Originally written by Dan Matthews on Small Business
For more than a decade, the UK has been mired in a “productivity puzzle”. Ever since the so-called credit crunch and the financial crisis which followed in 2008, businesses have struggled to become more efficient.
As you might expect, economic growth, employment levels and total hours worked all slumped during the recession; but within a few years they returned to near-trend levels. Productivity got left behind.
According to the latest official figures, UK output per hour fell 0.1pc in the final quarter of 2018 compared with the same three-month period in 2017. It was the second consecutive decline and further evidence of an unprecedented stagnation.
That’s despite all the astonishing office technology advances that have taken place in recent times, including software as a service (saas) and cloud computing, plus ever-more sophisticated smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, not to mention the constellation of new online services designed to power businesses forward.
“UK small businesses are not as productive as they could be,” says Shaun Shirazian, UK head of product at Intuit QuickBooks. “The gap in productivity between the top and bottom 10pc of firms is 80pc larger in the UK than it is in the US, France