UK productivity is down: lower than pre-pandemic levels, lower now than a year ago and lower than most of our G7 peers. Solving the productivity problem is complex in any field but in health and social care, where interventions don't always yield direct results, it's more challenging still. 

Part of the issue appears to be what gets measured. We can measure the number of GP appointments in any given month (28.4m in December last year) but it's hard to determine whether that time (and money) was productive. To assess that you'd need to look at baselines (how ill people were), outcomes (whether they got better), alternatives (whether their health could have improved because of the nature of their illness or whether they would have improved anyway without intervention) and alternatives (what they might have otherwise done). Simply looking at numbers isn't enough. 

What's more, many factors that drive productivity are ignored publicly: the importance of teamwork; mission clarity – being clear what your job is in relation to the overall mission; managing and maintaining staff happiness; ensuring that people are sufficiently skilled to do their jobs; the importance of incentives – not just money, but progression and status; and strong and supportive leadership. 

But all too often politicians allow themselves to be sucked into the ‘how' debate rather than the ‘what'. Senior figures have become so obsessed with how – work from home or not – that it has now become a culture war. Never mind that research shows that productivity has increased through both home and hybrid working, commuter times have reduced and stress features less in workplace surveys. 

Home working, though, is the thin end of the how wedge. Politicians can have a significant impact on other factors that can affect productivity. Local government is, for example, in the midst of a massive reorganisation. This will contribute directly to workplace stress and uncertainty. Staff and leaders who might have, in the first year of the new Government, been totally focused on the core mission (build more, increase wealth, deliver sustainable change) will now be focused on surviving; most will, some won't. But in the meantime, anxiety will suppress productivity. 

Other political tactics don't help. Productivity gains can often be made by examining failures, looking for improvements and implementing those quickly. But as soon as there is public failure there is always a call for someone's head to be stuck on a pole and paraded for all to see. This kind of public shaming may reassure those who are reluctant to embrace the reality that failure is an inevitable part of delivery but it does little to help the senior leaders who think that it's only a matter of time before their time (and head) is up. This as much as anything will contribute towards a play-it-safe-and-keep-your-head-down culture, hardly conducive to leaps in productivity. 

The same goes for league tables and the name-and-shame, two other political stratagems. Fine if you're at the top of the first and nowhere near the second. But the public sector is not the Olympics; you can't reduce the delivery of increasingly complex interdependent service offers to a 100 metre race. Nuance disappears along with meaningful debate about how to move to a value-added, sharing culture where every organisation can thrive by sharing best practice and not making heroes of those who happened to get lucky in the last year. 

And then there's spin. The need to spread compelling narratives, to fill the ever-present media vacuums (if you don't someone else will) and to always have success stories (replete with heroes and villains) means that truths about productivity never get their day in court. Multifactorial delivery doesn't fit easily into 140 character tweets in the same way as seven word headlines and smiling faces. 

But productivity is clearly an issue for the UK that leaders can do something about. They can talk about the real challenges we face – and our actual starting point, post-Brexit. They can clarify what our national mission is. They can reward success, innovation and risk-taking, especially if it fails. 

And they can openly praise public servants who can't fight back when they are routinely vilified by politicians looking for quick headlines and snap judgments. 

It might help.