How to increase productivity by being bold

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Andy Stamps

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The construction industry continues to struggle with productivity. Bringing innovation and thinking out of the box might help overcoming the challenge, writes RLB’s National Head of Infrastructure, Andy Stamps.

We have recently been working on a tender and were asked to list our previous experience of similar projects. In the same week, I read an article in the press about how public service productivity decreased by 1.3% in the third quarter of 2022 compared with the previous quarter. And I thought of the Einstein quote: “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

We know that we face a national productivity and efficiency challenge, with UK productivity currently around 20% below that of the US and behind both Germany and France. Yet when it comes to tenders for essential public and private sector frameworks, we still seek replication of this inefficiency.

Of course, we need professionals with experience and expertise, but we also want clients who are bold and brave to think and commission things differently, ones that value an outcome-focused approach that the construction playbook mandates.

We need to break the cycle of formulaic procurement and delivering for the sake of delivering and start to think innovatively about how we can make our industry more productive and efficient.

‘Smarter, Greener and Better’

At RLB we have just launched a ‘Smarter, Greener and Better’ campaign. Read more here about how we are helping our clients think and act differently and by doing so solve the challenges they have to deal with on a regular basis,

While we still have a way to go on the infrastructure journey to working smarter, greener and better, we know that by being bolder, and by taking a risk, we will discover more efficient ways to work that will help us in the long term. 

This is an abridged version of an original article that first appeared in Construction Management. To read the full article, please click here.

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Andy Stamps
Andy Stamps

Partner - National Head of Infrastructure