Economy hit by bad days at the office

by Paul Mason BBC Newsnight business correspondent

David Brent and his hapless colleagues from the BBC TWO series The Office have achieved cult status. Over four million people a week have been tuning in to the antics of the Wernham Hogg workforce.

Like all the best comedy, The Office is funny because its true. But can it really be as bad as this in Britain's workplaces?

"It can be this bad but it can also be very good," says Philip Whiteley, management specialist and co-author of "Unshrink".

"There will continue to be people like David Brent and his boss Neil as long as people management is derided as a soft or fluffy skill as it is on general management courses."

There's a growing belief that poor management is affecting the UK's economic performance. UK productivity is 40% lower than in the USA.

And according to the International Institute for Management Development, the UK stands 16th in the world league table of competitiveness.

Our managers are poorly qualified, poorly trained and poorly developed, says the IMD. And there's a shortage of trained senior managers.

Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt

So Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt has appointed Harvard professor Michael Porter to find out what UK managers are doing wrong.

Porter will report early next year - but what could he learn from David Brent?

Fiona Dent, programme director at the Ashridge business school in Hertfordshire, thinks the David Brent phenomenon is a product of the way organisations are changing.

"Organisational life is much more complex. It's no longer sufficient to be a talented individual specialist or technical manager, all knowing about your professional area of expertise," she says.

New skills

At Ashridge, real life managers from the Co-operative Bank are undergoing that essential rite of passage, the residential training course.

They're learning business strategy, guiding a make-believe luxury cruise company through the troubled waters of a downturn.

We need people who can work across organisations

Fiona Dent

All the while the tutors are working on their inter-personal skills, because the changing nature of strategic management now demands it.

"We need people who can work across organisations," says Dent, "in cross functional teams, across cultures and in an international environment. People who can react and deal with different situations."

It's Brent's inability to deal with even familiar situations that is the source of much hilarity.

According to Newsnight's anecdotal evidence, every workplace seems to have a David Brent, and maybe even the best training will be lost on the worst managers.

David Brent in The Office

However, Whiteley believes people like Brent personify a problem at the heart of what's become known as Human Resource Management.

"The conceptual flaw in management is that people are a separate side of management, and that strategy is in a different silo," Whiteley complains.

"Its often said that 'people are our greatest resource'. To me that's absurd: people are your only resource - everything else, like capital, technology and money, is just a byproduct of what people do.

"So we need a radical reappraisal. The way you manage people is the way you manage, full stop."

New ways of working

In Britain's engineering industry, modern management techniques are becoming as common as overalls and swarfega.

At the Defence Aviation Repair Agency they know all about linking the people issues with hard strategic management goals.

They have brought in new forms of team working, removed layer upon layer of management, and scooped the pool in industry awards.

"We came from a military background, so there was a lot of command and control," says Flight Lieutenant Rachel Nealon, a production manager at DARA's plant in St Athan.

"Now the shop floor are running the way things work and managers are managing instead of making minute decisions. The shop floor workers themselves are now doing what they think is best."

In the process of merging the former repair facilities of the Navy and the Royal Air Force - a management challenge in itself - DARA found itself having to compete with private sector facilities.

So its chief executive, Steve Hill, deployed the full range of textbook strategy measures.

"We've done business process re-engineering, mapped all our processes, done activity based management to discover all the processes that were not adding value to the organisation, and we've done process acceleration," he says.

"We employed expensive consultants to start with, who drove the process from top down, byut we didn't achieve nearly as much as when we got one specialist who was expert at getting the best out of people themselves."

Hill says the agency slashed the turnaround time for the gearbox on a Lynx helicopter from 52 weeks to 13 weeks using consultants - but "the guys themselves" then drove it to 16 days.

But maybe the excruciating antics at Wernham Hogg are inevitable, given the way management functions have been pushed down into the small teams we work in.

The workplace used to be about them and us, workforce and management. But now it seems management is everywhere.

Just because you can't measure something doesn't mean it's not important

Philip Whiteley

One in 7 people manages somebody else at work. But as the management power structures proliferate they get tangled up with the ordinary human sociology of work and the resulting damage can be literally incalculable.

"The cost of the mismatch between what companies say they are going to do in terms of valuing employees and what actually happens - where you have line managers with weak leadership skills - is considerable," says Philip Whiteley.

"It almost certainly affects productivity, absenteeism, high employee turnover. But of course it's hard to measure: and just because you can't measure something doesn't mean it's not important."

When it comes to modern management, despite pockets of excellence, it's painfully obvious from the resonance that The Office has had in real workplaces, that we're not "simply the best"

Of course the issues go wider than poor communication skills.

But whatever cure the Harvard professor eventually prescribes, it'll be small compensation that we can still turn management mediocrity into world class comedy.

Is your manager like David Brent? Has your organisation achieved something stunning in the field of people management? What would YOU say to Professor Michael Porter as he begins his fact finding mission for the DTI?

Contact Newsnight's business correspondent Paul Mason ([e-mail])