Australia's productivity falling behind, warns Telstra

Stuart Corner
Monday, 22 February 2010 21:13

IT Industry - Strategy

A year ago Telstra surveyed large enterprises in Australia and found an alarming discrepancy between their aspirations to boost productivity and initiatives needed to achieve these goals. A year on, it says the situation has got worse.

Last February Telstra Enterprise and Government released results from the first of what it said would be annual surveys of productivity in large organisations. It has just released results of the second.

The most alarming finding from this year's report,  according to Telstra, is what it calls the productivity gap: the difference between the number of organisations that have identified productivity as a priority (76 percent this year and 78 percent last year) and those that have a productivity targets and know what these are (42 percent this year and 49 percent last year).

The differences between these two figures for each year gives a productivity gap that has widened from 29 percent to 34 percent.

According to the report, The decline in awareness of measures and targets for improving productivity is seen across all sectors, most notably within the Primary Production and Trade sector.'

"Placing a high priority on improving productivity requires a dedicated strategy to make it happen. However, many organisations seem to lack a specific productivity strategy with assigned accountabilities for execution...In order for productivity to become actionable within an organisation, measures and targets need to be in place and well understood by all relevant stakeholders.

"Without adequate and reliable metrics it is difficult for organisations to properly monitor the effectiveness of their productivity initiatives and identify areas for improvement."

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