Self-employed women, who earn an average of 16 per cent less than self-employed men, should be supported with greater training and development opportunities, a new report has said.  The government should also remove any barriers preventing young women embarking on apprenticeships, according to the report published by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Women and Work.  The report, How to Recruit Women for the 21st Century, is the product of a year’s research by the APPG, which is jointly chaired by MPs Jess Phillips and Gillian Keegan.

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Investment in diversity programmes has become commonplace: 98 percent of companies offer such programs. But that investment is falling far short of the mark: three-quarters of employees in diverse groups—women, racial/ethnic minorities, and those who identify as LGBTQ—do not indicate that they have personally benefited from their companies’ diversity programmes. This is one of the findings of Fixing the Flawed Approach to Diversity, a report from Boston Consulting Group (BCG). The report claims that a key impediment to progress is that older men (age 45 or older), who often lead decision making within corporate environments, are underestimating the obstacles in the recruiting, retention, and advancement of female and minority employees by 10 percent to 15 percent, as measured by comparison with the estimates of members of those actual groups: women, people of colour, and LGBTQ employees. This can lead to a misallocation of resources and a lack of investment in programs that could otherwise have the largest impact.

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Around a quarter (26 percent) of British workers believe that January is their least productive month with the nation still recovering from the Christmas period, according to a new report from Hitachi Capital Invoice Finance. The report also claims that December is the second least productive month (14 percent) whist 32 percent surveyed suggested that they’re equally unproductive across the entire year. Residents of the Welsh capital Cardiff were found to be the least productive in January (34 percent) closely followed by Southampton (31 percent) and Sheffield (30 percent).

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Employers make extensive investments in their employees; investing in hiring and retaining workers that match the firm’s needs. Now new research summarized by Kathryn Shaw, Stanford University, USA suggests that the hiring and training of good bosses may carry even more weight when it comes to workers’ performance. The study in the new IZA World of Labor Report shows a good boss can enhance the performance of their employees and can lower the quit rate. Good bosses have some universal traits: they coach and teach and offer insight into the strategy of the firm. According to Shaw economists are increasingly finding better data to measure the effects of bosses on workers’ performance, as well as the sources of these effects. A recent study of workers in a large firm that performs technology-based service (TBS) jobs found that the move from an average quality boss to one in the 90th percentile raised worker productivity by six units per hour, on a mean productivity of ten units per hour. Thus, when workers move from an average boss to a high-quality boss, productivity could rise by 50 percent. The study also showed that workers were more likely to quit when faced with bad bosses.

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