Construction companies in the UK are the least likely to measure productivity compared with their international counterparts, a survey by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has found.
The RICS Construction Productivity Report 2026 reveals wide differences in productivity metrics and a persistent ‘optimism bias’ across five global regions based on responses from nearly 3,000 construction professionals.
The regions covered include the UK, Europe, the Americas, Asia-Pacific (APAC), and the Middle East and Africa (MEA).
In the case of the UK, one in five firms never measure productivity at all (22 per cent).
This low productivity measurement rate is a result of different factors, including the absence of a common definition and smaller firms’ limited resources to track complex metrics, regardless of whether a standard exists.
The report shows that not even a third of firms across all regions use the same definition of productivity. Whereas most markets (24 to 29 per cent) define it as earned value over actual cost, others use output per worker hour or different methods.
Just 5 per cent of UK and European firms use benchmarks or reference points, the lowest across all regions. This hampers companies’ ability to identify performance gaps, set realistic improvement targets, or justify investment in productivity-enhancing measures.
Productivity performance over the past 12 months in the UK ranked fourth at 18 per cent, below the Americas (22 per cent) but above APAC (9 per cent).
The report says that the UK’s relative weakness may partly reflect Brexit-related labour shortages and its higher share of smaller firms in the sample.
Despite this, forward-looking net balances are higher than past performances in every region, with the UK rising from 18 per cent in the past 12 months to 34 per cent in the year ahead.
The report indicates that this ‘optimism gap’ is due to firms’ tendency to overestimate the impact of planned changes and underestimate external headwinds.
In terms of factors hindering productivity, all regions point to the availability of skilled workers as the highest-impact issue, although the UK ranks it the lowest among them (37 per cent).
The UK is the area with the lowest confidence in digitalisation and automation as measures to improve productivity (only 17 per cent of UK respondents rated automation as having a high impact) and the lowest average confidence in workforce upskilling compared with other regions.
The UK also stands out as the region with the lowest average confidence in interventions (23 per cent) and particularly weak belief in technology-driven improvement.
The report says this may reflect hard-won experience of implementation challenges or simply a more conservative professional culture.
