SA’S PRODUCTIVITY CONUNDRUM
Productivity in the workplace begins with assigning value to those who make up the workforce
Years ago, a friend told me how he attempted to improve worker attendance at his factory. One strategy was to offer a TV to employees whose absenteeism fell below a certain threshold. There were months, he said, when he gave no TV away.
I was reminded of this recently when interacting with a client whose business was looking to improve employee productivity.
Covid-19 regulations have drastically changed the way we work and manage our enterprises. But the pandemic has also required that, in adjusting to new ways of working (working from home, for example), we give more — requiring a discipline and commitment that many of us don’t have. It’s raised important questions about input and output.
There’s always been tension between employers and employees in SA. It’s something that has hardly been interrogated (though academic literature has hinted at the problem). Let me offer some initial thoughts.
In my career, two things have contributed to my productivity. First is the technical support I enjoy from a computer that downloads data quickly, stores it and retrieves it without time lags, and software that allows me to upload data and which spits out useful information that I can interrogate with education and experience.
Second is the SMS I receive when money goes into my bank account — the reward for my productivity. The expectation of that SMS is more of an incentive than any offer of a TV.
These two points contribute to my productivity in important and significant ways. But my experience does not make for an academic conclusion.
Writing for the OECD, Nobel laureate and economist Paul Krugman defines productivity as “a ratio between the output volume and the volume of inputs ... [I]t measures how efficiently production inputs, such as labour and capital, are being used in an economy to produce a given level of output. Productivity is considered a key source of economic growth and competitiveness.”
In my example, you put in a good computer, fast internet, expensive training and experience, and you get more and more output.
In SA, we know that the economy has been doing more with less. This is to say, outside of crisis or exogenous shocks, the ratio between jobs and output gives us interesting outcomes.
The economy has grown at a leading factor to employment. If we want to produce more, we have to invest more. But businesses aren’t investing in people; neither do they trust employees in a way that would encourage productivity.
When it comes to academic literature on the problems around productivity, behavioural economics offers some interesting insights.
In a 2009 paper published in the Journal of Economic Behaviour & Organisation, Justine Burns “examines the impact of racial identity on behaviour in trust games played by public high school students in SA”.
Though the experiment is set among a selected pool of multiracial pupils, it gives us critical insight into the social attitudes about black people in SA. The game itself is set in such a manner that participants (“proposers” and “partners”)
are given endowments to use in strategic interactions with those of a different race.
In her study, Burns found there was a systematic pattern of distrust towards black proposers. And she found that “nonblack proposers are significantly less likely to engage in a strategic interaction at all when paired with black partners”.
She also found that while black proposers did engage in exchanges with black partners, they did so at lower levels than when they were paired with white ones.
An unvalued workforce
This distrust towards black people is consistent with the attitudes experienced by many black people working in SA today.
What this means is that business doesn’t lend much value to most of its employees, and employees don’t give the extra effort, as a result.
In a 2012 paper, “The Tithes of Apartheid: Perceptions of Social Mobility among Black Individuals in Cape Town”, Samuel C Telzak echoes Burns’s work.
He refers to an interview he conducted in the course of his research in which a participant said: “Black South Africans are lazy. They’re complacent. They feel they’re entitled. They’re dreamers and ... not implementers.”
Telzak further observes: “These perceptions are not unique to this sample and seem to be widely held by those who have experienced some degree of social mobility.”
What all this means is that those who are working today are being asked to work harder.
However, they won’t do so, because the environment in which they are situated is broken — it defies everything we know about productivity.
We speak a lot about investment in the economy. But what we really need is to invest in workers.
That’s the only way to secure the outcomes we want. x
Those who are working are being asked to work harder. But the environment they are in defies everything we know about productivity