Matching Skills to Business
A report form The UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) has found that strategies to match employees’ skills to business demands and better skills utilisation can have an impact on productivity and business performance.
The commission is dedicated to raising UK prosperity and opportunity by improving employment and skills at all levels with a view that improved employment and skills systems can help the UK become a world class leader in productivity, in employment and in having a fair and inclusive society.
UKCES was asked by The Government to lead a key project looking at skills utilisation and its impact on productivity and performance. Skills utilisation is concerned with maximising the contribution that people can make in the work place, and therefore how well people’s abilities have been deployed, harnessed and developed to optimise organisational performance.
What happens inside the work place is therefore crucial to skills utilisation. This is why a key focus of the UK Commission’s work is on understanding how organisations can be successfully run to achieve High Performance Working (HPW).
HPW is an umbrella term covering working practices that stimulate more effective employee involvement. These are often delivered through decentralised organisational structures based on team working, job rotation and project work.
The report outlines an initiative intended to sit alongside existing policies such as Solutions for Business and Train to Gain, the intention of this positioning is not to produce a totally exhaustive reference to initiatives, but to clearly map existing work already on the way to achieving the outlined objectives of the report. From this the intention is to deduce the support available for more effective HPW and in turn skills utilisation in the workplace and employment on the whole.
The report has found that looking at business development policy from an HPW perspective there are several providers at least partly relevant to HPW. This is positive in terms of business development however, whilst policy makers increasingly recognise the value of HPW and skills utilisation, this is not being translated in general into a core vision for HPW, which can inspire and drive all the different components of the system nationally and regionally.
The concept of HPW is derived from two separate strategic frameworks from the government making it difficult to define a central position when rolling out an initiative is concerned.
E.g. when we consider the following:
a skills policy framework with a strong emphasis on up-skilling and enhancing skills
supply, and hence the relevance and responsiveness of provision, with a qualification bias,and focus on voluntarism; and
a business enterprise system, again emphasising voluntarism, and predominately focused on developing entrepreneurism and encouraging business start up as well as growth. Although there are some national and regional variations, overall, the focus of delivery is on tailored one to one advice to individual employers, covering a wide range of business issues (especially financial support), through a network of advisors and brokers. The overall emphasis tends to be on providing information and guidance, rather than direct intervention into how businesses are managed.
We can see that each framework has separate objectives while sharing key components that relate to HPW and the benefits it provides.
For more information on HPW and to access the entire report please follow this link: http://www.ukces.org.uk/reports/high-performance-working-a-policy-review-executive-summary-18