13 Easy Ways to Improve Team Productivity

“My people are always very productive,” said no team leader ever. 

Let’s be real: We all believe our teams could do better, but we often struggle to understand what that better means. More billable hours? Faster task completion? Just putting in more effort? 

Team productivity differs from individual productivity because it doesn’t get better using simple hacks like “Eat the Frog” or “Airplane Mode.” It requires more in-depth (and ongoing) collaboration, communication, and performance management improvements rather than just setting stricter KPIs. 

Learn how to improve team productivity and achieve greater alignment on shared goals with 13 proven tactics. 

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• High team productivity emerges from strong team synergy — aligned, joint efforts in groups with high psychological safety, a strong sense of purpose, and high dependability.

• Some productivity outputs like ‘total hours worked’ or ‘daily desktop activity’ indicate busy work, not good business outcomes. Your team may be “eating” too much productivity junk food without you realizing it.

• Building a culture of sustainable team productivity that brings you closer to your goals requires targeted interventions and ongoing efforts. Start with how you hire people and where you place them. 

• Productivity tools and workplace technologies are a conduit of change, not a self-contained solution. Use technology to identify and fix the causes of low productivity – think fragmented workflows, missing skill sets, or fragmented knowledge management. 

• Work on how you communicate. Coach your people to use async tools, be clear in written updates, and give constructive feedback.

• Build greater trust and improve team dynamics with practices like retrospectives, anonymous well-being surveys, and 1-on-1 feedback sessions. 

• Track a combination of hard and soft productivity metrics to ensure you’re not just optimizing for speed or volume, but also for employee engagement and motivation. 

Team productivity is different from individual productivity

Individual productivity focuses on personal output, while team productivity emphasizes collective success. You may have the most independently productive people in one room, but as a team, they’ll constantly play tug-of-war without proper steering.

Research reveals that individual cognitive ability and personality can impact employee productivity, but they don’t necessarily predict team synergy — a far more important quality. 

Most of you know what it’s like to be part of a great team. You feel understood, appreciated, and supported. This high degree of psychological safety, which Google researchers believe is the cornerstone of high team effectiveness, promotes stronger bonds, better communication, and higher innovation.

People feel safe to try new things, ask questions, and make mistakes. They also know others have “got their back” and are open to helping someone if they’re falling behind.

Productivity is about more than output and revenue

Many managers realize they need to be conductors, steering people in the right direction rather than telling them how to play their act. But it’s easy for doubts to creep in, especially when the C-suite wants hard evidence of a team’s productivity.

Toggl’s 2025 Productivity Index found most companies measure productivity in (sometimes marginal) outputs like ‘task completion rates’, ‘total hours worked’, or ‘daily stand-up meetings’. 

With employee surveillance software flooding the market, there are many things you can (not should) measure — employee screen time, keyboard activity, or eye blink rate.

None of these outputs necessarily equal hard work.  

Asana’s Anatomy of Work Global Index says employees spend 58% of their day on “work about work” — answering Slack messages, doing status check-ins, or sitting in pointless meetings.

This creates a sense and look of “busy” but doesn’t actually move the needle. Effectively, many teams are nourished by productivity junk food, which is as bad as the real stuff. And workplace tools can reinforce this habit.

To boost team productivity, you need to start optimizing inputs. Instead of tracking daily tickets handled by your customer support team or case resolution speed, examine your current processes.

Are there any roadblocks to faster response times, such as a confusing ticketing platform or ineffective handoff workflow between divisions? Do longer issue resolution times always lead to lower customer satisfaction? If your agents excel in providing complex and tailored support, they’re doing an amazing job. 

Because team productivity isn’t one-dimensional, it can’t be measured through blanket metrics like ‘numbers of completed tasks’ and ‘employee utilization rate’, or financial KPIs. 

By reverse-engineering how your people deliver their best work, you can remove blockers, eliminate redundancies, and set better team goals for more precise efforts.

How to improve team productivity

There’s no ‘quick fix’ to improve team productivity. Like other people management activities, productivity coaching requires targeted interventions and ongoing commitment. However, the sooner you start applying the following strategies, the faster you’ll see change. 

1. Hire the right team members

People can’t perform at their best in the wrong role. Sadly, bad hires happen often because only 33% of hiring managers have objective behavioral and cognitive data on candidates.

That third of managers usually rely on skills-based hiring — a strategy that evaluates applicants’ real-world abilities to determine their job fit. This includes hard and soft skills assessments, job knowledge tests, home-based assignments, or in-person case study interviews. 

By getting a good scoop on the person’s skills and personality during hiring, you’ll get team members who onboard faster, perform better, and stay with the company longer.

2. Create a healthy work environment

Few people can do quality work when they’re burnt out, rushed, or otherwise squeezed to work long and hard.

Our brain can only handle 4-5 hours of high cognitive load daily. That capacity shrinks when we are stressed, sleep-deprived, or mentally exhausted from constant stimuli (like endless pings in a work chat). 

Conversely, people in good physical, mental, and emotional health are more likely to be top performers at work. An Oxford University study recently confirmed that a one-point increase in self-reported happiness levels brings a 12% productivity increase among call center workers.

There are several important elements of positive work environments:

• Good employee work-life balance 
• Mutual respect and inclusion 
• High physiological and physical safety 
• Fair, transparent compensation 
• Open communication 
• Regular recognition and appreciation 
• Access to growth opportunities 

….and strong leadership advocacy for all of the above. 

To assess your team’s well-being, run an anonymous survey to detect emerging issues in motivation, workload allocation, and interpersonal dynamics.

3. Play to your team’s strengths

Teams perform better by compounding individual strengths.

Your marketing team may have a talented copywriter whose creativity thrives with guidance from an analytical content strategist. To discover individual strengths in your team, try:

• Skills mapping to understand which extra (under-used) competencies your people have or, on the contrary, need to do better work. 

• Personality testing to evaluate the team’s soft skills and unique quirks that make them click together and shine individually. 

• Team-building activities to shape better group dynamics, build trust, and provide bonding opportunities in a low-pressure setting. 

By understanding and using each member’s unique capabilities, you can improve task allocation, remove collaboration blockers, reduce conflicts, and boost engagement rates. 

4. Set a North Star (and follow it)

Productivity comes from focused attention. A North Star identifies the direction for the team’s brain power and energy. It communicates your company’s vision and mission as one overarching objective, supplying teams with a shared purpose.

A North Star Metric (NSM) can be revenue-based (e.g., annual recurring revenue), growth-efficiency driven (e.g., lifetime value), or customer-focused (e.g., paid subscribers).

For example, B2B software companies focus on converting free individual users to paid team plans. DTC brands obsess about maximizing profit margins for price competitiveness and faster growth. Your NSM can also evolve over time as priorities change.

The North Star metric trickles down as individual goals for different teams.

Lenny Rachitsky, former Product Lead at Airbnb, shared that the company chose a broad NSM of “nights booked”, which seemed too broad. So, he broke this down into input metrics that feed into the bigger goals.

One team was tasked with adding more homes to the platform, another with increasing website traffic, and yet another with optimizing guest conversion rates. All actions aimed to book more nights. This approach aligned teams on the big goal and focused on solving their piece of the puzzle. 

5. Establish a single source of truth

Almost half of digital workers struggle to find the information needed to do their jobs despite (or because of) having a myriad of communication and collaboration tools.

Digital knowledge falls through the cracks and isn’t stored, breeding productivity killers like:

• Limited visibility (Imani has no idea about her team’s capacity) 
• Information asymmetry (Kayla missed an important product update). 
• Institutional knowledge loss (No one knows how to debug code Amir wrote) 
• Lopsided decision-making (Slava made a sales forecast based on outdated data) 

A team knowledge base reduces confusion, improves decision-making, and streamlines collaboration. You can easily build all sorts of wikis, databases, and document logs with Notion, Slite, or Confluence to make knowledge more accessible.

Reinforce the writing habit by encouraging people to block time for creating documentation, templates, and other knowledge assets. 

6. Communicate clearly

Time and again, research into team behaviors and workplace policies proves that effective communication improves team cohesiveness, performance, and satisfaction.

But not all communication is good per se. Helicopter-style check-ins every hour? Nope, won’t move the needle. Vague “Can I ask you something?” Slack messages? Distracting.

Try the BLUF method to improve your written communication. Short for ‘bottom line up front’, this model aims to give the recipient the context to fully address your need or understand the situation without exchanging multiple messages.

Similarly, avoid ambiguous language when describing tasks. Start with an action verb, e.g., Review, Buy, Follow-up, in the title. List extra details in the description, such as what needs to be done, why, and how. Include specific sub-steps if needed and add a deadline.

Team leaders must always communicate clear goals, whether leading a planning meeting or distributing tasks: We need to do X because it’s important for Y, and the best way forward is through Z. 

7. Understand where (and how) to leverage AI

AI productivity tools have been touted by the media as “the next biggest productivity revolution”. 

Buuut…the jury is still out on whether GPTs impact productivity. Among Google survey participants, 45% reported productivity gains. Yet, a survey from Upwork says that 80% of workers believe their workload has increased with Gen AI tools. Not good. 

The truth is somewhere in the middle.

AI-powered automation can generate measurable efficiencies in customer support, marketing, operations, and recruitment processes, among others. However, redundant processes will remain redundant with or without AI. And your decision-making is skewed if teams don’t have a strong data culture.

8. Use workforce optimization tools

There’s no shortage of productivity, time tracking, and time management apps on the market. Each software offers a slightly different take on optimizing workforce performance.

Some apps focus on task scheduling and management. Others help with capacity estimation or workload forecasting. Choose a tool that provides missing insights for your team. 

Consider a to-do list app if your people have trouble prioritizing tasks and planning their days. Struggling with workload visibility or project timelines? Try an app with robust time data analytics features like Toggl Track. 

Toggl Track combines time and task data into a single analytics dashboard, allowing you to easily track team performance across tasks, revenue sources, client profitability, available capacities, and more. 

Learn what’s driving productivity gains (and losses) among your team with real data instead of guestimation. 

9. Give employees the freedom to excel

A productive team isn’t just one that jointly crosses off assigned tasks. It enables each member to take ownership of their work and be autonomous as they solve complex problems. 

A healthy team dynamic means you have regular’ group time’ for brainstorming and collaboration but also offers ample opportunities for deep work — that blissful state of high focus where the best work happens. 

But carving out uninterrupted stretches of work can be hard when there are too many team meetings or the pressure to respond to Slack messages within 10 minutes. 

Follow Shopify’s lead and give your people more room to excel independently. The e-commerce platform canceled almost all of its meetings and switched to async communication. The result? In about half a year the company reclaimed over 322,000 employee hours and said it’s on track to deliver about 25% more projects. 

Another fully remote company, Gumroad, has grown from $4M in annual revenue in 2019 to $22M in revenue in 2024 with a “no meetings” and “no deadlines” policy. Gumroad’s CEO Sahil Lavingia shared several components of his success with fully async work:

1. Everyone writes well and writes a lot. (See our tip 5) 

2. Single North Star metric of maximizing how much money creators earn (See our tip 4) 

3. Strong accountability — “People can work on what’s fun or rely on their intuition because as long as we remain profitable and keep shipping, we tend to get to the important stuff eventually.” 

Don’t be afraid to loosen your hold of the reins. Great work will happen when competent people can communicate clearly, have precise goals, and feel accountable. 

10. Provide feedback regularly

A high degree of team autonomy and individual freedom is important, but so is regular feedback. Employees are 3.6 times more likely to strongly agree they are motivated to do outstanding work when their manager provides daily (vs. annual) feedback.

Regular feedback allows on-the-fly course correction, reducing time and resource waste. It’s also essential for trust and rapport-building. People want to feel acknowledged for their contributions and celebrated for their efforts. Even more so in remote work companies, where loads of actions may seem ‘invisible’. 

Practice two things: 

1. Periodic one-on-one feedback sessions to recognize the person’s successes and provide personalized tips for performance calibration. 

2. Host all-hands meetings where everyone can engage in two-way constructive feedback on the processes, recent irks, or anything else on their mind.  

11. Celebrate wins (and failures)

Borrow a practice from Agile teams — host a retrospective meeting after each major project. 

Retrospectives provide a ‘safe space’ for discussing what went well (aka recognizing everyone’s contribution and successes), what went wrong (without finger-pointing), and brainstorming what can be done better next time. 

Example: You can ask everyone to share what made them feel mad, sad, or glad during the project. Then, drill down to the causes of ‘sadness’ with a 5 Whys analysis and jointly come up with a solution.  

The blameless nature of retrospectives encourages people to speak openly. This reduces mild tensions, promotes bonding, and builds trust. Your team can continuously learn from each other’s experiences and improve their behaviors to deliver even better results. 

12. Upskill and reskill your employees

Productivity dips when people don’t know how to do things differently. They become stuck in routines, using the same tools and techniques for decades. Some upskilling may be in order. 

Create a team skills matrix to analyze which competencies your people already have, which ones they need for their current roles, and how interested they are in improving a specific skill or learning a new one. 

Example: Your business analyst might already dabble into Python coding on the side and would love to get further trained in data science — a skill you’re struggling to hire for. Or you might realize your facility managers need more training on the new digital system — the one you’ve paid a lot for but haven’t yet seen any results. 

By investing in targeted employee development initiatives, you get a greater quality of work today and lower exposure to the skills shortages of tomorrow.  

13. Track the right productivity metrics

To understand what actions drive productivity improvements, gain visibility into how all of these elements affect team productivity. You can quantify the team’s productivity using the following: 

• Project metrics like team velocity, task burndown rate, scope creep, or recourse utilization rate. 

• Quality of work metrics like bug rate, customer satisfaction scores, issue resolution rates, or error rates. 

• Time-based metrics like time to completion, on-time delivery, total billable hours, or utilization rate. 

• Financial metrics like revenue per project, profit per employee, cost per output unit, or billable hours percentages. 

How to measure team productivity

Team productivity is multi-dimensional. You need the right organizational structure, clear communication practices, skill alignment, strong synergy, and the right technology in place. 

This makes productivity measurements more challenging than blanket labeling desktop activity as either “productive” or “unproductive”. To get a clear picture, use a combination of quantitative and qualitative measurement methods. 

• Use time tracking tools to identify organizational inefficiencies, such as meeting madness, broken workflows, or overly ambitious budget allocations.  

• Collect 360-degree feedback from peers, managers, and other stakeholders about the team’s performance levels. 

• Try skills assessment tools to detect mismatches between roles and determine employees’ training needs in your most important business areas. 

• Run an employee engagement survey to assess motivation, job satisfaction, and overall morale.

Your goal is to gain a view into what drives different productivity outputs, like the number of tasks completed per month or revenue generated. Some dips may be explained by skills mismatches, not the perceived employee laziness. Others may be caused by broken workflows, poor cross-team collaboration, or your employees just not feeling jazzed about their work. 

Understand your team’s strengths with Toggl Track insights

With Toggl Track, you can build single-click reports from your team’s time data to decode their productivity trends. You’ll: 

• Learn where efforts get wasted due to inefficiencies 
• Gain more accurate project estimates to manage timelines 
• Monitor and predict task and project duration for better workload allocation 
• Avoid project delivery delays and budget overruns  
• Analyze what your top performers do and share the insights with others 

With Toggl Track, you can learn about your people’s strengths without creeping into their privacy. That’s because we’re strictly anti-surveillance!

With our platform, you’ll quickly optimize team efficiencies by removing actual blockers and instilling greater clarity on your priorities. Book a free team demo to test-drive our data analytics features today.