Management skills gap is stressing workers
Wed 28 May 2008
27/05/2008
Managers lacking key skills are adding to greater stress for their employees. Professor Gary Cooper, world-leading expert on workplace stress, explained that poorly trained management can create numerous problems further down the corporate chain. These include stress-related sickness absence because workers have "more burnout, become less productive and deliver less to the bottom line", he said. This was now more common, he noted and revealed it "passed the muscular skeletal diseases as the leading cause of sickness absence in the UK". According to the National Employer Skills Survey 2007, almost 163,000 managers in England alone experienced a skills gap. Brendan Barber, head of the Trades Union Congress, said changing working practices has to involve "drawing on a range of measures to realign employment culture and people management practices – in ways that match both the needs of the business, and the aspirations of staff for a better quality of working life".
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