If your anxiety around your team’s productivity and workplace efficiency is at an all-time high, you’re not alone.
85% of leaders say that the shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are productive.
Some business leaders have tried to address these concerns with productivity monitoring software. These solutions, however, typically only increase the appearance of productivity, pressuring employees to send emails and schedule unnecessary meetings for the sole purpose of looking busy.
Here’s the thing: Employees are subject to many of the same productivity-sucking traps whether they work in person or remotely. Sending employees back to the office won’t resolve inefficient meetings with unclear next steps, versioning issues on documentation, and miscommunication.
If you want to actually increase productivity (not just the appearance of productivity) in the workplace, you need to dig deeper.
At Lucid, we’ve found that the problem isn’t that workers aren’t spending enough time on their screens or in person. The problem is that workers are spending too much time working inefficiently.
First things first: What is workplace productivity?
One main reason organizations are resorting to in-office mandates and employee tracking software is that they measure productivity by activity, not impact.
And while metrics around keystrokes, hours at a desk, meetings attended, or email activity may indicate a busy employee, they don’t necessarily indicate a productive employee.
Workplace productivity should be thought of as high-impact work that produces tangible business value efficiently—increased revenue, lower operating costs, or customer satisfaction, to name a few. So when employees spend all their time in inefficient meetings or tracking down information in email threads, they may be incredibly busy and incredibly unproductive at the same time; according to a survey conducted by Asana, employees spend 60% of their time on activities that take time away from meaningful work.
To properly gauge productivity, leaders should set clear target outcomes and measure progress toward these outcomes. For the sake of this article, we’ll focus on ways to increase workplace efficiency and productivity to help your organization move faster toward your goals.
“My team has really specific goals we’re trying to accomplish, and it doesn’t matter how we get there, as long as we get there. Establish together what the outcomes you expect are, and let the team use their autonomy to determine the best way to get there.”
—Dan Lawyer, chief product officer, Lucid
What’s really affecting workplace productivity?
Lucid Software commissioned a survey to find out the root cause of productivity and collaboration challenges in the workplace. Here’s what we found:
Workers are wasting time in ineffective meetings and losing momentum afterward
Meetings can be a valuable way to problem-solve and connect, but too many meetings today are either unnecessary or poorly facilitated. Our research shows that 34% of workers feel meetings aren’t productive, and 31% feel that information lost between meetings is a top barrier to innovation.
Employees spend too much time in meetings just trying to get on the same page. And all too often, teams lose momentum after the meeting because next steps and action items aren’t clear.
Workers have too many tools at their disposal
The sudden shift to remote work a few years ago prompted many businesses to adopt new tools in a relatively short period—too many tools, it seems.
Nearly half of the respondents (45%) in our survey use five or more productivity applications at work, and 42% of workers find it frustrating to have too many tools available.
Plus, different teams across the business are using different tools to work together, further intensifying organizational silos. Almost half of the organizations we surveyed lack a standardized way to share documents across their tech stack, leading to versioning issues and knowledge gaps.
Workers can’t find the information they need
Because information is spread across various tools, workers have a hard time knowing where to find the information they need to do their jobs effectively.
In fact, workers reported spending an average of five hours a week looking for project information, and 31% feel that "knowing where to go to get project resources" is an important piece that’s missing from their project processes.
Workers lack clarity around goals, plans, and project status
45% of workers find that not all relevant parties are kept in the loop on projects, which impedes progress. And 30% feel they are missing a clear way to visualize project details like status, process, or assignees.
Without an easy way to see or understand how a project is progressing, teams spend too much time trying to understand where the project is at and what needs to happen next instead of actually moving the project forward.
