According to a recent Productivity Commission, Australia is facing an urgent productivity problem, with a new report showing the country is at a standstill despite a temporary “bubble” of improvement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Australians have been working record-long hours, however those additional hours have not been matched by business investment in systems and technologies that would allow them to work efficiently, according to the report. Productivity Commission deputy chair Alex Robson said. “What you need is to be able to work smarter.”
Australian Industry Group CEO Innes Willox, said businesses were not making investments that would improve productivity because of broader economic conditions they faced every day, such as tax, deregulation and compliance. These are shared findings that Claire Richards and Matthew Fletcher, KPMG, presented in their Geelong Risk Landscape white paper recently (although much time was spent considering how the potential of risk management can enable growth and opportunity).
However Innes Willox says a number of things are holding businesses back from making investments to improve productivity. “We have to find ways to allow businesses to invest in their people …we are going into a new age of digitalisation and decarbonisation and businesses are going to have to invest more in their people to upskill them.”
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