Staff Turover is Burning Cash, and the UK Economy is Paying the Price

Productivity in the UK is still lagging 10% behind the G7 average, and growth in GDP has dropped from 2% to 0.5% since 2010 (Office for National Statistics, 2025).

Economists have weighed multiple factors that might be causing this productivity drop:

• Our effective productivity might skewed by the difference in work patterns needed for a service-based economy, versus a more production-heavy economy in Europe where productivity is easier to measure.

• The metrics used to measure real productivity may not be suited to the modern digital economy; tasks that seem ineffecient such as research may have 'hidden' value-add for the smaller tasks that appear higher leverage.

  
  

Or these metrics are accurate enough, but we are measuring productivity of a workplace with much higher turnover, and many economists think this is the elephant in the room. However productive employees become over time, all of this has to start again once a hire is replaced.

So what are measures that UK SMEs can put in place to reduce turnover, and to avoid this productivity drop when turnover is unavoidable?

Decrease Turnover using Employee Incentives

This is probably the 'lowest' of the low hanging fruit. Most businesses have an existing employee rewards strategy and employee benefits that stand out from the competition.

The simplest solution could be to formalise these offers in the form of a digital employee pass, where their latest employee benefits collect data in real-time, telling you which offers catpture the most interest.

Offers should be easily accessible on a digital employee pass alongside other work tools

As with a OnePal digital employee pass, these offers are displayed right next to their other digital tools such as accessing training and business apps in the cloud.

This strategy not only boosts performance by A/B testing rewards over time, but could also help retain roles with high-turnover rate such as hospitality and construction. Employees would stay longer, making productivity of the team rise as a whole.

Capture Anonymous Complaints and Adjust

The majority of HR professionals recommend implementing some sort of an anonymous complaints portal.

This ensures that employees are given a safe space to report hazards, support compliance and increase employee welbeing.

OnePal equips your HR team with an anonymous notes portal out of the box, with all team members able to submit notes anonymously from their smartphone through their digital employee pass. This is also a robust example of team members working together to increase compliance of the organisation; anonymous notes in OnePal can be sent to appear under specific projects as hazards or risks at a granular level.

Anonymous notes should be accessible to HR manager easily across devices, with action status.

However, just the Operations Manager uses OnePal submitted hazard and risk notes to modify policies and SOPs, there is equally an opportunity for the HR manager to use anonymous complaint notes to improve employee welbeing:

Whether bullying, disrimination or anti-social behaviour, a simple anonymous note can make all the difference in making a key team member stay rather than leave.

Learn from France. Good Food is Good ROI

Mais oui. The French enjoy their work life balance, but the same productivity statistcs that show the UK lagging behind in productivity may hint at an easy fix for increasing productivity and employee retention at the same time.

There is nothing that can quite compete with a digital offer in a OnePal employee pass that says 'free lunch' or 'discounted canteen'.

Studies on French office workers during the 2020 pandemic showed that team members not only got more done out of the 8 hours they worked by investing 1-hour into a lunchbreak, but that each daily lunch doubled as an informal meeting for discussing topics with colleagues while strengthening working relationships (M Bruegel, 2021).