The University of Manchester is proud to support National Productivity Week

A week-long series of events, seminars, conferences and panel discussions has been launched to address the UK’s productivity challenges.

National Productivity Week has been organised by The Productivity Institute, the ESRC-funded research body of which The University of Manchester is a member alongside eight other institutions. 

It will run from November 27 to December 1, and will bring together academics, business leaders, policymakers and thinktanks to share insights into - and provide potential solutions for - the productivity slowdown in the UK.

The North West Regional Productivity Forum, led by The University of Manchester, has organised a panel event about changing working patterns as part of the week. The panellists will discuss how companies should respond to increasing demands from some employees for flexibility, opportunities for remote and hybrid working and the growing calls for a four-day working week. To book your place, click here.

The week will also see The Productivity Institute launch the UK’s first Productivity Agenda, a 10-chapter report written by academics spanning the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge, Cardiff, Kings College London and Warwick, among others. This will highlight nine key areas policymakers need to focus on to address productivity growth in the UK.

Business drivers of productivity

The Productivity Institute has identified five key drivers of productivity, and there are a number of our services that can help businesses with a number of these:

Innovation – our Knowledge Transfer Partnerships can help businesses innovate. Find out more here.

Worker skills, engagement, wellbeing and management competencies – skills and training are major enablers for firms to become more productive, and we know there is a link between productive firms and management practices. Find out about our Executive Education courses here.  

Productivity research

Our academics have produced a wide range of research relating to productivity. Some highlights include:

Capital Shocks and UK Regional Divergence uses uniquely detailed large-scale commercial real estate investment data to examine how financial markets perceived the attractiveness of investing in UK regions during the last two decades.

Gender and productivity makes the case that integrating equality into the productivity agenda is essential for a medium to long term strategy for raising productivity that aims at improving well-being for all. 

The North West of England’s Productivity Challenge addresses the barriers to improving productivity in our region, and what needs to change to remove these.

To find out more about National Productivity Week, visit www.productivityweek.co.uk

To find out more about The Productivity Institute, visit www.productivity.ac.uk