What do we know about New Zealand workplaces?

Over recent years, as interest has grown at a national level in improving productivity and performance, the workplace has received increasing research attention as a unit of analysis. Internationally, the existence of a High Performance Work Systems model has been debated, and there has been an outpouring of articles giving consideration to the range of workplace practices that are associated with this model. This has been facilitated by the existence in many countries of large-scale surveys that provide a systematic and robust evidence base for informed policy making. Within the New Zealand context, however, the empirical basis for drawing conclusions about the nature and spread of a range of workplace practices is sparse, and limited by the data available in official statistics and a continued reliance by researchers on small-scale case studies. This paper considers the limits of our knowledge about the dynamics of New Zealand workplaces, and questions whether the time has come for development of a large scale survey to provide robust empirical evidence to better inform decision-making by policy makers and practitioners.