Turning data into action: a practical workshop on productivity

Speakers

• Professor Bridgette Wessels
• Gordon Baggott, Chief Data Scientist, Smart Data Foundry
• Magdalena Getler, Head of Research Growth, Smart Data Foundry

Increasing productivity involves fostering employee engagement and supporting employee wellbeing in order to boost economic growth. One of the key tools at our disposal to improving economic wellbeing is a growing economy with which people can engage productively – and where the benefits of growth are well distributed across the country.

However, UK productivity has undergone a prolonged slow down – barely recovering to above the levels seen at the 2008 financial crash. The UK is in the bottom half of OECD nations for productivity, and even within the UK there are huge regional variations, with London far outperforming the national average.

At the same time, the data used to produce the official statistics from which government policy is developed and made is challenged by declining participation rates, a lack of representativeness across regions, industries and workers, and timeliness.

This interactive session, led by Smart Data Foundry, will explore how alternative data sources can be used to enhance official statistics, support better policy decisions, and equip researchers and data scientists interested in productivity with new insights and tools to understand this critical facet of our economy.

We will cover use cases for financial data, research already underway, novel approaches to official statistics and how to use smart data to understand the impacts of economic changes in near real-time.

This session is aimed at researchers, think tanks, economists, and policymakers.