Busy doesn’t always equal productive.
Just ask your inbox.
We all know the feeling of losing a day to our emails or admin – and while those days are ok once in a while, they’re not a true measure of employee productivity.
Instead, organisations should measure productivity as the value its employees deliver. Not how much they do, but how effectively they do it. And guess who’s a key influence on employee productivity?
The HR team. So, um, you.
HR teams drive productivity every day through the tools they roll out, the policies they set, and the culture they create. They also shape what productivity itself actually looks like, through setting how expectations are set, how it's measured, and how it’s communicated.
Productivity is the natural outcome of these foundations being in place. Productive employees are consistently able to do their best work over time, and everyone from new hires to managers to investors stays happy.
That all sounds well and good – but figuring out how to improve employee productivity in a way that actually sticks is another matter. And that’s what we’ll be running through today.
Coming up: why employee productivity matters, how to measure it, and strategies to improve it. Plus, what not to do as well.
By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll know exactly how to give your team the clarity, autonomy, tools, and systems that remove friction and allow them to do their best work. Let’s go.
Why employee productivity matters to business success
Before we get into the nitty gritty of how to improve employee productivity, let’s talk about why we should care.
When employees are set up to do their best work, you’ll see improvements: faster project delivery, better service, and fewer mistakes. Over time, that adds up to better business outcomes: stronger performance, happier customers, and more sustainable growth.
Companies with higher productivity also tend to see lower turnover and stronger engagement — both key drivers of long-term success.
And if employees aren’t productive?
Standards start to slip. Teams miss targets and deliver more slowly. Quality creeps down, and time and resource needed creeps up.
And this, shocker, isn’t a good feeling for anyone. One unproductive team can drag others down, and create ripple effects across the whole business. Cue employees subtly Googling ‘exit interview best practice’ on their lunch breaks, and a damaged employer brand.
So, what makes one team fly while another falls behind?
It’s tempting to credit a star player or blame a clash between colleagues. But those are surface-level factors. The real blockers often stick around longer: think overloaded line managers, unclear expectations, or clunky external tools.
Put too many barriers to good work in your teams’ ways, and the good work simply won’t happen.
How HR can measure productivity effectively
If you’ve been tasked with improving employee productivity, you first need to understand what you’re working with. And that means measuring where your organisation is at now.
Productivity is often misunderstood and mismeasured. Time-tracking tools or dashboards show busyness – not value or quality.
Think of a customer support team being judged by how fast they close tickets rather than how well they solve problems. The result? Happy dashboards, unhappy customers.
Instead, you need to get under the surface:
- Focus on outcomes: look at the quality and impact of work delivered, not just hours worked or tasks ticked off
- Use a mix of data types: blend metrics (like project delivery times or error rates) with signals (like feedback from managers and employees)
- Ask the right questions: you’re looking for blockers, bottlenecks, or clarity gaps, which means questions like “What always takes longer than it should?” or “Are expectations clear?”
- Adapt measurement to each team: what works for engineering won’t work for marketing. Tailor metrics to what “great work” looks like in context
- Make it collaborative, not top down: work with managers and teams to define what success looks like. They know their roles best
Tools to measure employee productivity
Tools that make the process easier and faster include:
- Project management tools (Asana, Trello): task progress, team workload, and delivery timelines indicate output consistency
- HRIS platforms with performance tracking (HiBob, Lattice): built-in feedback loops and OKR tracking help assess alignment and contribution
- Employee engagement platforms (Peakon, Leapsome): capture sentiment, motivation, and clarity
- Time analytics tools (Clockify, Timely): use carefully. They can show where the time goes, but they’re not a sole indicator of performance
- Feedback tools (Officevibe, Polly): help uncover blockers and team dynamics
Metrics to measure employee productivity
Commonly used to measure employee productivity include:
- Goal or OKR completion rate: are individuals and teams consistently hitting what they set out to do?
- Quality indicators: are error rates low? Customer satisfaction scores high?
- Turnaround time: how long does it take to complete key tasks or processes?
- Engagement scores: are people motivated and set up to succeed?
Balance these quantitative data pieces with qualitative data. Qualitative data tells you why things aren’t working as they should – you’ll see it in feedback, frustrations, and patterns in people’s language.
Need an example? Let’s say you picked up on a sudden drop in output a couple of months ago. You assume it’s underperformance or disengagement. Once you’ve talked to the team, however, you understand performance dropped when a new system was introduced – without any training.
Collecting feedback and finding bottlenecks
Go beyond the spreadsheets by:
- Ditching the 50-person surveys: who has time for these? Quick pulse surveys are the way to go
- Asking managers: not just “How’s performance?” but “What’s stopping your team from moving faster?” or “What do they have to work around just to get stuff done?”
- Making it safe to be honest: this might look like using an anonymous tool so teams can flag problems without worrying
- Watching where work gets stuck: if the same handoff, sign-off, or system keeps being flagged as causing delays, you’ve found yourself a bottleneck
How to improve employee productivity: 6 strategies
So, now we’ve done all the preliminary work: what is the best way to increase employee productivity?
There’s no one ‘best way’ or magic bullet to employee productivity (sorry). But you can start by removing friction from your employees.
Let’s take a look at ways for you to remove blockers to productivity.
1. Flexible work policies
Flexible work isn’t just about working from home. It’s being able to start later so you can do the school run. Giving employees the ability to block out focus time without repercussions. Letting caregivers work compressed hours.
When people can work in ways that suit their energy, environment, and role, they’ll think more clearly, produce better work, and make fewer mistakes.
The 2022 UK four-day workweek trial is a great example of the results flexible working can deliver. By 2024, 89% of businesses still had it in place and reported greater efficiency as a benefit.
2. Greater autonomy
Autonomy means trusting someone to choose how they hit a goal. For example, letting a recruiter tweak their outreach process, or a manager try a new way of running experiments – without needing three layers of approval. When people feel trusted to manage their time and make decisions, they show up better and have more time to actually get work done.
3. Performance management and feedback
Performance management isn’t just about forms and ratings. It’s about clarity, consistency, and helping people grow.
Regular feedback helps employees understand what great work looks like, where they’re adding value, and what they need to improve – before it becomes a problem.
In practice, this might look like a monthly check-in to track priorities, a mid-project review to course-correct in real time, or an in-the-moment piece of feedback from a manager.
When performance management is prioritised from the start, it becomes less about solving a problem and more about stopping these problems from arising in the first place. Forward-thinking, that.
4. Learning & development
If someone doesn’t know how to do something, they won’t do it well. Regular training gives employees the skills, context, and confidence they need to work productively. This could look like:
- Teaching new hires where to find key information, and how to use key tools and tech
- Teaching managers how to give meaningful feedback
- A team lead upskilling in project delivery, so they can improve performance across the team
L&D initiatives should go beyond what’s mandatory (compliance training, for example), and be tied to real challenges to remove friction.
5. Employee engagement and culture
Wondering how employee engagement increases productivity? Engaged employees care more, think deeper, and stick around longer. And culture is what sets the tone: are people supported, trusted, clear on what matters?
Are check-ins genuine? Do people feel safe flagging blockers? Are managers encouraged to hire for culture and performance, not choose between the two?
When people feel valued and connected to their work, productivity isn’t something you have to chase. It happens naturally.
6. Tools and tech
Teams need to be set up with the right equipment to do their jobs. Period.
If your team’s battling with employee productivity tools that aren’t actually productive, manual processes, bad UX, or terrible customer support, they’re going to struggle to be truly productive. We should know: our desire for a better background checking tool is why we built Zinc in the first place!
We’d encourage you to look at your tech stack as a whole, too. If your team has to bounce between 5 different tools (that’s 5 logins, 5 forgotten passwords…you get the picture) to get a key task done, you know what the problem is.
What not to do
Now, we’d hope the following are obvious to most – but every leader in a business should self-assess.
Micromanagement
This one’s easy. If a marketer writes a draft and their manager rewrites it line by line instead of giving feedback, time’s been wasted, morale’s been lowered, and next time, they’ll wait to be told what to do rather than pressing on.
Focusing only on output
You have to get to the root of a problem to make meaningful change. For example, if a poorly-performing team’s bogged down in admin, try introducing a tool to reduce it rather than pushing harder.
Charlotte Egan, Talent Acquisition Optimisation & Data Manager at John Lewis did just that when she introduced a new knowledge platform to reduce time spent firefighting. The results? “Quick wins that make a big difference” and changes that “really make someone’s day easier”.
Ignoring team-specific needs
When you ignore team-specific needs, you risk creating processes that don’t serve the people they’re designed for. For example, a hiring manager might hold valuable insight into where their productivity is blocked — but they’re not brought into the conversation early enough.
Standardising processes can feel efficient. But one policy, one tool, and one way of working for everyone is only going to cause friction. What looks good on a spreadsheet can be messy in real life.
Good news: you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to improve employee productivity. Just make sure the one you already have can turn smoothly.
Want more ideas from HR teams doing things differently? Join The Herd – our community for HR leaders like you – today.
