Euro rivals 'work harder' than UK staff

In the UK, workers take five days to produce what French, German and US counterparts do in four. This makes the UK a whopping twenty per cent less efficient than their closest economic rivals.

However, measuring productivity isn’t an exact science. To determine output per hour, or per day, workplace boffins must figure out what output is as a whole. On the modern work landscape, where workers are more likely to offer services than produce goods, this can be difficult. And, in the UK, the service sector is the dominant industry, producing circa 78% of GDP as of 2014.

Speaking to The Times, Nick Vaughn, Chief Economic Adviser at the Office for National Statistics (ONS), said: “parts of the service sector are not just ill-measured by completely mismeasured.”

And difficulty in measuring productivity in all sectors is exacerbated by digitisation, constant change and migrations to new ways of working. However, Ian Stewart, Chief Economist at Deloitte, explains that “we [the UK] does have a problem with productivity”.