But CBI survey shows staff want employers to share more about important issues
Employees trust their employer more than businesses in general, a survey by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has revealed.
This finding was shared at the launch of a new CBI campaign, ‘The Great Business Debate’, which is designed to help tackle the public’s lack of confidence in business. The campaign will consist of an online forum as well as a series of public-facing events.
Prior to the campaign’s launch, YouGov ran a poll for the CBI to investigate the public’s confidence in business. The poll found that public confidence in business is generally low.
Only just over half (53 per cent) of the 2,080 respondents thought that business makes a positive contribution to society and more than half (55 per cent) believed that there was a greater expectation on business to ‘do the right thing’ than there was 10 years ago.
When questioned about the survey results, CBI deputy director-general Katja Hall said although confidence was generally low, people did trust their employers more than they trusted businesses in general.
“I think part of this campaign has to be about business leaders talking much more to their employees and that’s one of the groups that we’re focusing on initially in the campaign,” said Hall. “And there is huge interest from employees to hear from their managers, to hear from their leaders about important issues, whether that is Scottish independence or just the plan for the business and how it’s going to grow and what factors will impact on that.”
The launch of the Great Business Debate coincided with the announcement of the CBI’s most recent growth indicator. This found that private-sector growth had eased off over the last three months and was now at a five-month low.
Additionally, real wage growth and productivity have been weak. But CBI director of economics Rain Newton-Smith said that skills shortages in the labour market were resulting in increased starting salaries for certain in-demand positions.
“Our surveys suggest that skills shortages are starting to affect more sectors of the economy and some of our members tell us that pay rewards for longer term staff, particularly in more sort of hot-spot professions like IT and construction, are starting to outpace inflation and once people become more confident in the recovery, we may start to see people moving to new jobs more readily, which will boost wage amounts,” said Newton-Smith. “And, if this is matched by a pick up in productivity, we should see higher earnings growth over the forecast and more people sharing in our recovery.”