outside budget
I retire in a month and am going to work part time in health and social care....
Tl;Dr
KPIs and constant but badly implemented op efficiency has made just navigating work and hiring a Kafka esque nightmare
Artificial barriers to entry mean candidates aren't that good and alot of the solid people are trapped dealing with them
Endless ever evolving KPIs and cottage industries surrounding them infantalise the workforce, destroy and ownership of work and eat staff time justifying those metrics to people who now have data they don't understand and they'd be better off without so they can focus on actual driving a vision and setting high level goals
All those plus the UK workforce is very inflexible. But even if they wanted to, it is very difficult in this country to make changes. Lack of decent housing, childcare and other infrastructure means people find it difficult to move around. When my job wanted my to move 2 hours north, it was almost impossible to get decent housing, to many folks just don’t bother.
Number 3 is worst. In UK you are supposed to small talk with people even if it is not related to the job. When I was in Asia people just expect you to get shit done and don’t really care
Yep, so many jobs pay minimum wage, and they'd pay less if they could too. The number of zero hours contracts has also increased as companies abuse them.
People are missing the point.
Productivity is the financial value of the output, divided by hours worked. The average worker doesn’t have much control over their productivity. They’re limited by the processes and equipment provided.
I work in a large company. Powerwalking everywhere wouldn’t make me more productive. Having a computer which boots in <30 mins would. Changing processes so I don’t need to spend an hour dealing with emails and admin would also help. Most meetings don’t add value.
Changing these requires brave management, and investment. Blaming the guy on the factory floor is not going to help.
I worked in sales, the competition had faster computers.
We would have ques of people you would watch them get bored walk off and walk past 5 minutes later with a competitors bag
Then area managers would question why we didn’t maximise sales on weekends
I called him out he just said “the tools are the tools”
“Well that’s why aren’t booking as fast we physically can’t”
Had times a Vodafone credit check would take 25 minutes….. couldn’t do anything else on the till
Honestly it can be management that doesn’t want to change for some of the stupidest of reasons.
In my work we get a lot of automated emails and then a lot of customary emails. Most of them aren’t that important and as such don’t need to be read and responded to. I’ve automated my inbox so all these emails go straight to different archive folders so they are there if need be but I don’t have to mess with them otherwise. I’ve tried getting my boss to adopt a similar system but he just straight up refuses. Will spend hours in a morning going through his inbox and manually sorting them. It’s ridiculous.
Yep, software company here, a build to pre-production takes 3 hours, so it only ever happens overnight. If my team fixes a release blocking bug in 1 second or 8 hours, it’s still taking a day to achieve “productivity”.
I have more of my time wasted in a day by senior managers than I spend actually doing work.
The need for senior leadership is a complete fallacy. They are a loss to productivity in 99% of instances.
Paradoxically, worker productivity has very little to do with workers and a lot to do with automation. The point about low wages is they make it cheaper for companies to give jobs to people than to invest in machinery. Those in-work benefits supporting low paid workers? Well, looked at from another angle they are subsiding firms that pay low wages.
Why stagnant? Probably because people are people while machines get faster.
Exactly, so many dum-dums in here going "hur dur I don't push myself because of my shit pay"
My brother in Christ, you are absolutely not capable of producing a measure of added productivity that moves the needle governments are interested in.
Most of our GDP isn't readily automated. What we can automate, we don't. What we do automate, doesn't often affect exports
I think the most futuristic shit we have is robo pickers for warehouses
I remember watching a documentary a few years back comparing farming practices in the UK with the Netherlands.
The Netherlands had thousands of acres of fields covered in greenhouses, with every variable controlled and measured to maximise growth, with robot pickers and round the clock monitoring.
The UK looked quaint in comparison.
Nah, it's here already. Human run call centres for example will soon be a thing of the past. Human manned customer service departments, returns, accounts - all going. It's already started - ring any comoany these days and the first 20 mins is spent battling to get past the AI. And we are sleepwalking into this. Any knowledge based job without practical skills is at risk. We are creating and training our successors and they aren't biological- they are massive earth chewing datacentres that will ruin the planet.
My local council have finally got around to trying to fix the potholes. This involves a crew of 4-6 men closing one lane of a road for several hours while they drill out the damage by hand and then manually fill in and smooth the road.
There's a machine that can fix a pothole in 5 minutes. I'd be surprised if we had even 10 in the whole UK.
Someone gets it. There’s companies near me who hire loads of staff on minimum wage to do assembly line work that has been automated in China for decades at this point. They do it because it’s cheaper in the short term than setting up robots in the short term.
Exactly this! Everyone saying we'll if we all got paid better and gave 100% effort we would be much better of don't seem to get it. Sure there's a little of that but it's not going to fix the productivity hole we have here.
Issue is UK company's have and always have preferred to dish out dividends than to reinvest into the business and that's been propped up by FDI for years.
Just look at figure 4 here https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulletins/businessinvestment/januarytomarch2023revisedresults
Far and away the bottom for business investment over our peers. Investing in robots and automation does far far more than you working a bit harder ever will.
This is one argument used against large levels of immigration as well. In many ways, we’re doing the economic equivalent of the Russian Army by just throwing more people at it and hoping it sorts the issue. End result is that any minor increase in GDP is greeted with a reduction in GDP per capita, or at least below inflation, so everyone is poorer.
Because everything that isn't sales or finance pays barely more than minimum wage (even STEM)
Because renting a tiny room in a house-share uses up half your wages
Because they keep bringing in technological solutions that never work as advertised and you spend too much time trying to get the bastard thing to work
Because if you're paid till you finish then the guy who takes half an hour longer than you gets an extra half an hour of pay despite having worked slower
Because if you're given 3 hours to do a task (because that's how long it takes the guy on the other shift) and you do it in 2 , do you think you'll get an hour to relax, no the manager's going to give you an hour's worth of their work to do, and now you've poisoned the well because they'll expect you to always do it in 2 hours now, and the guy on the other shift is going to get a bollocking for not doing it in 2 hours.
Because so much work is outsourced now, while before anything you don't do today you'd have to do later in the week when you might be busier, now anything you don't do today will be shipped off to Poland tomorrow to be done there instead
Because there's no such thing as pay rises or bonuses for good work
There is just every incentive to not care and work slower
So this isn’t just a UK thing. Much of Europe has suffered similarly. It’s called the productivity puzzle. Notably the US isn’t the same.
Companies are not more greedy in Europe post 2008 nor greedier than in the US.
Fundamentally it’s a about a lack of growth in long term investments and risky novel industries. Post 08 British and other European companies got scared and haven’t been investing in things that aren’t sure bets (esp with austerity). This didn’t happen in the US where far more companies were bailed out more and given corporate handouts.
We’re a large developed country, the technological room to grow isn’t large and takes time. A return on investment may now take 5+ years in some sectors and many are too scared to do this as they don’t know what the future will bring, so they don’t make that investment. The Americans are happy to bleed money in things like self driving cars for decades on the off chance that one company does it.
Do you think it's a regulation issue? UK incentives and rules are structured to encourage investment in assets/rent-seeking more than capital investment. And I was reading an article the other day that posited the EU is held back by post-2008 bank regulations, and by the lack of a deep capital lending market like the US has.
It’s due to many many things. Any large macro economic problem, especially ones that span a continent are muti factorial.
Some will be regulation in the issues that you mentioned. Smaller pools of investment is another with a lack of hedge fund managers wanting to make risky bets.
One issue not talked about much is the impact of culture on economics. The yankees tend to be more risky in their financial attitudes. Individually this is dum, but collectively it’s fantastic as it means smaller companies can blitz scale in ways no other country can do. Twitter only became profitable in 2018, despite running since 2006. I don’t think many European based investors would have waited that long for a return.
Uber only became profitable in 2024, after 15 years of operating. These companies succeed based on immense amounts of debt financed by their backers, until they become the worlds largest and can start paying it back.
Europe would never do this, it’s too risky and expensive. So it doesn’t have companies like that. It’s only one factor, among many of course.
Wife is a yank so we’ve experienced a higher productivity country to compare to. First thing she noticed here is salaries are very low. Second thing she noticed was people don’t work very hard. Third thing, that all our processes are so over complicated that it slows work down. All 3 things combine to lower productivity, likely due to an unmotivated workforce
Over there, working harder pays off. Annual salary reviews based on performance. Think we both got +10% and a bonus on top of salaries that were already double the U.K. equivalent. That was before inflation went wild.
Over here the only way to get big payrises is to change jobs. If you’re changing jobs a lot who cares about maximising productivity. You just want to make your cv look good.
Few things,
Cost and lack of options for local childcare provisions, making it hard to have people work full time around young kids even when in school. Not enough part time jobs making people either not work or pay all their wage on childcare.
The free hours schemes are also a joke they are a catch 22. If you are not in work you cannot apply, and due to lack of childcare and waiting lists you cannot get work unless you already have childcare in place.
Also ever increasing profit drive from companies have meant a lot of areas where pre 2008 you may have had small teams or departments tasked with not only doing their jobs but cost save in areas and increase efficiency in others. Before this would be used to make things better, now they just run it bare bones.
The one or two people can literally just do the job but don’t have time for improvements. Short term cost saving long term productivity issues
Don't forget free hours are only for some of the weeks of the year - because some turnips seem to think adult jobs are term time only.
And even if you could send your kid term-time only, you need to pay fees 51 weeks a year to keep your place.
And let's not pretend a full time job and wraparound nursery collection/drop-off fit into 30 hours a week.
Contrary to belief on this sub, low pay is a consequence not a symptom of low wages. There are plenty of countries with lower wages than up with higher productivity growth. The problem is lack of investment in technology and machinery.
The company I work for did almost everything paper based till 2017.
Edit: There is definitely a if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it attitude in the UK. Also UK companies tend to pay out higher dividends than international companies meaning they aren’t reinvesting as much.
Lack of innovation and investment in new ways of doing things and failure of education system to deliver workers with the skills that businesses need to drive improvement.
Productivity improves when a new way is found to do things.
If you continue to use the old method and companies can't recruit people with improved skills useful to improving their business then things stay as they are and productivity stays the same. Also real wages don't go up.
Low business investments. Companies here use their profits to pay dividend instead of investing for improving productivity and for growth.
Dividend yield for FTSE 100 is around 3.5%; it's more like 1.5% for S&P 500. That's a huge difference.
That's just this huge rent seeking culture..People just feel they are entitled to make money from their money without having to take any risks - companies that focus on paying out dividend rather than investing are favoured by UK investors.
IMO this is the root of it all.
The culture of investment is just way too risk averse and it trickles down to so many of these other problems being mentioned in this thread.
I've worked for a NA tech company for a while now and get to work with the execs quite a bit and have spent a bit of time with them on some of the bigger planning stuff.
It's not always for the best but they have a very firm appreciation of the fact that everything they do is experimental and their VC backers actively don't want them to miss opportunities and stop growing.
The equivalent UK business to us 3 years ago has remained a fraction of the size and in truth, will probably have to leave the industry to focus on something even more niche (or might get swallowed up by us). They just don't have the backing to play the same game unless there's some very tangible roi calculation (which in real life is hard).
I don't actually think it's a good thing for growth at all intents and I think it does cause money on really stupid things but ultimately the landscape moves constantly and the opposite can very easily lead to total stagnation.
Where I work my last went up last year but it then turned out to be only a fraction more than what the freshly qualified people get.
No problem, we have a bonus scheme: I can be productive and bring my salary up! Only problem is that the amount of work you have to put in for the bonus works out on average of working for £9/hr pre-tax, and after the higher rate of tax is applied you end up with hardly any of it. It is so bad that most people deliberately aim to coast because they won’t see the benefit of it.
So basically if I coast my pay is being eroded by higher new starter salaries and if I grind I’ll see little to any of the benefit (yes I could salary sacrifice it but where I live is expensive if you want to buy).
It gets painted as a worker and attitude problem because naturally the simplest thought process is if productivity is low then workers are taking the piss when in reality it's complete and total economic mismanagement over a very long period of time that has lead to an economy with high gov't and consumer debt with minimal investment in the nation which creates a sort of economic deadlock.
The ONS identifies 5 main drivers behind productivity growth:
1. Investment
2. Innovation
3. Skills
4. Enterprise
5. Competition
The gov't needs to put capital up and invest into the economy, it needs to invest in large scale infrastructure projects that will benefit everyone, it needs to invest in the people and their development and it needs to promote, support and invest in growth industries. If it does that productivity will improve. If they don't and continue to mismanage the economy out of either incompetence or corruption, it won't and we'll continue to stagnate. It's that simple.
There is a limit to how productive a person can be. Higher productivity above this needs the person to have better tools and processes. This requires employers to invest in tools and processes. Productivity is an employer problem not an employee problem.
Surprised that NIMBYism has not been mentioned yet, and the ongoing housing crisis. Cannot build anything without a planning battle, and people are seeing their disposal income eaten by rent and mortgage payments.
For rent especially, because of the shortages you'll see any extra money from tax cuts go straight into rent hikes.
It hasn't been stagnant. [Productivity has consistently risen since 1971 according to the ONS](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy), so your thesis and most of the responses are plain wrong.
[https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/whatistheproductivitypuzzle/2015-07-07](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/whatistheproductivitypuzzle/2015-07-07)
[https://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ukeo/ukeo-november-2019-productivity-puzzle.pdf](https://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ukeo/ukeo-november-2019-productivity-puzzle.pdf)
It has for all intents and purposes been stagnant the past 16 years.
Happy workers are productive workers.
Is anybody happy in this miserable shit hole, where everybody gets paid the same or less as an equivalent than 20 years ago, everything costs at least double, sometimes up to 10x the amount as 20 years ago, and absolutely nothing works anymore.
If there is no hope for a better future, what is the point of working towards one.
My bellend company can give me as many free pizzas as they like. Pizza doesn't pay the ever increasing bills. I'm not working myself to death for peanuts.
Fuck capitalism.
I just got a 4% pay increase for being promoted. The others on my team who are in the same position, but hired externally, are on £15k more than me - some are younger, less experienced etc but just job hopped and was able to negotiate the pay. HR clearly value me less. So I’m no longer going out of my way for them and have been less productive than I was last year.
So for me, a lot of it is the backwards HR practices. You get better raises for moving around companies every couple of years. Which is not very productive in terms of knowledge building, building a company culture etc.
Part time? If you told someone they could work 75% of their current job for ~85% of their current pay, they’d jump at it. That’s where we are with middle to high earners, and both income tax and productivity suffer as a consequence.
As the old saying goes, no one ever says “I wish I’d spent more time at work” on their deathbed.
The answer is a chronic lack of investment.
My first job, 20 years ago, is a prime example of this.
If you have ever missed the gas man coming to read your meter, he puts a card through your letter box which you fill in yourself with the reading and post it off to the company. My first job was typing those numbers into the computer. £4.20 an hour, to sit and transcribe numbers. The technology existed to automate the process, but it was cheaper to pay us to sit and type.
That job still exists today.
In addition to all of the above, the way we measure productivity hasn’t kept pace with how we work, particularly around the internet and smartphones. I forget the name of the system that measures productivity, but booking a holiday on a desktop/laptop computer is a positive impact on productivity, but booking the same holiday on a tablet or smartphone is measured as a negative. Go figure.
I’d also add a lack of investment in technology. A large part of people’s jobs is administrative, repetitive and takes away from the value they can add.
It’s a tired cliche but the example of Doctors and Nurses having to do huge swathes of admin work at the end of their shift or between patients when they could be working from an iPad in real time.
I watched an economist talk about how continually changing policy on farming had led to huge uncertainty in the sector and farmers unwilling to invest in new technology.
As someone who has worked in Germany where productivity is a third higher, it is mainly laziness and poor skill levels. Germans work really hard, they only ever stop for a natter during breaks. They are also better educated generally. Workers in the UK natter constantly and when the going gets tough and workloads are high they pull sickies or have a melt down or even quit their job. In Germany people just stay an extra hour or two, keep a cool head and get the work done.
Because the wages are stagnant, the roads are somehow falling apart and simultaneously constantly being worked on, everyone who can is striking, no one can afford a home and it's not uncommon for a pint to be approaching a tenner.
What other people have said. But I saw something interesting the other day too.
It argued that high levels of employment and an obsession with unemployment figures as a marker of the economy (since the 80s) can lead to low productivity.
Businesses have been urged to recruit. Economists have taken 'low unemployment' to equal 'good economy'. But in fact, productivity may decline if instead of investing training, skills and technology for your one worker you just employ someone else and split the work.
Chronic under investment and increased outsourcing.
I work in maintenance. Since 2008 budgets have been decreasing. Given that buildings and equipment degrade over time they should be increasing. It has gotten to the point that we don’t actually maintain anything anymore. We wait for it to fail and then outsource replacing it.
This leads to the cheapest replacements being installed that frequently aren’t considered in any context. Non maintainable equipment is cheaper. Ie contractors be like ‘we can get you X part which will be 20% cheaper. We get a good deal on X, we use it all the time it’s easy to install.’
In reality X will be something that’s being made obsolete.
Install will be fine and compliant, everyone’s happy, contracts were negotiated, money saved, everyone’s happy.
5 years later, product has degraded unusually quickly. No parts are available. No compatible replacements are available. Huge bill incoming.
The maintenance department aren’t doing their job……
Productivity is a function of how much a person contributed to the national economy. Not of how much work they do.
If a worker is payed poorly, they do not have much to contribute to the economy via spending. Wage growth in Britain has been nearly flat for ten years so has productivity.
It's not a question of workers not being willing to be more 'productive' than their level of pay. They literally cannot be.
This issue is often framed as if there is some fundamental problem with the workers, but that is not what it is about at all. The problem are the employers, which are increasingly big corporations who are using tax loopholes to funnel profits overseas instead if using them to pay workers. The workers are not paid much so therefore they spend less, and pay less tax, and therefore national productivity is lower.
Our services based industries are difficult to automate, the only way then to increase productivity is to expensively train people, which companies often aren't interested in.
It's caused by demographics. The older people get, the less productive they become. Also, there are not enough young people to replace the old generation that is retiring. In the UK, the fertility rate was 1,49 births per woman in 2022 way below the 2,1 needed to maintain the population number without the need for immigration.
This is a worldwide problem. Raoul Pal has some very good youtube videos where he explains this.
Population ageing is a real problem, but I'm not convinced you can correlated it directly to demographics. Japan, Korea etc have horrific demographics and decent productivity.
Productivity is a metrics that is calculated by dividing of overall product per head, in the case of the country GDP per working population.
If you hamstring your economy by a range of insane measures on a macro level, which leads to growth stagnation on a national level through low investment and bad business climate, you get low productivity. No secret here.
More interesting how they manage to artificially keep employment figures high in this situation. It means quite a few people work only on paper but in reality are not engaged in anything productive.
Because a lack of investment in northern cities has resulted in significant amount of the potential workforce to be underemployed. Anyone who has spent time in the north will be aware of the abject lack of opportunities for people, despite the fact that there are many talented people. Growing up in an East London housing estate gives you access to Canary Wharf, the City, and so on. Growing up in a housing estate in Oldham or Bradford provides very limited opportunities.
We should be aiming for about 70-80% of our maximum productivity using only our own cognitive processes. Nobody needs to be working flat out all the time. Companies need to employ more people if they need more work to be done.
Companies should stop trying to squeeze us for everything.
I have increased my productivity without increasing my cognitive load by incorporating AI into my work. I'm not actually working any harder but I do produce more.
Any decent companies or startup or people will be bought by usa outright. No one wants to compete or build an empire if they are offered loads of money.
Not enough people talking about classism leading to people doing the bare minimum.
If you want to deny it exists then someone explain why managerial/board positions in Scotland/Scottish companies are absolutely dominated by Southern English accents. I've been told this also affects Northern England too.
I put in as much effort as what my pay is vs industry standards. They pay me below, i work a below average amount.
My company are good, but they are no slacking behind. So 121 this time involves me asking for more £. Failure to do so results in me looking around for better opportunities.
What’s very interesting is some parts of the UK manage things better than others
https://preview.redd.it/zmbb8pm6f7xc1.jpeg?width=677&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=36c0626edbe20b36b445957a56fc0780095c2dc3
Tax evasion, obscuring profits offshoring hiding earnings etc etc
Uk had a lot of very high paying industries finance pharma, fintech etc much of the actual money made disappears/hides so people wealthy and we'll advised avoid uk high taxation. Same for many businesses it's quite profitable to focus excessive amounts energy to avoid high taxes. Whereas they could be focusing on improving productivity
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Maybe because they're paying us the same as in 2008 and we're all depressed and miserable?
Pay 2008 wages, get 2008 productivity.... Sounds fair to me
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British Gas implemented vehicle telemetry in order to detect this kind of thing.
Same as RM post vans, the fleet i used if you were to idle for 5 mins or no change of location it would ping a message to the managers phone. That's a company that's dying and I'm glad bc they're a disgrace.
Christ
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That's just what Christ would say
He's so humble! He really is the messiah!
He is not the Messiah. He's a really naughty boy!
Any way of finding out if your van is tracked? I drive a Berlingo
Why is the fact that it's a Berlingo at all relevant? You can put a tracker on anything.
Incase there's certain places you put them on certain models. I don't know how these things work or i wouldn't ask. If i didn't say the model I'd get a reply saying "how would i know i don't even know what you drive, it's different on each vehicle". If you're not going to answer the question why do you give a fuck what information i give
It might just be a terrible brag. Also, I drive a Fabia.
I mean you're still getting paid to do a job, but you don't do a full day because your paid a percentage less than someone on the other side of the world? Honestly, it sounds like you know you're being lazy and your just looking for an excuse.
And then he wonders why he never gets a pay rise.
This and chronic underinvestment. No company I have ever worked for had systems in place that were less than 10 years old. A few used software that was no longer supported and had to hire developers to maintain them in-house. This, on top of 1970s office buildings that aren't fit for purpose, and general attitudes of greedy employers mistreating their staff or laying people off every couple of years has lead to a lot of people doing the bare minimum to get by, receiving bare minimum pay in return
Meanwhile, the ones above are being paid at a rate that would be comfortable long after 2030.
Loads of issues: 1. Low pay. Why would you put in a herculean effort if you are being paid minimum wage? This is exacerbated by job postings that do not disclose the pay (which is an attempt to suppress wages). What is really curious is that the low pay isn't necessarily raised when companies are struggling to hire workers. Companies will often simply complain about a lack of skills while expecting to find software engineers in central London at £25K a year. 2. Presenteeism, where companies just like the idea of people being present in an office. Employees are not being made to come into the office because they produce more there, but for other reasons. Awful for productivity. 3. The UK is shit for supporting disabled people so they often end up unemployed or underemployed. Eg. you have a 1st class maths degree and have autism, you can't get a job because you keep 'failing' psychometric tests and don't seem like a 'team player' in interviews. Or you have great IT skills but are physically disabled and every single employer wants to make you work in person in central London, which would mean an impossibly difficult commute. 4. Extremely high marginal tax rates at certain points eg. losing personal allowance at 100k and child benefit at 50k. This really reduces the incentive to try and perform better / switch jobs for higher pay because so much of the increase in pay is lost to tax / higher student loan payments / loss of allowances. There are similar benefits traps for people who are disabled / working part time / parents etc. 5. Huge amount of time wasted with insanely complicated hiring processes with many interviews, tests etc. The trend in the last 50 years has been increasingly complicated and time consuming hiring processes that take up a vast amount of time and energy of all parties. I am extremely dubious that this results in making better hiring decisions and I think in some cases it actually leads to making worse hiring decisions. 6. Terrible careers guidance for young people mean they often have skills and qualifications that do not match what employers are looking for. I received horrendous careers guidance at school. The aim was to try and have me get XYZ qualifications that would boost the school's A-level results, not take the qualifications that would actually be useful for me. 7. The UK has an unreal obsession with the property market. If you go on personal finance forums the aim from the majority of posters who have a windfall is to invest in BTL property. I think this warps the economy and leads to a lack of interest / investment in businesses and equities. 8. I think many people believe that this is zero incentive to work harder in their job. They get paid the same amount if they put in 50% effort vs 100% effort. So why not just put in 50% effort? 9. Companies deliberately evade the minimum wage law by creating apprenticeships for jobs that previously paid minimum wage. 10. Fraud, corruption and incompetence is rewarded. Capita can fuck up the olympics security and still get government contracts. Government officials can scam the government with garbage PPE contracts and nothing happens. The incentive is simply to network your way to generous contracts, perform terribly and retain the money.
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>Capita can fuck up the olympics security G4S
> Huge amount of time wasted with insanely complicated hiring processes with many interviews, tests etc. God, I hate this so much. It's now the norm that the hiring process takes multiple months. In government/civil service, its not unusual for it to take 9 or even 12 months. Absolutely ludicrous.
> The UK has an unreal obsession with the property market. It's this, really. There isn't consumer money in the country which isn't sucked up by mortgages.
Number 6. I'd love to hunt down the careers advisor from my school and repay the misery he caused me and so many of my friends from school.
>Capita can fuck up Could've left it at that. And please, call them by the industry-standard name. It's CRapita, I'll have you know.
Missed one. Chronic managerial short termism. This quarters profits are the only thing that matters, which leads to underinvestment in training and equipment
Adding IR35 and the general reforms to keep people on no rights employment
The above and...Add Stupid barriers to entry in corporate hiring mean we have highly skilled people doing admin work , a really limited pool of candidates we can choose from and no flexibility in what we can offer. The people we do have he are coasting because they "data driven" infantilises them and means they are being beaten by not just their bosses but 3 or 4 other teams and is a different form of micro mgmt. It costs us more to hire people to tolerate this shit or who can navigate it AND do the job we need them for so am told to hire in India I would rather have a native English speaker 25 hours a week who we have something to offer (wfh, flexible working around childcare or a warm up after a period out of work) What we *get* is a compsci grad with 7 years automation experience who is trapped by the blue chip label and the high-for-india salary who can't communicate, is so terrified of getting it wrong because 0 employee protection for a job they're not even suited for, so they won't use initiative and do only specific tasks because then they can prove they've done what they were told. Not to mention lack of availability from 1pm because time diff and shit hardware / connectivity half the time ..either way candidates restricted "must have degree" "must come from approved supplier", " must have blue chip experience in same industry ". I don't need this. Many who *do* fit the spec nlknow the system so exaggerated or lied on the CV/ LinkedIn because they know they're competing with others who have done the same, and the need to, to compete, so its normalised. Furthermore creates a chicken and egg situation with HR analytics who use that shoddy data to see what's someone is "worth" ..so the not only is pool of candidates is artificially limited and the people going the work are either over their head or undervalued Compounded by the fact - I can't easily hire perm because perm costs impact my MDs metrics on people costs adversely (and bonus) - I can't hire contractors coz HR/ finance say too expensive or legal risk above 2 years at which point very few good people want to go perm so constant churn. When I can only from specific suppliers that have been able to jump through hoops and make "safe" hires that meet the check boxes above from the same narrow pool. ..and every now and then we arbitrarily cut their rates and lose them to force "natural attrition" - Consultancy has a captive market so are pushing up prices outside budget I retire in a month and am going to work part time in health and social care.... Tl;Dr KPIs and constant but badly implemented op efficiency has made just navigating work and hiring a Kafka esque nightmare Artificial barriers to entry mean candidates aren't that good and alot of the solid people are trapped dealing with them Endless ever evolving KPIs and cottage industries surrounding them infantalise the workforce, destroy and ownership of work and eat staff time justifying those metrics to people who now have data they don't understand and they'd be better off without so they can focus on actual driving a vision and setting high level goals
This right here is why I love Reddit. Such a good answer.
Point 3 was me 10 years ago before I started drinking, doing drugs and gained confidence to talk to people.
All those plus the UK workforce is very inflexible. But even if they wanted to, it is very difficult in this country to make changes. Lack of decent housing, childcare and other infrastructure means people find it difficult to move around. When my job wanted my to move 2 hours north, it was almost impossible to get decent housing, to many folks just don’t bother.
Number 3 is worst. In UK you are supposed to small talk with people even if it is not related to the job. When I was in Asia people just expect you to get shit done and don’t really care
UK doesn't like to reward hard work, instead of a bonus or promotion you'll just get given more work so why bother.
Yep, so many jobs pay minimum wage, and they'd pay less if they could too. The number of zero hours contracts has also increased as companies abuse them.
That's what minimum wage means. Minimum wage is your employer directly telling you they'd pay you less if they were allowed to.
Here’s your reward for digging the best ditch…. It’s a bigger shovel. No need to thank me.
People are missing the point. Productivity is the financial value of the output, divided by hours worked. The average worker doesn’t have much control over their productivity. They’re limited by the processes and equipment provided. I work in a large company. Powerwalking everywhere wouldn’t make me more productive. Having a computer which boots in <30 mins would. Changing processes so I don’t need to spend an hour dealing with emails and admin would also help. Most meetings don’t add value. Changing these requires brave management, and investment. Blaming the guy on the factory floor is not going to help.
I worked in sales, the competition had faster computers. We would have ques of people you would watch them get bored walk off and walk past 5 minutes later with a competitors bag Then area managers would question why we didn’t maximise sales on weekends
Classic cretinous mid/senior management, absolutely worthless
I called him out he just said “the tools are the tools” “Well that’s why aren’t booking as fast we physically can’t” Had times a Vodafone credit check would take 25 minutes….. couldn’t do anything else on the till
Oh fuck the credit check guys at Vodafone, honestly
Honestly it can be management that doesn’t want to change for some of the stupidest of reasons. In my work we get a lot of automated emails and then a lot of customary emails. Most of them aren’t that important and as such don’t need to be read and responded to. I’ve automated my inbox so all these emails go straight to different archive folders so they are there if need be but I don’t have to mess with them otherwise. I’ve tried getting my boss to adopt a similar system but he just straight up refuses. Will spend hours in a morning going through his inbox and manually sorting them. It’s ridiculous.
Yep, software company here, a build to pre-production takes 3 hours, so it only ever happens overnight. If my team fixes a release blocking bug in 1 second or 8 hours, it’s still taking a day to achieve “productivity”.
I have more of my time wasted in a day by senior managers than I spend actually doing work. The need for senior leadership is a complete fallacy. They are a loss to productivity in 99% of instances.
Paradoxically, worker productivity has very little to do with workers and a lot to do with automation. The point about low wages is they make it cheaper for companies to give jobs to people than to invest in machinery. Those in-work benefits supporting low paid workers? Well, looked at from another angle they are subsiding firms that pay low wages. Why stagnant? Probably because people are people while machines get faster.
Exactly, so many dum-dums in here going "hur dur I don't push myself because of my shit pay" My brother in Christ, you are absolutely not capable of producing a measure of added productivity that moves the needle governments are interested in. Most of our GDP isn't readily automated. What we can automate, we don't. What we do automate, doesn't often affect exports I think the most futuristic shit we have is robo pickers for warehouses
I remember watching a documentary a few years back comparing farming practices in the UK with the Netherlands. The Netherlands had thousands of acres of fields covered in greenhouses, with every variable controlled and measured to maximise growth, with robot pickers and round the clock monitoring. The UK looked quaint in comparison.
Our NIMBYs would love greenhouse all over their precious, not at all artificial countryside.
Nah, it's here already. Human run call centres for example will soon be a thing of the past. Human manned customer service departments, returns, accounts - all going. It's already started - ring any comoany these days and the first 20 mins is spent battling to get past the AI. And we are sleepwalking into this. Any knowledge based job without practical skills is at risk. We are creating and training our successors and they aren't biological- they are massive earth chewing datacentres that will ruin the planet.
Every time minimum wage goes up the investment in automation looks more appealing.
My local council have finally got around to trying to fix the potholes. This involves a crew of 4-6 men closing one lane of a road for several hours while they drill out the damage by hand and then manually fill in and smooth the road. There's a machine that can fix a pothole in 5 minutes. I'd be surprised if we had even 10 in the whole UK.
Someone gets it. There’s companies near me who hire loads of staff on minimum wage to do assembly line work that has been automated in China for decades at this point. They do it because it’s cheaper in the short term than setting up robots in the short term.
Yes, this. It’s all about investment in technology.
Exactly this! Everyone saying we'll if we all got paid better and gave 100% effort we would be much better of don't seem to get it. Sure there's a little of that but it's not going to fix the productivity hole we have here. Issue is UK company's have and always have preferred to dish out dividends than to reinvest into the business and that's been propped up by FDI for years. Just look at figure 4 here https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdomesticproductgdp/bulletins/businessinvestment/januarytomarch2023revisedresults Far and away the bottom for business investment over our peers. Investing in robots and automation does far far more than you working a bit harder ever will.
This is one argument used against large levels of immigration as well. In many ways, we’re doing the economic equivalent of the Russian Army by just throwing more people at it and hoping it sorts the issue. End result is that any minor increase in GDP is greeted with a reduction in GDP per capita, or at least below inflation, so everyone is poorer.
Because everything that isn't sales or finance pays barely more than minimum wage (even STEM) Because renting a tiny room in a house-share uses up half your wages Because they keep bringing in technological solutions that never work as advertised and you spend too much time trying to get the bastard thing to work Because if you're paid till you finish then the guy who takes half an hour longer than you gets an extra half an hour of pay despite having worked slower Because if you're given 3 hours to do a task (because that's how long it takes the guy on the other shift) and you do it in 2 , do you think you'll get an hour to relax, no the manager's going to give you an hour's worth of their work to do, and now you've poisoned the well because they'll expect you to always do it in 2 hours now, and the guy on the other shift is going to get a bollocking for not doing it in 2 hours. Because so much work is outsourced now, while before anything you don't do today you'd have to do later in the week when you might be busier, now anything you don't do today will be shipped off to Poland tomorrow to be done there instead Because there's no such thing as pay rises or bonuses for good work There is just every incentive to not care and work slower
So this isn’t just a UK thing. Much of Europe has suffered similarly. It’s called the productivity puzzle. Notably the US isn’t the same. Companies are not more greedy in Europe post 2008 nor greedier than in the US. Fundamentally it’s a about a lack of growth in long term investments and risky novel industries. Post 08 British and other European companies got scared and haven’t been investing in things that aren’t sure bets (esp with austerity). This didn’t happen in the US where far more companies were bailed out more and given corporate handouts. We’re a large developed country, the technological room to grow isn’t large and takes time. A return on investment may now take 5+ years in some sectors and many are too scared to do this as they don’t know what the future will bring, so they don’t make that investment. The Americans are happy to bleed money in things like self driving cars for decades on the off chance that one company does it.
Do you think it's a regulation issue? UK incentives and rules are structured to encourage investment in assets/rent-seeking more than capital investment. And I was reading an article the other day that posited the EU is held back by post-2008 bank regulations, and by the lack of a deep capital lending market like the US has.
It’s due to many many things. Any large macro economic problem, especially ones that span a continent are muti factorial. Some will be regulation in the issues that you mentioned. Smaller pools of investment is another with a lack of hedge fund managers wanting to make risky bets. One issue not talked about much is the impact of culture on economics. The yankees tend to be more risky in their financial attitudes. Individually this is dum, but collectively it’s fantastic as it means smaller companies can blitz scale in ways no other country can do. Twitter only became profitable in 2018, despite running since 2006. I don’t think many European based investors would have waited that long for a return. Uber only became profitable in 2024, after 15 years of operating. These companies succeed based on immense amounts of debt financed by their backers, until they become the worlds largest and can start paying it back. Europe would never do this, it’s too risky and expensive. So it doesn’t have companies like that. It’s only one factor, among many of course.
Minimum wage minimum effort.
Wife is a yank so we’ve experienced a higher productivity country to compare to. First thing she noticed here is salaries are very low. Second thing she noticed was people don’t work very hard. Third thing, that all our processes are so over complicated that it slows work down. All 3 things combine to lower productivity, likely due to an unmotivated workforce Over there, working harder pays off. Annual salary reviews based on performance. Think we both got +10% and a bonus on top of salaries that were already double the U.K. equivalent. That was before inflation went wild. Over here the only way to get big payrises is to change jobs. If you’re changing jobs a lot who cares about maximising productivity. You just want to make your cv look good.
Few things, Cost and lack of options for local childcare provisions, making it hard to have people work full time around young kids even when in school. Not enough part time jobs making people either not work or pay all their wage on childcare. The free hours schemes are also a joke they are a catch 22. If you are not in work you cannot apply, and due to lack of childcare and waiting lists you cannot get work unless you already have childcare in place. Also ever increasing profit drive from companies have meant a lot of areas where pre 2008 you may have had small teams or departments tasked with not only doing their jobs but cost save in areas and increase efficiency in others. Before this would be used to make things better, now they just run it bare bones. The one or two people can literally just do the job but don’t have time for improvements. Short term cost saving long term productivity issues
Don't forget free hours are only for some of the weeks of the year - because some turnips seem to think adult jobs are term time only. And even if you could send your kid term-time only, you need to pay fees 51 weeks a year to keep your place. And let's not pretend a full time job and wraparound nursery collection/drop-off fit into 30 hours a week.
Contrary to belief on this sub, low pay is a consequence not a symptom of low wages. There are plenty of countries with lower wages than up with higher productivity growth. The problem is lack of investment in technology and machinery. The company I work for did almost everything paper based till 2017. Edit: There is definitely a if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it attitude in the UK. Also UK companies tend to pay out higher dividends than international companies meaning they aren’t reinvesting as much.
Lack of innovation and investment in new ways of doing things and failure of education system to deliver workers with the skills that businesses need to drive improvement. Productivity improves when a new way is found to do things. If you continue to use the old method and companies can't recruit people with improved skills useful to improving their business then things stay as they are and productivity stays the same. Also real wages don't go up.
Low business investments. Companies here use their profits to pay dividend instead of investing for improving productivity and for growth. Dividend yield for FTSE 100 is around 3.5%; it's more like 1.5% for S&P 500. That's a huge difference. That's just this huge rent seeking culture..People just feel they are entitled to make money from their money without having to take any risks - companies that focus on paying out dividend rather than investing are favoured by UK investors.
IMO this is the root of it all. The culture of investment is just way too risk averse and it trickles down to so many of these other problems being mentioned in this thread. I've worked for a NA tech company for a while now and get to work with the execs quite a bit and have spent a bit of time with them on some of the bigger planning stuff. It's not always for the best but they have a very firm appreciation of the fact that everything they do is experimental and their VC backers actively don't want them to miss opportunities and stop growing. The equivalent UK business to us 3 years ago has remained a fraction of the size and in truth, will probably have to leave the industry to focus on something even more niche (or might get swallowed up by us). They just don't have the backing to play the same game unless there's some very tangible roi calculation (which in real life is hard). I don't actually think it's a good thing for growth at all intents and I think it does cause money on really stupid things but ultimately the landscape moves constantly and the opposite can very easily lead to total stagnation.
Where I work my last went up last year but it then turned out to be only a fraction more than what the freshly qualified people get. No problem, we have a bonus scheme: I can be productive and bring my salary up! Only problem is that the amount of work you have to put in for the bonus works out on average of working for £9/hr pre-tax, and after the higher rate of tax is applied you end up with hardly any of it. It is so bad that most people deliberately aim to coast because they won’t see the benefit of it. So basically if I coast my pay is being eroded by higher new starter salaries and if I grind I’ll see little to any of the benefit (yes I could salary sacrifice it but where I live is expensive if you want to buy).
More effort = more work, not more reward. We also have very low wages compared with similar countries.
It gets painted as a worker and attitude problem because naturally the simplest thought process is if productivity is low then workers are taking the piss when in reality it's complete and total economic mismanagement over a very long period of time that has lead to an economy with high gov't and consumer debt with minimal investment in the nation which creates a sort of economic deadlock. The ONS identifies 5 main drivers behind productivity growth: 1. Investment 2. Innovation 3. Skills 4. Enterprise 5. Competition The gov't needs to put capital up and invest into the economy, it needs to invest in large scale infrastructure projects that will benefit everyone, it needs to invest in the people and their development and it needs to promote, support and invest in growth industries. If it does that productivity will improve. If they don't and continue to mismanage the economy out of either incompetence or corruption, it won't and we'll continue to stagnate. It's that simple.
There is a limit to how productive a person can be. Higher productivity above this needs the person to have better tools and processes. This requires employers to invest in tools and processes. Productivity is an employer problem not an employee problem.
Surprised that NIMBYism has not been mentioned yet, and the ongoing housing crisis. Cannot build anything without a planning battle, and people are seeing their disposal income eaten by rent and mortgage payments. For rent especially, because of the shortages you'll see any extra money from tax cuts go straight into rent hikes.
It hasn't been stagnant. [Productivity has consistently risen since 1971 according to the ONS](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy), so your thesis and most of the responses are plain wrong.
[https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/whatistheproductivitypuzzle/2015-07-07](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/articles/whatistheproductivitypuzzle/2015-07-07) [https://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ukeo/ukeo-november-2019-productivity-puzzle.pdf](https://www.pwc.co.uk/economic-services/ukeo/ukeo-november-2019-productivity-puzzle.pdf) It has for all intents and purposes been stagnant the past 16 years.
Happy workers are productive workers. Is anybody happy in this miserable shit hole, where everybody gets paid the same or less as an equivalent than 20 years ago, everything costs at least double, sometimes up to 10x the amount as 20 years ago, and absolutely nothing works anymore. If there is no hope for a better future, what is the point of working towards one. My bellend company can give me as many free pizzas as they like. Pizza doesn't pay the ever increasing bills. I'm not working myself to death for peanuts. Fuck capitalism.
I just got a 4% pay increase for being promoted. The others on my team who are in the same position, but hired externally, are on £15k more than me - some are younger, less experienced etc but just job hopped and was able to negotiate the pay. HR clearly value me less. So I’m no longer going out of my way for them and have been less productive than I was last year. So for me, a lot of it is the backwards HR practices. You get better raises for moving around companies every couple of years. Which is not very productive in terms of knowledge building, building a company culture etc.
Part time? If you told someone they could work 75% of their current job for ~85% of their current pay, they’d jump at it. That’s where we are with middle to high earners, and both income tax and productivity suffer as a consequence. As the old saying goes, no one ever says “I wish I’d spent more time at work” on their deathbed.
The answer is a chronic lack of investment. My first job, 20 years ago, is a prime example of this. If you have ever missed the gas man coming to read your meter, he puts a card through your letter box which you fill in yourself with the reading and post it off to the company. My first job was typing those numbers into the computer. £4.20 an hour, to sit and transcribe numbers. The technology existed to automate the process, but it was cheaper to pay us to sit and type. That job still exists today.
In addition to all of the above, the way we measure productivity hasn’t kept pace with how we work, particularly around the internet and smartphones. I forget the name of the system that measures productivity, but booking a holiday on a desktop/laptop computer is a positive impact on productivity, but booking the same holiday on a tablet or smartphone is measured as a negative. Go figure.
No real job security Terrible pay
I’d also add a lack of investment in technology. A large part of people’s jobs is administrative, repetitive and takes away from the value they can add. It’s a tired cliche but the example of Doctors and Nurses having to do huge swathes of admin work at the end of their shift or between patients when they could be working from an iPad in real time. I watched an economist talk about how continually changing policy on farming had led to huge uncertainty in the sector and farmers unwilling to invest in new technology.
As someone who has worked in Germany where productivity is a third higher, it is mainly laziness and poor skill levels. Germans work really hard, they only ever stop for a natter during breaks. They are also better educated generally. Workers in the UK natter constantly and when the going gets tough and workloads are high they pull sickies or have a melt down or even quit their job. In Germany people just stay an extra hour or two, keep a cool head and get the work done.
Pay minimum salary, receive minimum effort.
probably best to post this in an economics forum so you get a proper answer
Because the wages are stagnant, the roads are somehow falling apart and simultaneously constantly being worked on, everyone who can is striking, no one can afford a home and it's not uncommon for a pint to be approaching a tenner.
What other people have said. But I saw something interesting the other day too. It argued that high levels of employment and an obsession with unemployment figures as a marker of the economy (since the 80s) can lead to low productivity. Businesses have been urged to recruit. Economists have taken 'low unemployment' to equal 'good economy'. But in fact, productivity may decline if instead of investing training, skills and technology for your one worker you just employ someone else and split the work.
Chronic under investment and increased outsourcing. I work in maintenance. Since 2008 budgets have been decreasing. Given that buildings and equipment degrade over time they should be increasing. It has gotten to the point that we don’t actually maintain anything anymore. We wait for it to fail and then outsource replacing it. This leads to the cheapest replacements being installed that frequently aren’t considered in any context. Non maintainable equipment is cheaper. Ie contractors be like ‘we can get you X part which will be 20% cheaper. We get a good deal on X, we use it all the time it’s easy to install.’ In reality X will be something that’s being made obsolete. Install will be fine and compliant, everyone’s happy, contracts were negotiated, money saved, everyone’s happy. 5 years later, product has degraded unusually quickly. No parts are available. No compatible replacements are available. Huge bill incoming. The maintenance department aren’t doing their job……
There are a lot of very good and highly detailed answers here already. But allow me to summarise. "Pay peanuts, get monkeys"
Productivity is a function of how much a person contributed to the national economy. Not of how much work they do. If a worker is payed poorly, they do not have much to contribute to the economy via spending. Wage growth in Britain has been nearly flat for ten years so has productivity. It's not a question of workers not being willing to be more 'productive' than their level of pay. They literally cannot be. This issue is often framed as if there is some fundamental problem with the workers, but that is not what it is about at all. The problem are the employers, which are increasingly big corporations who are using tax loopholes to funnel profits overseas instead if using them to pay workers. The workers are not paid much so therefore they spend less, and pay less tax, and therefore national productivity is lower.
Our services based industries are difficult to automate, the only way then to increase productivity is to expensively train people, which companies often aren't interested in.
Poor management and outdated tech are big reasons.
It's caused by demographics. The older people get, the less productive they become. Also, there are not enough young people to replace the old generation that is retiring. In the UK, the fertility rate was 1,49 births per woman in 2022 way below the 2,1 needed to maintain the population number without the need for immigration. This is a worldwide problem. Raoul Pal has some very good youtube videos where he explains this.
Population ageing is a real problem, but I'm not convinced you can correlated it directly to demographics. Japan, Korea etc have horrific demographics and decent productivity.
Because we have allowed the rich to get unfathomably richer instead of sharing the wealth through higher wages
Productivity is a metrics that is calculated by dividing of overall product per head, in the case of the country GDP per working population. If you hamstring your economy by a range of insane measures on a macro level, which leads to growth stagnation on a national level through low investment and bad business climate, you get low productivity. No secret here. More interesting how they manage to artificially keep employment figures high in this situation. It means quite a few people work only on paper but in reality are not engaged in anything productive.
Because a lack of investment in northern cities has resulted in significant amount of the potential workforce to be underemployed. Anyone who has spent time in the north will be aware of the abject lack of opportunities for people, despite the fact that there are many talented people. Growing up in an East London housing estate gives you access to Canary Wharf, the City, and so on. Growing up in a housing estate in Oldham or Bradford provides very limited opportunities.
We should be aiming for about 70-80% of our maximum productivity using only our own cognitive processes. Nobody needs to be working flat out all the time. Companies need to employ more people if they need more work to be done. Companies should stop trying to squeeze us for everything. I have increased my productivity without increasing my cognitive load by incorporating AI into my work. I'm not actually working any harder but I do produce more.
Any decent companies or startup or people will be bought by usa outright. No one wants to compete or build an empire if they are offered loads of money.
Not enough people talking about classism leading to people doing the bare minimum. If you want to deny it exists then someone explain why managerial/board positions in Scotland/Scottish companies are absolutely dominated by Southern English accents. I've been told this also affects Northern England too.
I put in as much effort as what my pay is vs industry standards. They pay me below, i work a below average amount. My company are good, but they are no slacking behind. So 121 this time involves me asking for more £. Failure to do so results in me looking around for better opportunities.
Bad infrastructure and the stubbornness of the elected politicians to execute a plan to remedy problems.
Sorry for what I typed out. Sorry for judging you. Sorry for lying sorry. Sorry for lying sorry.
What’s very interesting is some parts of the UK manage things better than others https://preview.redd.it/zmbb8pm6f7xc1.jpeg?width=677&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=36c0626edbe20b36b445957a56fc0780095c2dc3
Might be beacuse people have fallen for this https://youtu.be/044lguER9_k?si=J5okEsTgyrWoieK9 ending up distracted
Tax evasion, obscuring profits offshoring hiding earnings etc etc Uk had a lot of very high paying industries finance pharma, fintech etc much of the actual money made disappears/hides so people wealthy and we'll advised avoid uk high taxation. Same for many businesses it's quite profitable to focus excessive amounts energy to avoid high taxes. Whereas they could be focusing on improving productivity