There are two crucial areas business needs to address this year.

You know what these are: Climate Change and Productivity.

Sceptics say that Climate Change doesn’t exist. They either don’t know any better or they may be right. But for the good of us all we still need to look at current business practices and determine what changes can be made to address the situation. What are we emitting into the atmosphere? What source of energy do we use that may be causing an environmental problem and what can be done to rectify the situation?

What is our individual role in climate change?

When we hear that ice are melting, water levels rising and temperatures increasing then we do indeed have a problem.

Productivity is harder to measure because there are a lot of people in society who contribute a lot without the financial reward. Their efforts are not on payrolls or widely known about. There are reasons for this of course: homemakers don’t have the same esteem as a bank manager, nor the salary that goes with just as much (if not more) hard work.

Productivity and a living wage or a fair wage, not just a scrapping by wage is a difficult subject. Companies don’t want to raise wages and salaries unless they really need to. They want to make a profit for shareholders and no more was this apparent than at the recent Davos gathering. Someone owns the oil and someone else owns the property and the workers gather around for a share of the crumbs.

Productivity keeps the wheels turning, to making the goods for market and positioning our country as an export earner on the world stage. The highest percentage of what we manufacturer comes from the land. Not that what we make in a workshop or factory is irrelevant, but the numbers add up to our greatest export success comes from land valued enterprises.

Let’s be clear employers want to reward staff for their efforts and compulsory collectives wont help with this.

And in this we have control of our raw components and original parts to put together the cheese or wine for export. The home-grown product is what we aspire to perfect.