A thorn in the side of government, UK workforce productivity is miserably low – still, and stubbornly lags behind our G7 competitors. Figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in their productivity report for January and March 2023 revealed the UK’s output per worker was 0.9% lower than the same period in 2022. And the ONS’ most recent report for April to June 2023 offered little hope of improvement, reporting no change (0.0%) compared to the previous year. What part can HR leaders play to help resolve this?

Why is UK productivity so low?
It will not have been lost on students of productivity graphs that while productivity has either declined or flatlined, so too have been the measures of overall employee engagement which research has shown is a key contributor to productivity. Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workforce survey ranked UK employee engagement level at only 10%, almost the lowest in Europe.

Compound previously low levels with the battering that businesses suffered at the hands of the pandemic, and the new headwinds presented by the changed expectations of a workforce that has had cause to fundamentally review its values and we can begin to see why those of an age and means decided to exit the workforce entirely. Many others resolved to resign from less than satisfactory jobs or from companies offering little prospect of development or advancement and some of those that remained resolved to quietly quit, choosing to limit their contribution to the minimum.

Looked at through this lens, many employers might despair at their tragic retention figures. Whilst they may have hastily adjusted benefits and salaries, wrung their hands as they caved in to their employees’ desire to work from home (at a stroke turning once vibrant workplaces into ghost towns and eviscerating the soul of companies built over many years) little has really changed with regard to the structures and strictures that most organisations still operate within; senior leaders define the organisational strategy, middle managers translate that into work for teams and employees to conduct and then solve the problems that occur to keep the show on the road.

But is it just the fault of supine employees disenchanted with their lot or is there a greater malaise abroad? In 2017, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) highlighted poor management practices as directly correlative to poor productivity. Two years later, they launched their report Great Job: Solving the Productivity Puzzle through the Power of People which addressed the state of British management, noting that for only a 7% increase in the quality of management, the UK could boost workforce productivity and the economy could benefit from unlocking an additional £110bn. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) added momentum with their estimate that 70-80% of all managers should be regarded as accidental managers, promoted for reasons other than for their people management and engagement skills. Taken together,  could transforming our management capability be the key to cultivating a more productive and high-performing workforce?

The missing management superpower to transform productivity
In an effort to find the levers that might be pulled to lift our flagging performance, the Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) commissioned a large-scale academic study to assess the impact of a new management practice that veered away from the traditional command-and-control leadership style and instead championed an enquiry-led approach to management – Operational Coaching®. This new approach to management was implemented with managers and leaders across sixty-two organisations in fourteen sectors. The research protocols for the trial were established, administered, and the results from the trial were independently evaluated by the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE).

LSE established, to a level of statistical significance, that managers who practiced Operational Coaching® had adopted new behaviours leading to a 70% increase in the time that they spent using a coaching style of management with others, enabling them, in turn, to resolve day-to-day issues for themselves, thus increasing productivity levels. Each learner undertaking the programme generated an average of 74 x ROI, and increased skill levels across all 9 management competencies assessed including communication skills and handling challenging conversations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, LSE also detected positive trends at the organisational level too including a six-fold improvement in employee retention amongst intervention group organisations versus those in the control group.

Adapting management behaviours to capitalise on the insights and drawing from the learning from team members, rather than managers telling, directing, fixing and solving problems for employees, it turns out, is vital for improving productivity.

As businesses everywhere have yet to see a measurable improvement in staff productivity, ask yourself this question:

“With the changes that have happened and the new paradigm we seem to be operating within, how have we equipped our people managers any differently with the skills they need to cope today?”

The time for a management revolution is now. What can HR do to help?
Here are three elements to an enquiry-led approach that HR can help managers practice in order to increase staff productivity:

1. Stopping and taking a step back
As managers, most of us would feel obliged and indeed would readily share our accumulated knowledge when asked by a team member to help them address a problem. Whilst coming from a good place, something has been lost in that moment, though, as the manager has inadvertently prevented the employee from learning how to resolve the problem for themselves. Helping managers to STOP is the critical first step to shake this habit. Without it, nothing changes; their team will continue to rely on them. HR can help managers to take a step back from the situation and learn to literally bite their lip, rather than sharing their advice so readily. This brings them into the moment to assess what a better response could be for the benefit of the employee.

2. Identifying coachable moments
Once managers have made a conscious effort and learned to stop, they can begin to assess whether the daily situations they encounter might afford a coachable moment. There is a series of considerations that can help managers to determine coachable moments with their staff. HR can help managers think through questions like ‘is it an emergency situation?’, ‘is there the potential here for learning?’, ‘is the person open for this conversation right now?’ and ‘am I able to have this conversation now?’. Deciding whether it is a coachable moment can happen almost instantly, giving the manager the option to choose how best to engage an employee to help them resolve a problem themself instead of fixing it for them.

3. Asking more powerful questions
Having identified that a situation is a coachable moment, managers must learn how to ask more powerful questions designed to stimulate the employee’s thinking in a way that generates a positive outcome moving forward. Questions are crucial not only for increasing productivity, performance and engagement, but also for fostering an authentic connection with staff, yet for most of us, all we will have ever learned is “to ask open questions”. Understanding how questions can affect thinking and learning to design intentional questions that help others to think in a way that might be most helpful to them in the moment is the subject of purposeful enquiry, core to developing an Operational Coaching® style of management.

A first step on the path that HR can help to address is to encourage managers to stop asking ‘why?’ all the time and instead start asking more ‘what?’ questions. Why-based questions can feel personal, like the employee is to blame somehow or that they’re being criticised, which can lead to defensiveness. Replacing why…? with what…? removes the (unintentionally loaded) personal inference from a question and focuses on the situation itself. The employee is then more likely to be open to exploring specifics rather than feeling that they need to justify or defend their actions. This approach benefits the immediate situations people bring to their managers but also benefits countless future situations where this issue might arise again. Every time managers ask a powerful question and help staff to think through the situation differently, their confidence and capability both increase. They also gain in terms of resourcefulness, and when that happens, their capacity to deal with situations themselves increases and they have fewer reasons to come to their manager. They know now how to solve the problem and have the confidence to take action without help.

And shouldn’t that be our management purpose?