by Dr Zahra Murad

Charities are shedding jobs at double the rate of the public sector as many voluntary organisations face deepening financial distress as a result of recession, cuts in government spending and rising costs. The voluntary sector shed more than 70,000 jobs in the year of 2011 following financial crisis, according to analysis of employment data by the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), an umbrella group for the charitable sector[1]. Donations to most charitable organizations generally come from individuals (e.g. from a fundraising appeal or given as a legacy), from companies, or from charitable trusts and foundations. Gifts and individual donations are a particularly important source of income for charities and can attract tax relief. Raising funds however can be time-consuming and costly which may render effort of charitable organizations futile.

Research in behavioural economics has used various tools to test for the effectiveness of donation raising strategies. Most of the studies use student populations and some have argued that students behave less pro-socially and are more money motivated than the general population[2],[3] and hence are not representative of what is going on in real world. A recent study has shown that students participate in economic experiments solely to earn money as the recruitment rates have been found to be extremely low when money was not mentioned in the recruitment email[4]. Yet we know of an abundance of studies that show that in completely anonymous settings, people choose to give money to others[5],[6], reject unequal offers at the risk of not earning any money at all[7],[8], cooperate with others at the risk of being taken advantage of[9],[10] and return money back if someone has entrusted in them[11].

by Dr Zahra Murad

Many organizations require their workers to adopt more than one duty within a job role. We, academics, are both researchers and teachers. A salesman can be a developer, price setter, marketer and a seller of a product all at once. A surgeon in a medical development centre is expected to both treat patients and to engage in explorative R&D. With an increasing budget cuts across the UK and many Western countries, we anticipate multitasking in the workplace to increase.

Although it is contrary to the core economic principle of the division of labour, requiring an employee to multitask between a number of job duties is an efficient way to cut costs of hiring additional labour units, which is a significant input cost for an organization. For this reason, it is likely that an increasing number of public and private companies will expect their employees to undertake multiple roles and be individually multi-skilled within the organization. One of the research agendas within our project “Delivering Better For Less” will focus on how multitasking work environment affects productivity and motivation within organizations and under which conditions employees are more likely to multitask more effectively.

This website provide a launch pad for the dissemination of research, comment and publications for the Delivering Better for Less: Improving Productivity in the Public Services research team.

This £1million Leverhulme funded project will look to interrogate four underlying assumptions of recent public service reforms.