Britain’s productivity crisis was no closer to being solved today as it emerged large businesses are investing twice as much in their telecoms as boosting the productivity of their workforces.

 

Large U.K. businesses are reliant on a “spray and pray approach” to productivity and don’t know how to maximize their human capital, said a new report by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) and Concentra Analytics.

 

The survey of 400 U.K. and U.S. business leaders with more than 1,000 employees used profit per employee as its definition of productivity.

 

It found the U.K.’s largest businesses are overwhelmingly worried about their output, with 86% “concerned” or “very concerned” about their people productivity.

Yet the average large business invests just 0.25% of its turnover on measures to improve it, which is half the amount spent on telecoms services. A third of large firms budget less than £10,000 a year for planning and analyzing how workforces operate and perform.

 

Despite low overall investment, the data revealed 79% of big businesses have made some effort to improve human productivity. Of these, more than a third (35%) have looked at ways to boost employee wellbeing, while 39% have looked at improving business processes and decision making. Just 29% have invested in technology to automate repetitive tasks.

 

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