Management and Expectations Survey 2020

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Management and Expectations Survey 2020

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The 2020 MES survey was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the research project ‘Understanding and Explaining Management Practices to Promote Higher Productivity in UK Businesses‘ and developed with ESCoE and a Business Engagement Group.

MES2020, run by the Office for National Statistics, collected information from businesses in both the services and production industries about their management practices and expectations for their business in the future. The survey was run online and sent to approximately 50,000 businesses in Great Britain for the period 1 January to 31 December 2019 as well as their current experiences to date in 2020 (the survey was run November 2020). Their 2020 practices were included to cover the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Firms who participated could benefit as the published statistics could be used as a benchmark to compare their business against the same, or across different, sectors.


Business Engagement Group MES2020

Tera Allas, McKinsey & Company

Nida Broughton, Behavioural Insights Team

John Forth, Bayes Business School, City, University of London

Adam Hardy, Be the Business

Daisy Hooper, Chartered Management Institute

Anna Leach, Confederation of British Industry

Josh Leedale, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

Cher Li, PrOPEL Hub

James Phipps, Nesta

Elizabeth Spratt, Chartered Management Institute

Chris Starmer, University of Nottingham

Emily Wyman, University of Nottingham


 The MES2020 questionnaire can be found here:

The MES2020 data are available to access for research from the ONS Secure Research Service. For further details visit here.

We welcome the potential offered by ONS’s relatively new Management and Expectations Survey to examine the impact of COVID-19 on the main components of productivity – inputs, outputs and prices.

Office for Statistics Regulation ‘Assessment Report: UK Productivity statistics‘, 17 May 2021