The UK’s productivity problems
It’s widely considered that the United Kingdom has productivity problems. In particular, the UK has been experiencing slow productivity growth in comparison with other countries, and this is more pronounced since 2008. To back this up with some facts:
- UK labour productivity has historically grown by around 2% per year but since the 2008/2009 recession, it has risen more slowly. [source: UK Parliament]
- The cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) for output per hour between the pre-pandemic period (2019 average level) and Quarter 2 2024 was 0.5%. [source: Office for National Statistics]
- In the August 2024 budget, UK GDP growth is forecast to remain below 2% for 5 out of the next 6 years. [source: Office for Budget Responsibility, reported by BBC News]
Underinvestment in capital and skills, inadequate innovation and poor policy coordination have an economic impact on GDP and living standards, with marked regional disparities that exacerbate inequalities. The long-term consequences of this are impacts on future growth and competitiveness. Productivity is a big deal. That’s why the UK Government is constantly referencing growth in its announcements. In our organisations, we are under pressure to do more with less – and this has led to a plethora of “productivity tools” that we use to communicate and collaborate.
But productivity is not just about doing more with less; it’s about creating a robust, sustainable, and thriving business environment that benefits everyone – from individual businesses to the broader economy and society.
The need for administrators
To save costs in providing services, businesses often “shift left” – “what can we move from first line support to self-service?”, “what can we move from second to first line?”, etc. In many situations, that works well. But if we look elsewhere we have actually shifted right. I suggest that all too often, what looked like an efficiency-led cost saving on paper, in reality, led to increased costs, in the form of inefficient working that has impacted productivity.
It feels to me that, over the last 20 or so years there has been a massive drop in the number of administrative positions in the workplace. And yet, the Office for National Statistics (ONS)’s Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES) shows an increase in the number of employees carrying out office administrative and support activities. Could this be because, instead of employing expert administrators, we expect staff to do their own administration? Only the most senior people in the organisation have an assistant (and that role is probably shared between several executives).
This is a side-effect of the PC revolution – we all write our own reports (no more typing pool), and automation of transactional processes pushed out other administrative roles. At the same time, memos became emails; a few days in the post became seconds across a network; there has been a proliferation of “productivity” tools for new methods of collaboration. Instead of creating things (be they widgets, knowledge-based services, or other items of value), for many workers, a large part of their job is now administrative. As technology has advanced, administrative work has become more complex.
Administrative assistance or administrative assistants?
No, it’s not a typo – just a bad pun – but we need more assistance from our admin. More administrative assistants. Administrative assistance. OK, enough of the wordplay, let me give an example…
A skilled administrator, who follows a process regularly, will be more efficient than someone who is employed to do a different job, and only follows a given process infrequently. It might be booking hotels, creating expense claims, chasing invoices, or one of a number of administrative tasks that, over time, have shifted right.
To take an example, one UK National Health Service (NHS) trust dramatically reduced waiting times by employing someone to relieve clinicians from admin:
“[…] we have introduced a new system for booking in patients to our children’s therapies service, with a business manager now taking this share of the administrative workload from clinicians. This has resulted in a fall in waiting lists from an average of one year to seven weeks.”
[Kent Community Health Chief Executive’s Report, October 2024]
Yes, you read that right – by removing the administrative workload from skilled clinicians and employing someone whose job is focused on operating an administrative process, a huge efficiency gain was created. Patients were presumably much happier not having to wait so long. Expert staff could focus on the things that they are expert at – delivering services to patients.
This example could be replayed many times over – not just in the NHS but elsewhere in the public sector, and in commercial organisations.
So what’s the answer?
It’s 2024, so I have to say artificial intelligence is here to save us. But I’ll caveat that too.
In the same NHS trust’s board papers that I cited above, I saw that they have an objective for a “20 per cent reduction in clinician time documenting care by March 2025”. To help with this, various programmes “aiming to deliver ways to free up staff admin time, improve patient flow, improve working lives and ultimately advance our productivity.”. Their automation programme has “a total of 175 processes automated with 135 bots running”.
That’s really encouraging to see. Artificial assistants are being used to automate processes.
At Node4, I’m aware of conversations taking place with a UK Police Force to help with the redaction of images (obscuring the faces of people who are not suspects). In another case, we have just published a customer story, where we helped Flood Re with a robotic process automation solution. This extracts very specific data from complex reports and provides unique summaries of flood damage, costs and interventions before creating new documents (with personally identifying information redacted) for Flood Re’s loss adjusters.
These are real-world examples of driving up productivity, by using AI to make efficiencies.
But we need to be careful – the current wave of AI assistants do amazing things but there are some very real concerns about the quality of some of the outputs from generative AI. We can improve that with better grounding of the AI models that we use (grounding is the term describing the ability to connect model output to verifiable sources of information), and with improved data governance.
Why Node4 is best positioned to help
We can help you navigate the technology path to productivity. Whether it’s helping to make smarter business decisions with predictive analytics; agent assistance in a contact centre context; predictive fault finding in connectivity; or personal assistants – harnessing the power of Microsoft Copilots in our modern work.
Contact us using the details below – and let’s start a conversation about driving up your organisation’s productivity, growth and resilience.