Employee Productivity 101: Help Your Employees Achieve More

After decades of creating team building experiences and working with companies of every size, I’ve learned something important: productivity isn’t about working harder—it’s about working smarter. It’s not about squeezing more hours out of your team. It’s about creating the conditions where people can do their best work with the least friction.

According to Gallup, highly productive teams can increase profitability by as much as 21%. That’s not a small number. But here’s what really gets me: most companies leave that productivity gain on the table because they focus on the wrong things. They micromanage. They pile on tasks without prioritizing. They confuse activity with achievement.

In this guide, we’ll explore what workplace productivity really means, the biggest challenges teams face, and proven strategies for boosting performance without burning people out. Whether you’re managing remote workers, leading a hybrid team, or running an in-person operation, you’ll find actionable insights that actually work.

What is workplace productivity?

In simple terms, workplace productivity is a measure of how effectively employees are working together to achieve goals and produce results within a specific time frame. It’s about output relative to input—how much you accomplish with the resources you have.

Productivity can be measured in a variety of ways. Some measure output as a whole, while others think output quality is more important. Other measures include efficiency and job satisfaction. Many try to use all of these to get a more holistic measure of productivity.

That’s a good starting point, but you also need to consider the factors that influence productivity. Things like company culture, work environment, resources, and individual motivation all influence productivity.

For example, a culture of innovation often rewards and incentivizes productivity, in the end raising it. Meanwhile, a culture that is toxic can demotivate people and decrease productivity across the workplace.

It’s important to keep all of this in mind while trying to increase productivity. You should be aware of what productivity is, how it’s measured, and what influences it so you can more effectively boost productivity in your workplace.

How productivity is measured

Measuring productivity can be tricky because different roles require different metrics. Here are the most common approaches:

• Output per hour: Units produced, tasks completed, sales closed
• Quality metrics: Error rates, customer satisfaction, revision cycles
• Revenue per employee: How much value each person generates
• Project completion rates: On-time delivery, milestone achievement
• Efficiency ratios: Input costs versus output value

The best measurement systems track both quantitative and qualitative factors. Numbers tell part of the story, but you also need to understand team dynamics, collaboration quality, and whether people are doing work that moves the needle.

What influences workplace productivity?

Productivity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s shaped by dozens of factors, from physical workspace to company culture to individual well-being. Understanding these influences helps you know where to focus your efforts.

Key factors that impact productivity:

• Physical Environment: A productive office space considers lighting, noise levels, ergonomics, and layout
• Company Culture: A culture of innovation rewards productivity; a toxic culture kills it
• Management Style: Micromanagement destroys productivity; trust and autonomy boost it
• Tools and Technology: The right systems enable efficiency; poor tools create friction
• Communication Quality: Effective communication impacts every aspect of productivity
• Employee Wellbeing: Tired, stressed, burnt-out people can’t perform at their best
• Trust and Relationships: Building trust in the workplace reduces friction and enables collaboration
• Clear Goals and Priorities: People can’t be productive if they don’t know what matters most

It’s important to keep all of this in mind while trying to increase productivity. You should be aware of what productivity is, how it’s measured, and what influences it so you can more effectively boost productivity in your workplace.

Unique productivity challenges for remote workers

Remote employees face unique challenges when it comes to workplace productivity. This might seem obvious, but it’s essential to highlight these challenges since they differ significantly from in-person employees.

Top remote productivity challenges:

• Home Distractions: Pets, families, household tasks, and hobbies compete for attention
• Isolation and Disconnection: Lack of casual interactions and social connections
• Communication Gaps: Missing context from body language and spontaneous conversations
• Boundary Issues: Difficulty separating work time from personal time
• Technology Problems: Connectivity issues, inadequate home office setups
• Meeting Fatigue: Back-to-back video calls drain energy

And these challenges won’t solve themselves. Remote workers are resourceful, but they shouldn’t have to figure everything out on their own. Give them the support they need, be crystal clear about what you expect, and build systems that actually make sense for teams working from different places. A little intentionality goes a long way.

10 strategies to increase productivity in the workplace

Looking for practical ways to increase workplace productivity? Here are the strategies I’ve seen work consistently across thousands of teams:

1. Teach time management skills

Teaching time management skills is a great way to boost productivity, but it’s important to remember that self-care and breaks are factored into time management as well. Time management isn’t about cramming more work into every minute—it’s about using time strategically.

Key time management techniques:

• Time-blocking: Allocate specific time slots for focused work
• Priority matrices: Distinguish urgent from important
• Energy management: Schedule demanding work during peak energy hours
• Pomodoro technique: Work in focused sprints with breaks

Anais Rodriguez, employee experience expert, emphasizes boundaries: “When I meet with employees who are struggling with work-life balance and feeling burnt out, I always come from a place of, ‘What boundaries are you setting for yourselves? How are you managing your time?'”

2. Boost employee motivation

When employees are motivated, they are more eager to work and give their best effort, resulting in increased workplace productivity overall. Look for ways to engage teams. Whether they’re remote or in-person, you need to get them engaged and excited for work.

Ways to boost motivation:

• Set clear, achievable goals
• Provide meaningful rewards and recognition
• Offer learning and development opportunities
• Promote work-life balance
• Connect work to purpose and impact

Motivated employees naturally work more efficiently and produce higher-quality results.

3. Avoid micromanagement

This is less a tip and more something to avoid, but micromanagement in the workplace is an enemy of productivity. Just put yourself in an employee’s shoes: You’re working on a project, giving it your best effort, and your manager constantly checks in, questions every decision, and wants approval for tiny details.

That destroys productivity. It signals you don’t trust your team. It creates bottlenecks where decisions can’t move forward without management approval. It kills creativity and innovation. Instead, set clear expectations, provide necessary resources, then get out of the way and let people work.

4. Prioritize employee wellness

As mentioned earlier, employee wellness is a key component of workplace productivity. People perform their best when they are happy, healthy, and have a good work-life balance. Prioritizing wellness is a great way to boost productivity.

That said, most people understand that these days. The real problem is finding the time and opportunity to prioritize wellness. This is something productivity expert Kory Kogan emphasizes:

How do I get enough sleep? How do I make sure? If you could just do one of those things—eat, sleep, move, relax, or connect with other people (which is also really important to well-being)–what would you do? Find one of those things and get started and be proactive about it.

Employees that are feeling good, happy, and energized are going to have better performance than those who are tired, burnt out, and frustrated with work. Think about it from a personal perspective. When are you most productive at home? It’s most likely when you’re in a good mood, not stressed, and feel energized. The same applies to work.

Factors to consider for employee well-being:

• Job satisfaction and fulfillment
• Work-life balance
• Feeling supported by management
• Understanding their importance to the organization
• Mental and physical health resources

Since COVID, hybrid work has become a common option for many businesses. The flexibility and freedom that comes with hybrid work can help people reduce stress and get a better work-life balance—which directly improves productivity.

One way of dealing with that problem is with wellness programs, such as our Team Wellbeing program. This event is a great way to set aside some time to prioritize your employees’ wellness, boosting productivity at the same time.

5. Foster collaboration and teamwork

There are all sorts of different people in your workplace. They each have something special to offer, so take advantage of that. Lean into your team’s diversity and use it as a strength. When you couple diversity with collaboration, you can increase performance significantly.

Team cooperation allows a diverse team to pool its strengths and shore up weaknesses any individual team member may have. This results in a stronger, more efficient, and more productive team than one that is reluctant to collaborate.

6. Improve communication systems

Poor communication creates confusion, delays, and errors—all productivity killers. Strong communication systems keep everyone aligned and informed.

Communication best practices:

• Use the right channels for different types of communication
• Establish response time expectations
• Create shared documentation systems
• Hold regular team check-ins
• Minimize unnecessary meetings

Good communication doesn’t mean more communication—it means clearer, more purposeful communication.

7. Build employee confidence

Confident employees take initiative, make decisions, and solve problems independently—all of which boost productivity. Confidence comes from competence, recognition, and psychological safety. When people feel capable and supported, they perform better.

8. Leverage team building activities

The psychology behind team building events is simple: they forge bonds that filter through to the workplace, leading to an increase in output and a more harmonious working environment. Team building events also increase employee flexibility and strengthen individual focus on workplace tasks.

Once an employee recognizes the need for effective communication and learns to rely upon colleagues, their confidence increases, and they commonly maintain greater loyalty to their employer. Employee morale also inevitably increases with the introduction of regular team building activities.

9. Create focus time and deep work periods

Sometimes, staying productive in a busy workplace is like trying to read a novel in a room full of mischievous toddlers. Every distraction can derail your thought process, making it harder to accomplish anything meaningful.

Strategies for better focus:

• Design distraction-free zones for heads-down work
• Clarify availability expectations and respect focus time
• Limit multitasking—studies show it reduces productivity by up to 40%
• Block calendar time for focused work
• Batch similar tasks together

When the workplace supports focus periods, team members think more creatively while solving business problems and achieving work they can be proud of. Better work quality, fewer mistakes, and faster project completion all follow from protecting focus time.

10. Embrace workplace flexibility

According to research from Gartner, nearly 45% of employees say that flexible working hours are the key driver of productivity. Additionally, 75% of employees are the same or more productive while working from home. In fact, 30% stated that not having to travel to work allowed them to be more productive.

The data is clear: flexibility works. When you trust employees to manage their own time and choose when and where they work best, productivity often increases rather than decreases. Flexibility shows you value results over arbitrary rules.

Company culture and employee productivity

Company culture has a massive impact on productivity. A culture of innovation often rewards and incentivizes productivity, ultimately raising it. Meanwhile, a toxic culture can demotivate people and decrease productivity across the workplace. 

Productive cultures share these characteristics:

• Clear values that guide decision-making
• Psychological safety, where people can take risks
• Recognition and celebration of achievements
• Accountability without blame
• Continuous learning and improvement mindset
• Collaboration valued over competition

Culture isn’t something you can mandate—it’s something you build through consistent behaviors, employee connections, and reinforcement over time.

The people-centric approach to productivity

On that same note, employees are fitter, happier, and more productive in people-centered workplaces. They feel cared about and valued, which in turn means they are more engaged and motivated at work.

A workplace that prioritizes people sees their value. They know that their employees are what keep things running, and they treat employees like the valuable assets they are. Employees are given respect, praised for their successes, and provided extra training and education.

When employees feel important and cared about, they are much better workers. Putting employees first shows that you value them, resulting in better retention and a stronger culture of innovation. Though you are focusing on employee wellbeing, you’ll also get the benefit of more excited and engaged employees who naturally produce more. 

Focus on these two factors to create an employee-first culture:

Invest in onboarding

According to SHRM Foundation, a well-thought-out onboarding process can increase employee productivity by 50%. Think about that—you can essentially double new hire productivity just by onboarding them well.

As career coach Terry Jones emphasizes, “When employees feel good about having joined a company, they’re able to get up and running very quickly. They feel like you’ve actually set them up for success.”

A strong onboarding process focuses on people, not paperwork. It communicates that you don’t just care about the work—you care about the person doing it. That investment in the beginning pays dividends in productivity for years to come.

Implement proper change management

We often hear that poor management is the number one productivity killer at work. And sure, bad management doesn’t help. But what if we’re looking at this the wrong way? What if the real problem isn’t poor management itself, but getting the balance wrong between change management and leadership?

When that balance is off, everything gets stuck. Organizations can’t move forward, can’t grow, can’t adapt. So what’s the difference between the two?

Change management is basically your game plan—it’s the structured approach you use to roll out changes in your organization. Think of it as your roadmap: it helps you spot potential roadblocks and map out exactly how you’ll tackle specific changes.

But here’s where leadership comes in. You need strong change leadership to light a fire under people, to make them feel like “yes, this matters, we need to do this now.” Leadership brings that big-picture thinking that actually gets people invested in being more productive.

The disconnect happens when companies have all these processes and procedures in place, but nobody really understands why they’re doing any of it. Your team needs to know the vision behind the change, not just get handed a checklist. The “why” matters just as much as the “what” and “how”—maybe even more.

Using technology as a team productivity tool

Remember all those tedious manual tasks that used to eat up hours of your day and somehow still ended up with mistakes? With the right technology, you can knock out those same processes in minutes (and with almost perfect accuracy).

And when you automate and digitize the boring stuff, your team suddenly has so much more bandwidth. Instead of drowning in busywork, they can focus on the things that actually move the needle: generating revenue, growing the business, and doing work that matters.

The right technology doesn’t just make things faster. It frees your people up to spend their time on high-value work that actually makes a difference.

Technology best practices:

• Choose tools that integrate well together
• Provide thorough training on new systems
• Automate repetitive tasks whenever possible
• Gather employee feedback on tools and systems
• Avoid technology for technology’s sake

Technology should enable productivity, not complicate it. If a tool creates more friction than it removes, it’s not the right tool.

Ready to boost your team’s productivity?

Improving workplace productivity is a constant pursuit that many struggle with. However, it’s possible to boost productivity with the right approach that considers employees’ emotional needs and ongoing business strategy.

Improve productivity at work with TeamBonding. Our expert facilitators are ready to help you with one of our many events and boost your team’s productivity!