Publication

Research Report

Employee well-being, mental health and productivity in Midlands firms: The employer perspective

Published: 22 May 2020

This report focuses on the engagement, attitudes and behaviours of around 1,900 employers across the East and West Midlands to employee well-being and mental health. It also considers the effects of well-being and mental health on organisational performance and productivity. Data for the study was collected through telephone interviews and in-depth case studies in the three months immediately before the Covid-19 virus lockdown. The report therefore provides a pre-Covid-19 baseline which may be a useful comparator in months and years to come, when considering the impacts of the pandemic on employers and employees

Author

ERC,

Associated Themes
  • Productivity and performance
Download Full Paper

Related publications

Research Paper

Pathways to efficiency, pathways to growth: Evidence from the UK Innovation Survey. Research Paper No. 83

Published: 11 February 2020
Insight

Covid-19 and self-employment in the UK

In this short paper, we provide a preliminary assessment of the likely impact of the Covid-19 crisis on the self-employed, and in particular, using the most recently available UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey data, we provide an analysis of which groups and where the self-employed are most at risk of significant income loss and therefore household distress.
Because of time-lags in the publication of official labour force and business statistical data, it is still too early for us to assess with any degree of precision the impact of the crisis on the self-employment. Nevertheless, the sudden closure of businesses and tight social distancing restrictions on the movement of people in the attempt to slow down the spread of Covid-19 is having unprecedented effects on employment and businesses activity. Employment and self-employment in non-food personal and domestic services is directly affected since customers are required to stay at home except for essential shopping for food and medical supplies, and where possible work from home, and so no longer permitted to use these services.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies identifies sectors that are directly affected by the lockdown: non-food, non-pharmaceutical retail; passenger transport; accommodation and food; travel; childcare; arts and leisure; personal care and domestic services (Joyce and Hu, 2020). The sector-specific employment risk coincides with specific job and worker characteristics with young people and women being predicted to be hit hardest by the lockdown. Age and gender effects are further associated with low income jobs and part-time workers. Hence, the employment effect of Covid-19 is associated with a stark level of social inequality.
However, predictions about which workers are hardest hit by the crisis (Joyce and Hu, 2020; Kitsos, 2020), included only those in paid employment.
We provide here a corresponding analysis for the self-employed.

Published: 21 April 2020
Research Report

Northern Powerhouse Local Growth Dashboard

The UK Local Growth Dashboard has been developed by the Enterprise Research Centre (ERC) and builds on the LEP Growth Dashboard first launched in June 2014. Its purpose is to present a set of growth metrics for start-ups and existing firms across a range of sub-national geographies in the UK with a specific focus on each of the 38 English Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) areas. Alongside these metrics it provides some other contextual data for each LEP including the changing sectoral composition of local economies over time.
This version of the Local Growth Dashboard was requested by the Greater Manchester Growth Company for the 11 Northern Powerhouse LEPs: Cheshire and Warrington, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Humber, Lancashire, Leeds City Region, Liverpool City Region, North East, Sheffield City Region, Tees Valley and York, North Yorkshire and East Riding.
The Local Growth Dashboard can be used as a source of evidence to inform discussions on priorities in business support concerning small business growth and includes easily understood metrics which can be readily updated on an annual basis.
This report is designed to simply present the data for others to use and it is not the intention here to investigate the reasons for these variations as that can be found elsewhere in the research outputs of the ERC and the wider research and policy literature.

Published: 28 February 2020