News

Citation

(2014), "News", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 63 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPPM-11-2013-0190

News

Article Type: News From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 63, Issue 1

Singapore stalls … at best

Singapore embarked on a restructuring path in 2010 " initiated by the Economic Strategies committee. The aim was to enhance productivity and foster growth.

This is the fourth year of the program. The change in productivity has averaged '0.6 percent per year and, if anything, seems to be getting worse.

Singapore has long been held up as a productivity exemplar. This shows how difficult it is to find the right recipe … especially in the face of a global recession.

The state we’re in

The best way for Oregon to strengthen its economy is by investing more to create a better-educated workforce, according to a national report by the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN).

The EARN report, a well-educated workforce is key to State prosperity found “clear and strong” evidence that states’ workforces with higher levels of educational attainment tend to be more productive and enjoy a higher median wage.

Sounds bad

The recent Building in Sound report produced by Biamp Systems in partnership with Julian Treasure, chairman of The Sound Agency, states, “Noise is a major threat to our health and productivity " but until now we have been largely unconscious of its effects because of our obsession with how things look. By addressing noise concerns, we can transform the productivity and well-being of office workers, patients in hospitals and children in schools, among many others.”

However, poor sound is a bigger challenge than organizations typically realize. Extraneous office chatter may not be harmful to your colleague's health, but poor sound can definitely be harmful to your team's productivity " and your company's budget, too. In fact, in the same Building in Sound report, research shows that urban city noise alone costs European workplace companies a collective $52 billion annually in lost productivity.

What about the workers?

Despite US productivity gains of nearly 24 percent between 2000 and 2012, wages were flat or declined for the bottom 60 percent of workers, according to a study by the Economic Policy Institute.

Wage and compensation growth has been stagnant since at least 1979, the study said.

“For virtually the entire period since 1979 (with one exception being the strong wage growth of the late 1990s), wage growth for most workers has been weak,” the study said. “The median worker saw an increase of just 5 percent between 1979 and 2012, despite productivity growth of 74.5 percent.”

The workers are doing OK!

Employees at Hyundai Motor Co and its affiliate Kia Motors Corp are receiving the top salaries in South Korea's industrial circles, but their labour productivity is rated as below average, recent data have shown.

The world's fifth-largest auto manufacturer (Kia) paid an annual average salary of 94 million won (US$84,041) last year, the second highest out of 365 listed firms that had completed their required regulatory filing, according to the data compiled by the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS).

Its smaller affiliate came in third with an annual average salary of 91 million won, FSS data showed.

But the productivity of each staff at the two major South Korean automakers ranked 177th and 179th, respectively, drawing a contrast to their high wages.

The data were released as unionized workers at Hyundai and Kia were threatening to walk out in demand of steep rises in wages and compensation.

Too much pressure to be productive

Jeff deGraff, professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, thinks the USA might be focusing too much on productivity and not enough on creativity.

The alarm that the USA is trading creativity for productivity has been sounded for years now. In 2005, stalwart industry and academic leaders like IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano and former Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough co-chaired a Council for Competitiveness National Innovation Initiative Report that identified talent, investment, and infrastructure as the key components to economic prosperity in America. While politically contentious issues like the role of government and intellectual property rights were explored, it was developing creativity as a sustainable core competency that topped the list.

The findings of the State of Create Global Benchmark Study conducted by research firm StrategyOne suggest that in industrialized countries such as Germany, Japan and the USA, there is an increasing “creativity gap,” where three-quarters of the 5,000 respondents believe the drive for productivity has pushed out the time and resources required to be creative. These respondents also see creativity as the key to producing better and new products, services and solutions. In essence, the study suggests that the very things that made these countries into prosperous innovation juggernauts is being subverted by the continuous downward pressures to get more out of less, as opposed to more out of ingenuity.

Dominican Republic needs reforms

A group of young business leaders in the Dominican Republic are blaming the country's low productivity for the low wages that many sectors call a “misery,” noting that comprehensive structural reforms are needed to jumpstart the economy.

“The current Dominican real wage growth stems from our economy's lost productive capacity or from the absence of comprehensive structural reforms and the foundations needed to revive the productive activity,” said president of the group Frank Elias Ranieri.

He proposed focusing efforts on structural reforms on consensus in sensitive areas such as energy, taxes and labour market in adherence to the provisions in National Development Strategy (END).

He said the reforms are urgently needed to have a strong, competitive manufacturing and exporter sector, as the basis of an economy where the rules are respected and the Government maintains its regulatory role.

Rainieri said END's agreements and reforms need to a priority to start forming part of the government's agenda, “to see the business sector responding favorably to expanding investment, which translates into greater economic growth and naturally into formal employment benefits and better wages for the population.”