Members only: We take a look at our Knowledge Knibble 90-minute session on high-performance working and offer you an overview of what you can expect.
Our popular Knowledge Knibble sessions continue to be in high demand from our HR Network members. These are topic-focused 90-minute sessions which IES experts run on Network members’ premises for groups of up to 20 people.
Knowledge Knibble sessions are a good way of getting everyone ‘up to speed’ on topics typically of interest to HR professionals and line managers. They also offer the chance to find out what the latest research says and discover what innovative or interesting things other employers are doing in a specific area of work. This year, we are trialling a new Knowledge Knibble on high-performance working (HPW). In this article, we’ll cover some of the background to the Knowledge Knibble and offer you an overview of what you can expect.
The UK’s productivity gap with its major international competitors has been a big focus for government and business for two decades or more. Traditionally, we have tried to pull a combination of ‘levers’ to improve productivity (defined here as output per hour worked). Investment in equipment, technology and software which improves worker efficiency has, for example, long been recognised as an important factor. Similarly, boosting the skills of the workforce through training and development activities and improving the workforce’s vocational qualifications have been other ways of improving efficiency and giving businesses a competitive advantage over others.
More recently, there has been interest in promoting the use of so-called ‘high-performance work practices’ in UK workplaces to raise the game of employers in this area. A focus on work organisation, working practices, skills, motivation, wellbeing and labour utilisation strategies allows us to look at what some academics call ‘bundles’ of high-performance work practices which are known to differentiate high-productivity organisations from the ‘also-rans’. IES has been conducting research in this area for several years and has produced guides to the research literature, employer case studies and studies on developing employer-based survey tools to showcase the improvements that these practices can bring.
The Knowledge Knibble session is intended to provide an overview of the evidence about the impact of high-performance work practices from both the UK and internationally, and then to consider which practices make most difference to performance. More specifically, the session includes:
A description of the most common ‘clusters’ of management practice that research has shown to be most effective across sectors and in different types of organisations.
A look at the evidence on how to combine different high-performance practices to get the most appropriate ‘blend’ to suite your business strategy.
The chance to look in detail at the role that line managers play in the delivery of these practices.
A discussion of some of the current debates on the best routes to high performance – for example, the role of financial incentives, the impact of high-performance teams and the ways to update performance management to align with other high-performance practices.
Time to reflect on your own organisation’s approach to delivering and sustaining high performance and to consider who should take the lead on this.
The theory is that, if more employers invested in high-performance work practices, the stubborn productivity gap, which the UK has with our major competitors, might start to close. One challenge is that ‘productivity’ is only rarely measured reliably and meaningfully in a small proportion of organisations, especially those in the public sector or large parts of the service sector. So, the ideas surrounding ‘high-performance working’ feel closer to home and more amenable to action at workplace level.
This Knowledge Knibble can help your organisation benchmark your own approaches to the ‘gold standard’ set out in the academic research and identify the two or three areas of improvement for you to focus on in order to kick-start your own efforts to deliver a step change in people-driven performance.
See the full range of Knowledge Knibbles
The question of whether the way people are managed and treated at work contributes to the overall performance of the enterprise has been much debated. The focus of this debate has tended to be on formal processes and procedures within organisations. These high performance working practices (HPWPs) have been the subject of a wide range of studies designed to test their impact.
This publication was authored by Penny Tamkin before she joined IES.
The aim of this project was to develop a common, longitudinal, employer-based survey tool on high performance working (HPW) capable of providing results comparable by: nation, sector, size of firm and organisational strategy. This is needed because the UK evidence base has suffered deficiencies in the past around the issue of more effective skills utilisation and organisational performance.
