Digital adoption: the key to solving the UK's productivity problem?
“Digital adoption has to be prioritised as part of an organisation’s strategy and investment. Moving your organisation to becoming a digitally focused business needs to be driven from the top down, not an IT-suggested change.”
These were the words of one of Sage’s customers, Gaynor Bailey, Head of HR Programme and Operations at Channel 4, at a roundtable Sage held last week.
Sage UK brought a group of industry experts, customers and journalists together to hear first-hand how the admin burden is affecting the productivity of UK businesses, because since we released our 2018 ‘Sweating the Small Stuff’ report, the political and economic landscape has become even more complex. So, whilst technology, and our increasingly digitised ways of doing business should have eased the administrative burden, the truth is that many businesses are still spending hours worrying about compliance, admin and the future.
Our 2019 report asked if the administrative burden has been lifted – perhaps eased by digital adoption or more business-friendly policies, or if the weight is heavier than ever. Sadly, the latter is true. We know that these lost hours have an impact on our customers and detract from the things that they do want to spend time on. Our report shows that the cost of poor productivity across the 12 markets we surveyed is £446bn.
We see our role at Sage as helping customers manage this complexity, with technology, support and advice so they can spend their time on the things that matter, not on unproductive admin, outdated policies and red tape.
We hope our report reveals the huge productivity opportunity that is still out there for small and medium businesses – and raises awareness of the tools, support and advice that these businesses need if we are to boost productivity and trade.
*Sage commissioned YouGov to run a survey sample size of nearly 1,500 small and medium business decision makers across 12 countries to understand the global ‘Productivity Puzzle’.