by Andrea Longoni, Senior Training Specialist in Excellence Education
Labor productivity depends on skills
In a company in full production, at some point a key piece of machinery stops working. Nobody in the company can solve the problem, so the entrepreneur decides to rely on the best external technician on the market.
The technician goes to the company, has the problem explained to him, takes a screwdriver, gives a half turn to a screw and the machinery starts again.
The entrepreneur is very happy, at least until he sees the €1,000 invoice.
The owner, scandalized, exclaimed: “A thousand euros for so little work? Is absurd! This is too high a figure!” The technician then replied: “You’re right. I’ll rewrite the invoice better.” The owner was skeptical, but when the technician handed him the invoice, his expression changed, he calmed down and paid the amount without batting an eye. This was written on the invoice:
* Turn the screw: 1 euro
* Knowing which screw to turn, how much and in which direction: 999 euros
This image, clearly fictional, highlights the role played by workers’ competence on the productivity of economic activities.
The relationship between skills and productivity is so clear that no one is willing to question it. The more useful, specialized and scarce skills a person has on the market, the greater his value, as companies will be willing to pay him a higher salary as a promise of a competitive advantage, of productivity, over other companies.
The relationship between productivity and wages is clearly recognised, and it is very easy to visualize the difference between levels of training and wages.
This relationship, however, is true even if attention is focused, for example, on the difference in RAL in the more operational roles of general worker and specialized worker, or between different levels of employees. As skills grow, income grows, and income grows because the worker’s productivity grows.
Labor productivity means the measure of value produced per hour worked, and is the main parameter recognized in economics as a determinant of long-term wage growth.
The determinants of productivity are various, technological innovation, logistics, organisation, procedures, etc. But certainly among the variables to take into consideration are the skills of the employees.
It is in fact very interesting to see how, in the face of several billions of investments driven by projects such as the “Industry 4.0 plan”, the level of productivity in our country has remained substantially identical over the years[1] and, as confirmed, the same fate affected real wages (i.e. net of inflation).
This indicates the fact that the adoption of more advanced tools, such as machinery or software, can have a lower impact than expected if employees are not put in a position to understand the potential of the new machines and use them.
So how can we put employees in a position to improve productivity?
The answer that a trainer can give is obviously: through training. Yes, but in what sense?
* First of all, train managers to delegate activities, reducing control and recognizing the collaborator’s specialization: in this way the worker is made responsible and encouraged to use the tools and look at the procedures in a creative way (within respect safety), with the aim of improving its productivity
* At the same time train workers in a different way of working, moving from executors of actions to creators of innovation, explorers of solutions and producers of proposals, making them responsible as specialists of the activity.
The continuous emergence of new tools, machinery, software and services generates new opportunities which however must be noticed, proposed and discussed, and if deemed appropriate, implemented and used.
In general, companies have 3 ways to acquire the skills that allow them to guarantee a competitive advantage:
1. Acquisition of professionalism on the market
2. Search and selection of talents
3. Training (skilling, upskilling and reskilling) of employees
It goes without saying that they all have their usefulness, but the training becomes particularly interesting when some macro-trends are considered:
* Hyperspecialization of activities, the more specialized the knowledge, the more fragmented it is, the lower the managers’ ability to intercept possible services to support the specialists’ activities, the more specialists must be able to be promoters of change[1] and the managers of the controllers of quality of the result
* Increase in the average age of employees, who often grew up in the same hierarchically organized working context and with routine activities. This can lead to greater resistance to change[2]
* Reduction in the number of available workers, which went from 39.1 million people in 2011 to the current 37.2 million, and with a forecast of a reduction of 1.8 million by 2030[3]
Training on hard skills allows you to develop the technical skills necessary to use new tools, and training on soft skills, in particular for a managerial culture that promotes employee autonomy and responsibility, is one of the answers that companies can give themselves to improve worker productivity, reduce costs, open up new business opportunities and grow.
