Professor Andrew Schofield
Caroline Rayner
Adrian Leather
If we can support better quality work, then we should see
improved productivity and better health and wellbeing
Sara Gaskell Debbie Chinn
Adrian Wright
because the majority of companies have leaders in place who want to make a difference. It is more about funding and the skills moving forward. There are lots of barriers to the introduction of new techniques to increase productivity quite dramatically.
SG: We’re all aware that Lancashire lags behind when it comes to productivity rates in the UK. We’re 30th out of nearly 40 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and a lot of it is down to low skilled, low paid jobs. Lower health-related working lives means we’re losing a lot of people, 25 per cent of the working age population is in the inactive group.
People are either choosing not to work or not working through health-related issues, which have grown massively. Who would have thought at the end of a pandemic we’d actually have more jobs than we’ve got people for.
It’s how we work with businesses to support them to look at upskilling. It is about bringing partners together who have the expertise to support them through recruitment and retention, and that whole healthy lifestyle, work-life balance piece.
AW: Health and wellbeing is an absolutely massive part of dealing with the issues of productivity. If we can get the quality of people’s
Louise McArdle
jobs right and get it right in terms of managing productive work properly, then we get win-wins. We get a win through enhanced productivity and better outcomes for businesses, but we also get a win for employees as well.
AL: There is a huge productivity divide between the north and the south. A big issue is mental health. It is the key driver for engagement with your employer, engagement with work and viewing work as a positive thing, which the evidence says that it is.
People who are in employment live longer, they have better quality lives, they are more likely to continue to be productive. If you start off in work, you’ll continue in work. Your economic trajectory and your health trajectory are absolutely interwoven.
Lancashire’s economy has not bounced back after Covid. It was 10.8 per cent smaller in September 2022 than it was pre-Covid. We’ve lost 33,000 people who were previously economically active, and the biggest single reason is poor underlying health because they weren’t resilient enough when they got hit by Covid, and they have not recovered, and that’s ripped the heart out of our economic capability.
Martyn Jones
Would you be surprised if I said to you that 40 per cent of young people under 25 have one long term health condition? The most common is mental health and that is their barrier to employment.
The second big issue is people over 50 who, particularly during Covid, didn’t have to go into work, didn’t engage with work and have now withdrawn from work. The big health issue here is that those people are economically inactive. They’ve been utilising their savings, they’re now in a financially difficult position.
AS: I don’t think we get underneath absenteeism enough to really understand the reasons behind it. It is not just an HR issue, it’s a leadership and whole company issue.
AW: The first things we asked people about in the survey were stress, anxiety and depression and whether these were caused by or a made worse by work.
We tried to look at the relationship between the quality of people’s work and productivity but, also, the determinants of health and wellbeing in the workplace, so things like pay, hours, autonomy, contracts, job support.
Continued on page 66
LANCASHIREBUSINESSVIEW.CO.UK
65
DEBATE
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80
