If you’re searching for how to improve employee productivity, you’re not alone. When your team is working well, delivery improves, customers notice the difference, and growth feels more achievable. Productivity is the heartbeat of any modern business, but maintaining it is not always simple.
Hybrid and remote work have changed how teams communicate. Notifications compete with focused time, meetings expand to fill the day, and processes that once “worked fine” start to show cracks as businesses grow. That’s why the most effective ways to improve employee productivity usually come down to reducing friction. Productivity increases fastest when you remove the things that quietly drain time, attention, and energy.
Understanding what’s really hurting productivity
Many productivity issues come down to the same few causes.
People lose focus when their day is filled with constant interruptions. The biggest problem is not the distraction itself, but the cost of switching between tasks all day long. Even high performers struggle when they rarely get uninterrupted time to think, plan, and do deep work.
Workflow problems are another major factor. Work slows down when tasks bounce between people without clear ownership, approvals take too long, or the “latest version” of something is difficult to find. When expectations are unclear, teams often produce more work than necessary and then spend time reworking it later.
Over time, this leads to predictable outcomes. Morale drops because people feel permanently behind. Deadlines slip. Customers experience delays. Managers spend too much time chasing updates rather than removing blockers.
How to measure employee productivity without creating pressure
Measuring the right things is often the missing piece when teams are trying to work out how to increase productivity of employees, because it highlights where time is being lost and what needs fixing first.
A good approach is to focus on outcomes and flow:
Are the most important goals being delivered on time?
How long does work take from request to completion?
How often does work come back for rework?
These signals usually tell you more than tracking activity.
Research from Asana’s Anatomy of Work Index suggests that workers spend a large portion of their time on “work about work”, like chasing updates, sitting in unnecessary meetings, and switching between tools. It’s a useful reminder that productivity gains often come from reducing busywork, not increasing effort.
It also helps to look for the hidden cost of admin. If skilled employees spend large parts of the week formatting updates, repeating information in multiple places, chasing approvals, or searching for files, you have found a real opportunity to improve employee productivity without increasing workloads.
The aim is clarity, not surveillance. When measurement is simple and transparent, it becomes a tool for improvement and prioritisation.
Ways to improve productivity in the workplace that create real change
If you want to know how to improve productivity in the workplace, the biggest wins usually come from improving focus and tightening how work moves through the business.
Start with priorities. Many teams feel busy because everything seems urgent. Productivity improves when people are clear on what matters most this week, what success looks like, and what can wait. When priorities are clear, decision-making speeds up and work becomes easier to complete.
Next, look at the process. Most teams can increase output quickly by improving handovers, clarifying ownership, and reducing unnecessary approval steps. Consistency matters here. Once there is a standard way of working, you reduce confusion, cut rework, and make it easier for new people to deliver well.
Meetings are worth reviewing too. Not removing them entirely, but making sure they exist for decisions and collaboration. When updates can happen asynchronously in a shared space, teams often gain hours back each week without losing alignment.
Finally, make knowledge easier to access. If people cannot quickly find documents, decisions, templates, or “how we do this” guidance, they will interrupt each other throughout the day. That constant stopping and starting is a quiet productivity killer.
A few examples of practical changes that often work well:
Reduce the number of places information lives and make one source the default
Use shared templates for recurring work so people start faster and produce consistent outputs
Encourage protected focus time, especially for roles that need deep work
How technology can help improve employee productivity
Technology helps most when it reduces complexity. It should make work easier to do, easier to share, and easier to track.
In many organisations, productivity drops because systems do not work well together. People end up duplicating information across different tools, files become hard to locate, and important decisions get buried in long email threads. When that happens, teams spend more time coordinating than actually moving work forward. Often, simplifying the setup creates immediate relief.
This is where Google Workspace is often a strong foundation. It supports real-time collaboration, keeps documents centralised, and creates a consistent way of working across email, calendars, files, and communication. When teams can work in the same documents and avoid version confusion, coordination becomes smoother and delivery speeds up.
Where AI fits when you are trying to increase employee productivity
AI can be genuinely useful, but it works best when it’s applied to specific, repeatable problems. In most workplaces, the biggest opportunities are reducing repetitive admin and making internal knowledge easier to access.
For example, AI can help teams summarise meetings, turn notes into actions, draft internal updates, and create first drafts of documents. Used well, it saves time and reduces the mental load that comes from constantly switching between small tasks.
Do not layer AI on top of chaos. If workflows are unclear and information is messy, AI won’t fix the underlying issues. But when the foundations are in place, AI becomes a practical way to remove friction and keep work moving.
When it makes sense, Cobry helps organisations use AI in Google Workspace and identify sensible opportunities that genuinely save time and fit the way teams work.
Building a sustainable productivity plan
Long-term productivity improvements come from consistency, not one-off initiatives. A simple rhythm of review, refine, and repeat usually beats big changes that fade after a few weeks.
Start by identifying where friction shows up most often. This might be unclear priorities, slow approvals, duplicated work, meeting overload, or information that’s hard to find. From there, standardise the workflows that happen regularly so work moves in a clear, repeatable way. Once that foundation is in place, introducing the right tools and automation becomes much easier, because you are reinforcing good habits rather than trying to fix chaos.
If you would like support getting more from Google Workspace and exploring practical AI enablements that reduce admin and improve delivery, Cobry can help.
