Tracking management practices over time: Response rates and survey design choices behind the UK Management and Expectations Survey

This paper uses three waves of the ONS Management and Expectations Survey (2016, 2020 and 2023) to examine how management practices evolve over time and to understand response behaviour in a voluntary business survey. We track management scores for firms responding across multiple waves and assess the extent to which changes in management practices reflect genuine managerial improvements or responder biases captured by the responder’s occupation. Firms that responded in 2020 were 24.9 percentage points more likely to respond in 2023 when controlling for firm characteristics. Where the individual responding on behalf of the firm was a senior official, such as a director, the respondent provided faster and more consistent responses across waves than firms responding with junior staff. Firms responding in all three waves report higher and improving management practices on average, particularly in employment practices. However, this difference is associated with observable firm characteristics, such as firm size. These results highlight the importance of understanding response patterns when interpreting survey results. We recommend maintaining continuity by retaining firms that responded in all three waves, encouraging responses from senior staff, and applying longitudinal weights to address non-response. The findings support improved survey design for future MES waves and strengthen the use of management practices as a measure of organisational capital in productivity research.