The UK’s Most Productive Companies reveals which publicly-quoted UK companies are meeting the challenges of the 2010 business environment and leading their sectors in productivity terms.
The report has been researched and published by Profiles International, the world-leading assessment company, which analysed financial data from 594 publicly-traded companies on the Main market of the London Stock Exchange. These companies were grouped into 60 industry sub-sectors based on their SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes and then into 18 industries to produce a more meaningful analysis.
The results for each industry sector revealed the most productive companies to be:
Aerospace and Defence: Rolls Royce Group
Banking: Lloyds Banking Group
Business Services: Harvey Nash Group
Construction: Berkeley Group Holdings
Consumer Products: Diageo
Financial Services: Intermediate Group Holdings
Food Production: Hilton Food Group
Healthcare: Shire
Industrial: Johnson Matthey
Insurance: St James’s Place
Media: ITV
Natural Resources: Soco International
Retail: HR Owen
Software: Micro Focus International
Technology: Northamber
Telecoms: Inmarsat
Travel and Leisure: Enterprise Inns
Utilities: Drax
To reach its conclusions, Profiles International defined productivity by using the well-accepted ratio of revenue produced per full-time employee. Once it had identified the top performers in each sector, Profiles then took a closer look at the practices that enabled them to out-perform the market and analysed the results and the contributing factors behind the results.
The best practices that Profiles believes explain outstanding productivity can be broken down into five People Attributes and five Strategic and Operational Attributes. They are:
People Attributes: Performance-driven culture
- Effective managers
- Efficient use of people
- High employee effectiveness
- Encouragement of innovation
Strategic and Operational Attributes:
- Technological sophistication
- Financial sophistication
- Operational sophistication
- Effective distribution channels
- Marketing and brand sophistication
Profiles International UK managing director Martin Goodwill said: "We undertook this research to ensure that our employee assessments continue to reflect the requirements of today’s challenging economic environment.
"While the findings confirmed much of our existing knowledge, they also demonstrated that it is more important than ever for companies to benchmark their people processes to ensure they maximise the productivity of the people they employ. We have made the report available online – and we hope that managers will download it and use the information to inform and improve their own processes."
