White Paper

This Evidence Report is a key output from the Skills Utilisation project led by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. This project has looked at how High-Performance Working (HPW) can help to ensure skills are better used in UK workplaces. In the report HPW is defined as a general approach to managing organisations that aims to stimulate more effective employee involvement and commitment to achieve high levels of performance. This report describes the experiences of 11 organisations that have made the transition to HPW. Their experiences show what can be done and how it can be achieved. We hope that this report can stimulate discussions and the sharing good practice from one business to another.

This Evidence Report presents the results of a Policy Review that scopes the current field of the most relevant, core initiatives and support available to organisations in the UK, to promote and assist in the adoption of High-Performance Working (HPW) practices. It is one of four research components of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills’ skills utilisation project. Skills utilisation is concerned with maximising the contribution that people can make in the workplace, and therefore how well people’s abilities have been deployed, harnessed and developed to optimise organisational performance. What happens inside the work place is therefore crucial to skills utilisation. This is why a key focus of the UK Commission’s work is on understanding how organisations can be successfully run to achieve HPW. HPW encompasses the bringing together and implementation of a number of practices in a holistic way to effectively manage an organisation. As such it must provide an important means to stimulate businesses to review their business strategies; move up the value chain raise their demand for high skills; reorganise their work; and by so doing improve skills utilisation in the workplace and, hence, firm performance. In order to understand how this is implemented in praxis, please have a look at our case studies reports published alongside this report. We hope you find this report useful and informative in building the evidence we need to achieve a more prosperous and inclusive society.

This Evidence Report is a key output from the Skills Utilisation project led by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. This project has looked at how High-Performance Working (HPW) can help to ensure skills are better used in UK workplaces. In the report HPW is defined as a general approach to managing organisations that aims to stimulate more effective employee involvement and commitment to achieve high levels of performance. The report builds on the knowledge gained from existing research to explore the implementation of HPW through the experience of eleven case study organisations. Specifically, this research set out to: understand how decisions by employers to engage with HPW are made; how managers and leaders shape and influence practice; to explore the practices themselves and how they affect the experience of work; and to identify barriers to the take-up of HPW and how they are resolved. In order to understand what support is available to organisations in the UK, to promote and assist in the adoption of High-Performance Working (HPW) practices please have a look at our Policy Review report published alongside this report. If you are interested in a more detailed description of our case studies, please refer to the Employer Case Studies report also published alongside this report.

Technology and economic forces continue to reshape the world of work. According to our 2018 survey, more people than ever recognize the skills gap and the potential impact of automation and artificial intelligence on their jobs. While some see threats on the horizon, others are taking initiative and finding opportunities to build the careers they aspire to.

Today’s labor markets are undergoing radical change, as digital platforms transform how they operate and revolutionize the nature of work. In many ways, this is a positive development, one that has the potential to match workers with jobs more efficiently and transparently than ever before. But the increasing digitization of the labor market also has at least one very worrying drawback: it is undermining the traditional employer-employee relationships that have been the primary channel through which worker benefits and protections have been provided.

The study examines two primary research questions: (1) How are legal issues currently impacting WIL programs in Ontario? (2) What steps could be taken to help legal frameworks and processes align more closely with the goal of expanding the availability of quality WIL programs and opportunities? We addressed these questions through a combination of in-depth qualitative interviews with WIL experts in both legal and non-legal roles and a review of relevant provincial and federal legislation and regulations, as well as legal cases dating back to 1990. We also reviewed secondary literature on WIL in Canada and in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. As well, the report analyzes Canadian tax expenditures designed to support WIL to assess the size and scope of tax-delivered investments in these programs.

The unemployment rate is certainly a problem; but it becomes more worrying as the duration of unemployment increases, leading to long term unemployment (LTU). The Ontario government describes long-term unemployment as the proportion of unemployed people who have been actively looking for work for the last 27 weeks or more during the Labour Force Survey. Statistics Canada on the other hand defines LTU as the proportion of the labour force aged 15 or older who did not have a job any time during the current or previous 12 months and have been actively looking for work in the past 4 weeks. According to Toronto Employment and Social Services (TESS), those on assistance for three or more years are referred to as long term unemployed. This project will assess the feasibility of conducting a longitudinal study of job seekers in the City of Toronto. The goal is to discover, describe and document the “life-experiences” of people who have encountered workforce development programming, and those who should be able to benefit from employment services.

This evaluation report presents the learning from the evaluation of the UK Futures Programme (UKFP). The UKFP ran between April 2014 and June 2016 and was funded by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills’ (UKCES). The UKFP provided an innovative approach to tackling workforce development issues, offering small scale public co-investment to employers and industry, to design and test their own solutions to emerging or long-standing skills and productivity challenges. The UKFP’s four key objectives were to: Support collaborative approaches to workforce development issues amongst employers and, where applicable, wider social partners; Encourage innovative approaches to addressing workforce development issues; Identify ways to address new or persistent market or system failures which act as a brake on UK workforce competitiveness; Identify ‘what works’ when addressing market failures in relation to workforce development, for adoption in policy development and wider business practice.

Canada’s labour market is undergoing changes, but what does the future hold? With a range of technological, environmental, and political trends driving change, which ones should Canadians pay attention to most? Signs of the Times: Expert insights about employment in 2030 offers a look at how a range of experts across Canada are thinking about the future of employment, as well as which trends, they believe are most likely to create change. In doing so, this report aims to provide guidance to Canadian policy makers, educators, employers, students, and workers about what the future of Canada’s labour market may hold. Signs of the Times is the second report to be released as part of the Brookfield Institute’s Employment in 2030 initiative. Building on previous work conducted by project partner Nesta, Employment in 2030 uses futures research, expert workshops, and machine learning algorithms to project the skills most likely to be in demand in 2030 across Canada. The first phase of this initiative resulted in Turn and Face the Strange, a report that outlines 31 broad trends with the potential to impact Canada’s labour market. This research was used to frame the next phase of the project: six workshops held across Canada, inviting a range of diverse experts to share how they expect select occupations might change in the next 10–15 years. Data from these workshops will inform the last phase of the project: data analysis using machine learning algorithms to project these impacts across the labour market, shedding light on the skills most likely to be in demand. The findings from this final phase will be shared in a third report, which is set for release in 2020. Signs of the Times outlines the insights gathered at the six expert workshops, as well as the unique workshop methodology designed specifically for this project and the occupations experts were asked to rate. It describes the key trends participants identified as most likely to create change for Canada’s labour market, as well as broader reflections observed in each region.