You are not alone!

Veteran business journalist Andrew Sawers explains why the heat is on for people working in businesses of all shapes and sizes, and why it's no good moaning about it... you just have to get on

with it

Gordon Brown yet again reminded the Labour party conference in Bournemouth that Britain is enjoying "the longest uninterrupted period of economic growth in the history of our country". So, if we've never had it so good, why is business such hard work?

Statistics published just a few days ago appear to show that business is actually doing rather well in the current economic climate: British companies pulled in a rate of return on invested capital of 15.7% in the second quarter of this year - pretty good when you think that Bank of England interest rates are still below 6%.

But that performance has come at a cost. As one FTSE-100 company finance director put it recently, we're trying to "drive the car with one foot on the accelerator and the other foot on the brake". Company bosses - and the shareholders they report to - want to grow the business, but not the cost base. There is an utterly relentless drive to do more for less, squeezing more work out of employees and thrusting more "change initiatives" and other bothersome projects onto the shoulders of managers and staff who barely have enough spare time to get on with the day job.

In fact, consultants at Capgemini recently said that Western European businesses have launched an average of seven major transformation programmes in the last three years. Change may be the only constant, as the cliché goes, but this is ridiculous.

And given a fair economic wind, new technology, booming emerging markets in places such as China and Eastern Europe, and a breed of managers who have no shortage of ideas about how to drive businesses forward, it's remarkable that UK industry isn't actually doing even better than it is.

One of the big problems in modern business life is that the recent favourable economic conditions have helped encouraged the rise of the private-equity industry. Private-equity investment funds poured £6.7bn into British industry in 2005; one private-sector job in every five is at a company that is, or has been, supported by private-equity investors. Naturally, these investors demand healthy returns so that they can sell the businesses they've bought into within a few years - at a tidy profit.

High returns

They appear to succeed, as well. Companies backed by private-equity investors apparently show an average of 9% growth in sales, compared with 5% for mid-sized FTSE-250 companies on the stockmarket.

A recent survey by think tank The Work Foundation suggests that if private-equity investors install a new management team of their choosing, then there's a greater likelihood of job cuts; but if the investors buy a company and support the current management, then the strategy is usually to make the business grow much more quickly than it had under its previous ownership.

Either way, private equity is making life more difficult by driving out waste and pushing managers as hard as they can. But if you think that's tough, then it's not much more comfortable being in a rival company that has to compete against such freshly-invigorated (and incentivised) managers.

A second reason why business life is so challenging is simply because everything is so much more complex these days. Regulations don't help. And technology - which is supposed to be our labour-saving friend - is now so complicated that it's easy to make a mess

of things: the evidence is in huge corporate supply-chain systems that leave the shelves unstacked or management information installations that are scrapped after millions have been spent on them.

Complexity reaches even into our business models - the way we "do business". The outsourcing of everything from the accounts department to the company car park means there are companies today trying to make money doing things that used to be part of corporate overheads. Fine - but now instead of doing the jobs themselves, managers have to manage the relationship with the service provider, write detailed contracts that try to anticipate as many unforeseen circumstances as possible (never an easy task), and work out whether a bit of extra scrubbing of the hospital ward floor over and above what's been specified in the "service level agreement" would result in punitive penalty charges.

So fiendishly competitive

Where it used to be that you couldn't change an office lightbulb yourself because that was a job for a trade unionist; now you still can't change a lightbulb yourself because it's a job for an outside contractor.

But the most basic problem is that business is just so fiendishly competitive. The customer is king - but the customer is presented with an overwhelming range of choices in everything from soap powder to MP3 players. Increasingly, though, it matters less what customers buy than where they buy it. As retailers compete for the customer's cash, the retailer's brand increasingly becomes more valuable than the brand of the thing being bought. Beer? Clothes? Car insurance? Tesco can do that for you - or do you prefer Marks & Spencer? Sainsbury's doesn't care if you buy Coke or Pepsi; Mitchells & Butlers aren't bothered if the punters drink Grolsch or Sauvignon Blanc, as long as they buy it at All Bar One or O'Neill's.

This means that suppliers are under tremendous pressure from retailers to reduce cost, improve quality, supply greater quantity, source from China or Vietnam - or even to manufacture a supermarket's own-label products, putting the supplier in the unenviable predicament of competing against itself.

So working life is tough - and it's not going to get any easier. Is there any respite? No, not really. But if there is one thing that must certainly be a precondition to success (though not a guarantee) it is to ensure that customers actually do enjoy the experience that they are supposed to have - that the photographs of smiling patrons in the glossy corporate brochure bears more than a passing resemblance to reality. Getting that right raises the probability that the rosy economic statistics will start to reflect a feel-good factor.

But then, employees can soon expect head office to initiate a new focus-group-driven, quality-control feedback-mechanism "experience-change" project that will make it seem like hard work all over again.

So, if you think you've got it tough running a pub, just spare a thought for some of your customers - they could be just as overloaded.

ends