The simple answer to improving productivity: asking employees

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1:52This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Daisley. I saw a fantastic piece of work during the summer that I was frustrated with myself I hadn't seen before. And it was related to the way that we feel empowered to get our jobs done. It was work part of the Skills and Employment Survey 2024. And it asked a question of whether workers felt they had task discretion in their jobs. The question was more direct than that. It was, do you feel like you're able to get your job done in the way that you see most fit? And what was interesting about it is that because this survey, this SES survey, has been running over the period of over 30 years, it enabled us to track the answers to this question over time really intriguingly.

2:44There were huge faults in it. If you look back to 1992, 62 % of British workers said they had discretion to get their job done in the way they saw fit. Scanning forward to today, in 2024, only 34 % of people said the same. We've gone from two thirds of people saying they could get their job done in the way they saw fit to only a third in a generation. And it begs a really interesting question. Why was that the case? I was really intrigued to speak to one of the authors of the report, Professor Alan Felstead from Cardiff University, and get his perspective. That's what you're going to hear today.

3:26Along the way, though, you're going to hear a whole load more. Alan's going to give us a perspective about how we might tackle productivity in our own teams. He's going to talk about work intensification and what it does to the experience of work. And he's going to give us a perspective on AI and job displacement, how we should be thinking about the evolving nature of our jobs. Really fascinating discussion, not least because it helps answer the question of what role work plays in our lives and how we can find meaning from our jobs. I think Alan's perspective is a far more optimistic one about most of us see our jobs as being a force for good in our lives and seeing some sense of purpose from the way we do our work.

4:12Here's my discussion with Professor Alan Felstead.

4:19Alan, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do. Well, my name is Alan Felstead. I'm an amortis professor at Cardiff University and I work in the Wales Institute of Social Economic Research and Data. We shorten it to WIZARD. We've not got pointy hats in WIZARD, but probably we have in many senses, I suppose, because I do kind of look at data an awful lot. And I'm at Cardiff University. I lead the Skills and Employment Survey, which has been going on for donkey's years. And that's one of its great strengths is the fact that it's been going on for so long.

4:51There are eight surveys in the series, and so we can look back over a long time period to see how the world of work has changed. And of course, it's changed an awful lot, and we can pinpoint where it's changed and for whom it's changed in what ways. It was the Skills and Employment survey that I first saw that put me onto your work, and it's sort of done every few years. Probably the one thing that stood out for me was the fact that people reported a reducing amount of task discretion. So people reported a lot less agency, a lot less autonomy in how they got their work done. And to kick off on that SES survey, I'd love you just to describe the extent of the change and then maybe give us a sense of why it changed.

5:34You're right to pick out that change. There are many, many changes, but that's one of the kind of most dramatic changes. And it's a change that's been going on since the survey was carried out. First in 1986, and there have been eight in the series. as I said, every five or six years, we ask various questions about task discretion. So we ask about the extent to which people can decide what they do, when they do, where they do it, what standard. So a number of indicators on all of those indicators, it's been going down and down and down and down. And this is a bit of a conundrum, really, because other evidence in the survey suggests that there's a strong link between task discretion and productivity.

6:14And we all know people talk an awful lot, politicians talk an awful lot about productivity and the need for productivity to be enhanced. And we find a strong relationship between the more tax discretion people have and the better, the more productive they are at work. So that's a real conundrum. Why is one tax discretion going down? And yet productivity is going down as well. There's an association therefore, and our kind of, in a way, call to employers is to give workers more control they're the ones after all that will know how to improve their jobs they do it 24 7 they're at the cutting edge that sense that they will know how best to improve their jobs so our call to employers is yes people do make a difference i saw that as a slogan by the way recently on a factory people make the difference well yes they do and they should be made should be allowed to make that difference because it's good for productivity and it's good for their mental health and well-being.

7:17The conundrum is why is task discretion going down? And we can only speculate there. But one of the things I think might be going on is that middle managers may be unwilling to let people have their own say, let them have their heads in a way. And I think we see that as well with the resistance to the move to working at home. For example, managers want to see people at work and don't feel if they don't see them at work, they're not working productively. And again, the evidence in the survey suggests, yes, they are working productively when they're at home. In fact, more productively than those who are working in offices.

7:53Yeah, because the longitudinal nature of the research gives us a brilliant ability to do a contrast point. And the thing I saw was that in 1992, 62 % of people said that they had task discretion in their jobs. They could do their jobs or they could do aspects of their jobs in the way they wanted and now it's 34 so i love it because it's down from two thirds a generally go to one third now i mean it seems extraordinary can we go into the specifics of what that looks like is that someone getting to their desk or getting to their workstation and knowing how they should do their job what they should do what does it look like when you look at the mechanics of that well the mechanics is it's we ask people to what extent they have influence over their work how they do their work, what they do, the standards to which they work, the extent to which they're able to shape their own jobs.

8:47And that's been going down. I think what we find as well, the real conundrum is if you look at other aspects of what we might say is called employee involvement, like groups that meet together to talk about problem solving, they're often called quality circles, 1970s expression really, but they still do exist. They've been going up. So there's a conundrum. Some of the senses in which people in the jobs themselves have less discretion, yet the mechanics seem to have been going up. So there seems to be a disconnect between the mechanisms that employers are putting in place and the actual actuality on the ground.

9:30And again, I think the speculation is that middle managers might be the issue here. So senior managers might be implementing all these kind of practices, but they're not percolating down to the shop floor. And why is that? It might be that middle managers are not actually taking notice and really giving employees on the ground their own heads. So I think that's the thing I would say for people listening to this podcast, you might have got these mechanisms in place, mechanisms, but are they translating into practice on the ground. And our vision suggests they're not. And how might you resolve that as a middle manager?

10:06Well, lots of organizations nowadays have attitude surveys. That's great. So look at your attitude surveys. I would also urge people to look at other kind of innovative practices that myself and the team have been involved in. We've launched what's called howgoodismyjob.com. It's a quiz. I'll say it again, howgoodismyjob.com. It's a quiz. So it's short. and it's directed at workers. So people on the shop floor who were invited to fill it in and compare their jobs to similar jobs. I'm a university professor, so I'd put university professor in. I'd respond to all the questions and it would give me at the end of it, a spider graph along 10 dimensions that positions my answers with similar people in the same kind of jobs as me, a university professor.

10:56But also, we give another ring that positions people about the average jobs in Britain. So it's a diagnostic tool for employees, workers generally, but it could be used by employers. So when you're designing in the future your work attitude surveys, whatever, go and have a look at howgoodismyjob.com. Go and have a look at the questions on task discretion and import them into your attitude surveys because these are tried and tested questions that have been going on for 35 plus years. Introduce them into your surveys. Also, you might want to use the howgoodismyjob.com quiz as a diagnostic tool. Get your workers to carry it out.

11:43We have done hackathons with employers where we get employers around the table to do it themselves you know what was your job like and also then to put themselves in the position of their their workers just to get a sense of what people's jobs are like and it can be used as a as a kind of a tool within organizations to get a conversation going about various aspects of work which include task discretion and a number of other issues which relate to job quality in general You've mentioned along the way there, letting people do their jobs in the way they want or letting them have the discretion to do that is one of the routes into productivity.

12:24Do you see that it's also related to the engagement crisis that we often talk about, this low employee engagement? To you, are these sort of all part of a degree of system thinking that the ecology of work is broken because we've disempowered people from these sort of small micro decisions about how they do their job. As a result of that, they feel checked out from it. They don't feel like they're achieving much in it. Are they all part of the same ecology, really? I think so. I mean, I think it is giving people their heads to empowering them, empowering them. And the evidence is striking in that regard.

13:03It's interesting you've picked that out as one of the main findings. And I think it's true. And as I say, it goes against the grain in terms of productivity when we see a link between those who have greater say at work and increased productivity. So I think it is unblocking that. And for senior managers, and there might be senior managers listening to this, I think the question is, what are you doing in your organizations to give workers greater say? You might think you're giving them greater say, but are the mechanisms you're putting in place making a difference? So look within your own organizations about task discretion and see how it's changing.

13:37Has it changed? Is it changing? Are these mechanisms you're putting in place making a difference? It's a survey we're talking about at the moment, but there are ways in which we've tried to make this survey usable to the outside world, and particularly employees and employers, and should I say trade unions. We've used the howgoodismyjob.com quiz with trade unions as well. There's a whole host of issues that you can use that kind of vehicle to open up conversations, important conversations that, as you kind of suggest, Bruce, I don't think we're having, and I don't think are percolating down to the shop floor.

14:13And that's where it matters. There's a lot of talk, certainly in government circles, about productivity and big ticket items, I would say. The suggestion we've got is that it's the small ticket items that matter most. And these small ticket items extend across the economy. And we're not just picking winners, a few kind of sectors, which government tends to do. we're talking about a change across the board to empower all workers and get them greater get greater involvement because the evidence suggests it's a win-win situation presented this research this sort of task discretion work a couple of months ago somewhere as a result of it ever since i've been exposed normally when i've been dealing interacting with someone and they've said no to me or the person i've been dealing with has expressed gentle and private empathy but has told me they're not allowed to do something like this.

15:06I've been sort of really aware of it because these are the ways that sometimes we witness this in the wild, that where I was trying to get a delivery of something and someone told me that they couldn't do it and they had to cancel it and start again. And it was pretty evident that the person on the receiving end of dealing with this thought this was a banana system, but it's the rules. And so I was just using my own experiences to try and interpret why we got here. The thing I ended up with is that there's a sense of regulation or there's a sense of sort of overwatch that might be employers trying to increase the intensity of work, creating more rules for people and more regulations.

15:45Or it might be that there's some sort of safeguarding that's being created by an employer to either avoid stock leakage or to avoid sort of bad experience. Is that right? Are we over-regulating work? I think you're right. I mean, I think what was striking as well about the survey, remember, it's a survey. And so basically, it's asking a number of statements. Often we ask statements and to what extent people disagree or agree, those kinds of things. That's the nature of it. So it is kind of, I would say, quite a tick box exercise, a survey that we do get a lot of data. But we do ask some open ended questions.

16:23And the open ended questions are absolutely fascinating. So one question we ask is an open-ended question of what would you do to increase your own productivity? And we let people say, and it's amazing what they say. They come up with a minutiae of detail that, of course, in a survey we can't capture, but a wealth of ideas. They're very specific to their sector, their job, and so forth. But it's a wealth of ideas. It's just mind-blowing. Again, that suggests there are ideas out there. Let's capture them. Are they being captured? And I think my sense is they're not. We also ask, again, talking about the quiz here, we ask at the end of the quiz what people think of their own jobs, right?

17:07So instead of putting them on a spider graph and asking them a series of questions, you say, what do you think of your job? How good is your job? And they come up again with a wealth. Sometimes it's an essay. Remember, this is typed in, usually on the phone. And some people vent hugely. So again, that suggests to me that when people are asked, even in a quiz or a survey, and given the chance to input, they're more than happy to input. And as I say, often they input a lot. And that's probably one of my regrets about carrying out surveys, is when I'm there, because I accompany survey researchers.

17:48So I go in people's homes, only a few, obviously, because we do 5 ,500 interviews, for heaven's sake. but you get a sense of being sitting in someone's living room and they're going through a series of questions for an hour people are very happy to talk about their jobs in fact they talk about their jobs over the questions because people's jobs of course are are very interesting to them it's often people aren't talked people don't talk about their jobs for an hour to some strange person but a lot of the questions trigger detail about the jobs and certainly in the productivity We actually tried to kind of capture that by interviewers writing it down in the survey.

18:28We actually asked people to write it down. So it just suggests to me that when people are asked these questions, they're more than happy. It's really interesting that is, isn't it? Because I think in that study, it says that three quarters of people believe that their jobs are useful, that they serve a purpose in the world. They're not just these bullshit jobs. People don't think they're going to work to do something useless. And yet, and you describe there, you know, the very fact that people, when they're asked, fill in a lot of detail of how they'd do their job better, suggests that they're not asked it very often.

18:58If you've answered this 50 times, you know, you just get checked out and you don't do it. Absolutely. And so there's a solution there because people see their jobs as valuable. They're invested in trying to think of ways to improve it. But then if you ask them, are you allowed to do the job in the way you want? Some say, no, I'm not. So it feels like the productivity crisis that we're dealing with has got an answer in giving workers a voice. And I've seen you talk about the importance of workers having a voice. Do you want to just sort of elaborate on how you would do that? Well, as I say, I think it's more about, it's actually addressing the task discretion crisis, I suppose.

19:39You might say that that is a crisis that strikes, is very striking. And it extends to other issues like allowing people the ability to choose where to work. Evidence in the data suggests that that makes people more productive, not less productive. despite all the hullabaloo we often hear about uh kind of uh return to the office movements and so forth i i would also say as well certainly with regard to the working at home issue one of the i think striking findings which we know little about is where within the home people work when they do work at home that has a material difference from productivity if you've got a door you can shut makes a big difference to your productivity obvious reasons if you're on the kitchen table, you're interrupted a lot of the time, you might have kids interrupting and so forth.

20:31Same with the lounge. That has a big difference. So do employers know where people are working when they work at home? Question. Not sure. Probably they should. And kind of the ability to have a home office is very productive. It makes people more productive because they can shut the world of a home away by means of a door. And of course, this affects people in different ways. is it gendered? Women are less likely to have a home office than men. So there are a whole host of kind of productivity issues there that need to be explored. I saw you talking about that and you said that firstly, the trend for home working was already well established before COVID.

21:11I wanted to sort of link up a couple of the pieces of work that you've done. You did some work about work intensification and you've worked tracking that over time. One thing I noticed though, that when I was looking in the data of work intensification, the most recent version of it, I think was 2022, it reported work intensification had dropped a little. So like how busy people feel, how intense people. And I wondered what the cause of that was and whether that was some degree of shift to home working had allowed work intensification to decline or whether those two things weren't related. Well, it's interesting that in a way, the ability to work at home can make more work intense or can make it work it less intense you know there's a kind of there's positives and negatives there what it tends to do working at home it tends to elongate your working time basically you might work early in the morning might work late at night but the evidence suggests that actually it reduces work intensity because you're able to spread it out kind of doing a number of things at the same time so you might work longer so there's a there's a sense in which it elongates your working day but actually reduces work intensity because you're not under that kind of nine to five pressure so you know but at the same time you're working longer you might be working less intense i think that's the way i'd i'd explain it yeah i've just seen even people with intense jobs i've seen people describing their fridays as something as a pressure release they don't necessarily feel like they're as broken by the weekend as they might have been when they were in an office environment.

22:46It's just an interesting thing for me that actually, to some extent, hybrid working does seem to have been something of a sort of a balm on work intensity. And I was just, as you studied that, I was interested in your perspective. Well, I think hybrid working is here to stay despite the return to the office issues because it's hybrid working. I mean, the idea you get the benefit of both worlds, as you explained, Bruce, there, the intensity of working in the office and then the kind of downtime of actually having a breather, I suppose, to some extent, catching up on various things on a Friday or even, of course, a Monday because the extended weekend that people often have nowadays.

23:23But as you said at the beginning there, Bruce, I think one of the interesting things about a long-term trend is that obviously there's a massive interest in working at home during COVID for obvious reasons. People can come out to work and people were encouraged to work at home by governments across the world. And there's been this massive interest in working at home, but it's a trend that's been going on way, way, way before COVID. COVID has accelerated it. Yes, absolutely. But it's not been the trigger at all. It's been going on for a long, long, long time. And one of the other striking things, I think about the survey is that the decline of the traditional workplace has gone down and down and down and down.

24:08I think again, if I remember correctly, 64 % to 38 % work in a single workplace. That's another striking finder alongside the task discretion finding of a long-term trend. If you're looking at long-term trends, it's been going on the downward direction and not just about COVID. It's a long-term trend that is here to stay, and I can't see it going away anytime soon at all. And, of course, the Employment Rights Bill Act, of course it now is, kind of cements that trend. The current government's clearly very much in favor of giving employees the ability to choose where they work, as well as the other issues we talked about.

24:50Because where people work is another aspect of discretion. as long as they get the job done, are we really bothered where people are working? We shouldn't be. We might be bothered, as I say, a little footnote on that, about where within the house they might be working, given the effects that might have on productivity and their well-being. Can I ask you about one of the other themes that's sort of related to the contemporary world of work, and that's job displacement and sort of how AI is impacting jobs, hiring. Can you give me sort of a perspective of someone who thinks about these things? what's the current state of play and how do you see it evolving?

25:28Gosh, current state of play. I mean, remember this was carried out in 2024 and it was carried out over a number of months in 2023 and 2024. I mean, we saw the effect of AI during the data collection period. So that was early days, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, but so it's early days and we even saw it during the, nine months or so of data collection, when we're asking people about the extent to which they use AI, it was increasing then. I mean, but that was 2024. We're now in 2026, nearly going into 2027, not too far away. I mean, that's just mind-blowing, really. Our evidence, of course, is almost before the AI revolution really started.

26:11So we're still at early doors there. And well, who knows, to be honest, Bruce? I mean, I think that's a million-dollar question. It's the big question, isn't it? It's a massive question. I mean, you know, so much discussion on that. I mean, it's still evolving. It's so, so rapid. It's very difficult to say where it might go. I would say that. So difficult to say, I think. I guess my final question then is just related to, in the context of that uncertainty, the role that work plays in people's lives. I think the thing I see through all of your work is that people get meaning from their jobs no matter what they are.

26:50And so going to a world where a relationship with work might be somewhat different, there seems to be something in society thinking about how that meaning can be provided. Again, I think that's absolutely true. I mean, one of the other striking findings you mentioned earlier was that there's a lot of discussion about bullshit jobs, you know the fact that jobs don't have meaning and there's a whole whole literature on bullshit jobs we just don't find it you know only five percent of our sample would be classified as in bullshit jobs they all find meaning in their jobs so jobs are very meaningful for people important parts of their lives uh there'll be important part for lives post ai as well i'm sure everybody will have jobs i mean but the jobs might be different but i'm sure we'll have jobs we need meaning in in in our life and lives and one of the meanings central meanings we get is from the world of work either our kind of data supports that what would be interesting it would be to see how meaningfulness changes over time and the meaningfulness questions were only asked for the first time in 2024 so how they track over time that will be interesting how they track related to AI will be interesting.

28:12So watch this space, I would say, on that. We don't quite know. But what is the relationship? Actually, in the discussion, I haven't really heard much about that kind of link between meaningfulness and AI, because there's not a lot of evidence. But as I say, in terms of tracking and the great strength of the survey is the tracking ability. They're unique. I don't think there's any other survey in the UK that does this. I haven't heard any, across the world, in fact, over such a long period of time. And also, I would say about the survey, when people listen to this might think, well, the survey is a survey is a survey.

28:47There are many out there. I would say this survey is gold standard. Why is it gold standard? It's carried out to scientific standards, random probability sampling. It's very expensive to carry out. It's not a kind of clipboard in the street affair. It's random probability sampling where we randomly select people, houses, households to interview. There's an awful lot of what's called dead wood. Not everybody is interviewed. Not all houses have people working in them, for example. So you can imagine a lot of kind of effort is gone to actually interviewing people. So it is gold standard. Also, the other aspect of the gold standard nature of it is that it's got support from government.

29:30so we have part contributions from ACAS the department of education in England and also in Northern Ireland so we we have contributions from a number of key stakeholders including the ESRC who are the main funders of the survey that's the academic research body but so it's got buy-in from a number of key players and it's robust and well respected so its results are kind of I think I'm going to use the word meaningful. Hopefully. It's interesting, isn't it? Because the moment you say that only 5 % of people say that their job feels worthless bullshit, you immediately think, okay, follow up question.

30:10Tell me about your relationship with your manager, because it begs the immediate question. Then is it, do they objectively see their job as having no value or do they just not feel seen by their manager? Do they just feel unimportant to the organization they're in? It's a small enough number that that feels like a, a follow-up that'd be fascinating i can understand how you find it intriguing to go on these interviews well yeah the the five percent that's an interesting one but it's only one in 20 it's still five percent yeah yes i mean i think i think that's the problem the frustration i i find because i'm a person that does quantitative and qualitative work i must admit the frustration i have is that when i'm there listening to people responding to the questions the frustration i have is your question really, Bruce, why do you say that?

30:58Tell me more about that. But in a kind of survey situation, it's a bit kind of, you don't have that latitude to have that follow-up, but that's the qualitative follow-up that you want to find out, well, why did you say that? And I have a discussion about the kind of nuts and bolts of that. Obviously that would take an eternity to do and we just don't have the time. So there is this issue about collecting a lot of data in an hour when you're there listening people often talk over they give a narrative they tell you over the questions why that is but as quantitative researchers don't really collect that data so there's this frustration i have personally between being a quantitative researcher and then i hear the kind of explanations actually and we don't really collect it the only way the only time we collect it is when we have what's called open-ended questions so and we don't have many of them because they're expensive to collect it really strikes me if anyone's listening to if some managers listening to this or a boss is listening to this and they're thinking well okay this is intriguing it feels like there's applications directly for them in their own jobs you know that idea of asking your team to tell you the frustration of their job how they would do their job better.

32:13Maybe just giving them a voice to talk about those things, using the employee input as the route to improving productivity strikes me as a very easy way to try and get some dividend from the experience that employees have gathered. Absolutely. I mean, that is the main message, I think, of hopefully this podcast would be there are ways to do that. I'm just talking about research, which is what has happened in the past all this is past of course and what kind of are the trends but i think within it there are messages and the messages relate to you know give employees greater voice listening to them more using various techniques to open up that discussion to maybe challenge middle managers are they giving their employees greater say i think employers can monitor this more themselves There are, you know, say they often organizations have attitude surveys.

33:10They can, questions that we have used in our survey, which I say are available on the howgoodismyjob.com quiz. They can use that device, which is freely available, no charge at all, just to open up a discussion. Ask in what ways they might be able to prove their jobs anonymously. I mean, all of these things are tools in the same way that we started off with, Bruce, which is about this. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most.

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34:27And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Bruce Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel, Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings and non-stop action.

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35:58kind of giving people greater voice task discretion there are tools out there and i think we're trying to provide some of those tools and hopefully i've given some kind of ideas as to how that might happen within organizations well i've given a link to howgoodismyjob.com in the show notes i'm intrigued to hear if anyone actually gives that a go and experiments with that Alan, I'm so immensely grateful for the time you've taken to talk to us today. Thank you so much.

36:28Thank you to Alan. He didn't mention it in that discussion, but Alan's actually retired now. So he was taking time out of his own leisure time to have a conversation with us. But the work is ongoing and there's a whole team of people who will be completing the next Skills and Employment Survey when the next round of it comes due. So thank you. If you're interested in this, the best way to stay in touch is to follow along on the newsletter. And there's a link to that in the show notes. I've been Bruce Taisley. Really grateful for your company again today. I'll see you next time.

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