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Increase productivity by better understanding how work actually flows
Productivity is not just about working harder or checking off more tasks. In organizations, productivity emerges especially when employees know what is important, have sufficient energy, collaborate well, and don’t get stuck in unclear processes.
With a productivity survey from Deepler, you make visible where work flows smoothly and where time, focus, or quality is lost. This way, you not only discover whether teams are productive, but especially which circumstances help or hinder productivity.
- Discover where productivity in teams is hindered
- Measure focus, collaboration, priorities, and work processes
- Translate signals into targeted improvement actions
Productivity: what does it mean and how can you increase it?
Many organizations want to increase productivity, but immediately start with solutions: new tools, stricter targets, or more efficient processes. That seems logical, but without a good understanding of the causes, it often remains symptom management.
Low productivity can result from work pressure, unclear priorities, poor handoffs, too many meetings, poor collaboration, or lack of ownership. A good productivity survey helps make those causes visible.
In this article we explain:
- What productivity means within an organization
- How to measure employee productivity
- Which factors increase or decrease productivity
- How to recognize low productivity in teams
- How Deepler helps to improve productivity in a targeted way
Table of contents
What is productivity?
Productivity describes the relationship between what is invested and what it yields. In an organization, it’s not just about how many hours employees work, but especially about the value that emerges from those hours.
A team can be busy without actually being productive. Think of lots of meetings, many loose questions, lots of rework, or activities that overlap. Productivity becomes stronger when employees have clear goals, know what the priority is, and can do their work without unnecessary obstacles.
Measuring employee productivity without a control culture
Measuring productivity doesn’t have to mean controlling individual performance. In fact, it often backfires.
A good survey looks at the conditions under which employees do their work. Can they work focused? Is it clear what is expected?
Do processes connect smoothly? Is there enough room to deliver quality? This makes productivity a conversation about work improvement, not about mistrust.
Calculating labor productivity
Labor productivity is the ratio between what is produced and the labor needed to produce it:
- Formula: labor productivity = output ÷ input
- Output: for example revenue, the number of orders processed or products delivered
- Input: for example hours worked or the number of FTEs
- Example: in one week, a team handles 600 requests in 300 hours. Its productivity is then 2 requests per hour.
Note: the formula says nothing about quality, and works poorly for knowledge work, where output is hard to count.
Measuring productivity in knowledge work
In many roles, productivity can’t be captured in units or hours. So combine hard and soft indicators:
- Results: goals achieved, lead time and quality of work
- Working conditions: perceived focus, clarity of priorities and workload
- Obstacles: time lost to meetings, interruptions, waiting and rework
It is the last two that show why a team is less productive than it could be, and they are best asked of employees themselves.
Why is productivity important?
Productivity largely determines how much momentum an organization has. When teams work productively, goals are achieved faster, frustration decreases, and there is more room for improvement.
But when productivity is low, it often feels like everyone is busy while little progress is being made. That’s not only inefficient, but also demoralizing. Employees become exhausted from work that costs a lot of energy but yields little.
Increasing productivity provides organizations with various benefits
Productivity is influenced by priorities, work processes, collaboration, focus, available resources, and the way time and energy are deployed. Precisely because productivity is often linked to multiple factors, it’s difficult to steer on output alone. A productivity survey makes visible where employees experience obstacles and which aspects of the work environment need attention.
1. More results from the same capacity
In a tight labor market, additional staff is not always the solution. By better understanding where time and energy are lost, you can get more value from the capacity you already have.
2. Less time lost due to unclear communication
When employees don’t know what the priority is, lots of switching, waiting, and re-coordinating occurs. A productivity survey shows where unclear communication slows down work and where better agreements are needed.
3. Better collaboration within and between teams
Productivity often depends on others. If handoffs are difficult or teams work at cross purposes, delays arise. By measuring collaboration in a targeted way, you see where coordination can be smarter.
4. Earlier detection of low productivity in teams
Low productivity in a team is not always visible in numbers. Sometimes you mainly see busyness, frustration, or declining quality. Research helps to recognize early where support is needed.
5. Better control over improving productivity
Improving productivity only works if you know which factors have influence. With clear insights, you can make targeted choices in processes, meetings, leadership, and task allocation.
Conduct your productivity survey with Deepler’s software
With Deepler, you investigate which factors influence productivity within teams. Employees easily provide feedback on focus, collaboration, work processes, priorities, work pressure, and support from managers.
The results are translated into clear dashboards, so HR, management, and leaders see where productivity is strengthened and where obstacles exist. This ensures the survey doesn’t get stuck in general conclusions, but creates a concrete picture of what each team needs.
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Causes of low productivity in teams
Low productivity is rarely down to effort. It usually lies in the conditions people work in. These are the causes that come up most often:
- Unclear priorities: everything is important, so nothing gets real attention
- Too many meetings: meetings without a clear purpose eat up focus time
- Interruptions and distractions: notifications, ad hoc questions and switching between tasks
- Workload and fatigue: structurally too much work drains energy and quality
- Clunky processes and tools: duplicate work, manual steps and systems that don’t work together
- Dependencies: waiting for information or approval from others
- Little autonomy and recognition: employees can’t organize their own work or don’t feel seen
Which causes apply to you differs per team. That is why the best way to increase productivity is to start by asking where employees themselves lose time and energy.
A powerful tool for better organizational design
Productivity is not a separate HR topic. It touches strategy, leadership, processes, collaboration, and work pressure.
That’s precisely why it’s important to investigate it broadly. A team that seems unproductive might actually be suffering from unrealistic priorities, poor tooling, or structural understaffing.
With Deepler, you map that context. This way, you prevent productivity from being reduced to individual effort, when the real solution often lies in work design.
What are the benefits of a productivity survey?
A productivity survey gives direction to improvement. It shows where teams lose energy, where processes can be smarter, and where managers need to provide more clarity.
This makes increasing productivity not an abstract goal, but a concrete improvement process. The results help make choices: what do we tackle first, who owns it, and how do we measure whether work actually improves?
More targeted steering on focus and priority
Productivity quickly drops when everything is important at once. Employees become fragmented, teams mainly react to daily pressures, and strategic goals fade into the background.
A productivity survey shows whether employees know what the priority is and whether they have enough room to work on the right tasks. This makes it easier to bring focus back into the organization.
Work more efficiently without pushing harder
Many organizations try to increase productivity by increasing pressure. This can work temporarily, but often leads to exhaustion, resistance, or lower quality.
Deepler helps make visible which obstacles limit productivity. Think of unclear processes, too many meetings, poor handoffs, or dependencies between teams. By addressing those causes, you improve the way of working instead of just increasing pressure on people.
More ownership in teams
Teams become more productive when they understand the goal and can contribute ideas for improvement. A survey gives employees language to indicate where work gets stuck.
This increases ownership: not only managers see what can be better, but teams can contribute to solutions themselves. This creates productivity improvement that is not imposed from above, but carried by the practice itself.
Increasing employee productivity: 8 tips
Increasing productivity in an organization is different from personal productivity hacks. It is about the conditions in which teams do their work. With these eight tips, you take the brakes off without pushing harder.
1. Map where time is lost
Ask employees where they get stuck: in meetings, waiting time, unclear assignments or systems. That way you tackle the real causes instead of the symptoms.
2. Make priorities clear
Translate organizational goals into a limited number of team priorities. When everyone knows what matters most right now, much of the switching and coordinating disappears.
3. Protect focus time
Agree on fixed blocks for concentrated work, such as a meeting-free morning. Make clear agreements about availability, so not every question needs an immediate answer.
4. Meet less, and better
Give every meeting a purpose, an agenda and a fixed duration. Drop recurring meetings that no longer add value, and replace status meetings with a short written update.
5. Simplify processes and tools
Look at where duplicate work, manual steps or separate systems cost time. Automate what you can, and make sure information is kept in one place that is easy to find.
6. Keep workload in balance
Structurally too much work lowers productivity over time, because energy and quality decline. Keep an eye on workload per team. Read more on our page about measuring and reducing workload.
7. Give autonomy and room for development
Employees who can decide how to organize their work, and who can grow in their profession, are more motivated. Invest in training and let teams help shape improvements.
8. Show appreciation and give feedback
Recognition and regular feedback keep people engaged. Make feedback part of the work, not just of the annual review. Also read how to improve performance management with real-time feedback.
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Jonathan
Manager,
UWV
“What makes Deepler special is that it doesn’t get stuck in numbers. It helps you immediately understand where it is and what teams need. For us, this ensured that employees themselves came up with areas for improvement and took responsibility for them. The insights were sharp and useful, but most importantly: the conversation that started afterwards made the difference. Thanks to Deepler, we didn’t get a paper plan, but change that was supported by the people themselves.”
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Amadeus
COO,
OSRE
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Is a productivity survey mandatory?
A productivity survey is not legally required in the Netherlands. Yet it can strongly contribute to good employment practices and effective organizational policy.
Productivity touches on issues such as work pressure, work processes, leadership, and sustainable employability. When employees consistently get stuck or lose lots of energy to inefficient work, it can ultimately affect motivation, quality, and absenteeism. By carefully investigating productivity, you gain a better understanding of the conditions under which employees perform their work.
Is a productivity survey anonymous?
In a productivity survey, anonymity is important because employees might otherwise give socially desirable answers. Nobody wants to be seen as unproductive or create the impression that the team is not functioning well.
That’s why it’s wise to report results at group level and clearly communicate that the survey is about work factors, not individual performance evaluation. This creates more space for honest feedback about processes, priorities, and collaboration.
What about GDPR and privacy when measuring productivity?
When measuring productivity, you must handle personal data and traceable information carefully. Especially when feedback is combined with team, job role, or department data, it’s important that reports cannot be traced back to individual employees.
A good productivity survey works with clear objectives, minimal data collection, and reporting at an appropriate aggregation level. The goal is not to monitor individual output, but to make organizational patterns visible that affect productivity.
What is the role of HR, management, and leaders?
HR monitors survey quality, communication, and follow-up. Management determines why productivity is being surveyed and what strategic choices are connected to it.
Leaders play a crucial role in translating results to teams. They discuss the results, identify practical obstacles, and help refine priorities.
Employees provide input from daily practice. It’s precisely this combination of perspectives that makes it possible to not only measure productivity, but actually improve it.
Why do many organizations still conduct a productivity survey?
Many organizations notice that working harder doesn’t automatically lead to better results. There are meetings, coordination, reporting, and adjustments, but progress still lags behind.
A productivity survey helps break that pattern. It makes visible where work gets stuck, where energy is wasted, and which improvements have the most impact. This turns increasing productivity into a collective search for smarter work, not a demand to simply do more.
How to get more out of your productivity survey
Focus on work factors, not blame
Survey productivity from the question: what helps or hinders people from doing good work? This prevents the survey from feeling like an evaluation and increases the chances of honest answers.
Connect productivity with quality
More output is not automatically better. So also ask about rework, errors, clarity, and handoffs. Productivity only becomes valuable when speed and quality improve together.
Make improvements small and actionable
Don’t immediately opt for a large efficiency program. Start with one or two concrete obstacles per team, such as meeting structure, prioritization, or task distribution. Small improvements often deliver quick visible results.
Do’s of a productivity survey
A good productivity survey requires a careful approach. The topic can be sensitive because employees quickly link productivity to evaluation. Make it clear that the survey is intended to better organize work.
- Explain why productivity is being surveyed
- Ask about concrete work obstacles and conditions
- Combine results with team conversations
- Report at group level and avoid individual evaluation
- Translate insights into small, measurable improvement actions
Don’ts of a productivity survey
- Don’t use the survey as performance control on individuals
- Don’t measure only output without looking at quality
- Don’t draw conclusions without understanding the work context
- Don’t make productivity synonymous with working harder
- Don’t collect data you don’t need for improvement
What do you do with the results of a productivity survey?
The results of a productivity survey only become valuable when they lead to better choices in work. A productivity score alone says little.
The real value lies in understanding the causes: where do people lose focus, which processes take unnecessarily long, where is clarity lacking, and which dependencies slow down work? By carefully following up on the results, you prevent productivity from remaining an abstract management topic.
Converting insights into action
Now that you understand where productivity is being held back, it’s time to implement targeted measures. This doesn’t always mean major changes: often it’s about purposeful improvements in processes, communication or work structure. You focus on the bottlenecks that have the most impact and that your team can address directly.
The key to success is not to see this as a one-time project, but as part of a continuous improvement cycle. By regularly feeding back results to teams, clearly defining agreements and monitoring progress, you build an organization where work runs more effectively and employees can reach their full potential. We have identified 6 follow-up steps for you that you can implement immediately:
Want to know how to recognize work stress earlier, before it affects productivity? Read our article:
From absence figures to early signals: spotting work stress sooner
Analyze where productivity is being slowed down
Don’t just look at average scores, but at differences between teams, functions, or processes. Look for patterns in focus, priorities, collaboration, and workload.
Determine which obstacles have the most impact
Not every bottleneck is equally important. Choose the causes that affect many employees or have direct impact on quality, speed, or customer value.
Discuss results with teams
Use the outcomes as a starting point for a conversation. Ask employees which examples they recognize and which solutions they think are feasible in daily practice.
Make actions concrete and measurable
Translate insights into agreements, such as fewer meetings, clearer priorities, better handovers, or more defined role allocation. Make it clear for each action who is responsible.
Choose focus instead of everything at once
Improving productivity doesn’t work if every bottleneck is addressed simultaneously. Start with the biggest energy drain or bottleneck and build from there.
Keep monitoring whether work is running better
Measure again over time whether employees experience more focus, clarity, and collaboration. This shows whether improvements actually have an impact on work practice.
Make productivity discussable with insight into daily work
With Deepler, managers and HR see where productivity is supported or hindered. Dashboards show which topics require attention per team, such as priorities, collaboration, workload, or processes. This creates a concrete conversation about working smarter, without it being about individual monitoring.
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Frequently asked questions
What is productivity?
Productivity is the ratio between input and output. Within organizations, it’s not just about how much work employees do, but especially about how much value that work delivers. Good productivity means that people can spend their time and energy on work that contributes to clear goals.
What does productivity mean in the workplace?
Workplace productivity is about how smoothly work is executed. Think of focus, collaboration, clear priorities, good processes and adequate support. When these factors are missing, employees can be very busy while actual progress remains low.
How can you increase productivity?
Increasing productivity starts with understanding where productivity is being slowed down. Investigate where time is lost, which processes are sluggish, where priorities are unclear and which teams have a lot of rework. Then you can make targeted improvements in consultation, task distribution, decision-making or support.
How can you calculate productivity?
Productivity is often calculated by dividing output by input. In organizations, this is more difficult, because not all value is easy to capture in numbers. Therefore, it is wise to combine quantitative data with feedback on quality, collaboration, focus and work processes.
Can an employer measure productivity?
An employer may measure productivity, but must do so carefully regarding privacy, proportionality and purpose. Only measure what is necessary, be transparent about the purpose and prevent employees from being unnecessarily monitored individually. In organizational research, the emphasis is on improving work factors.
How do you improve employee productivity?
You improve employee productivity by strengthening the conditions for good work. Ensure clear goals, achievable priorities, good collaboration, appropriate support and processes that don’t unnecessarily slow things down. A survey helps determine which conditions need the most attention.
What are causes of low productivity in a team?
Low productivity can arise from unclear priorities, too much ad-hoc work, poor handovers, unnecessary meetings, poor collaboration, high workload or insufficient leadership. Often it is not one cause, but a combination of factors that reinforce each other.
What is the difference between productivity and workload?
Workload is about the experienced burden of work. Productivity is about what the work delivers in relation to the effort. They are related: high workload can reduce productivity, but low productivity can also cause additional workload because tasks pile up.
What questions do you ask in a productivity survey?
Good questions focus on influenceable work factors. Examples are: I know which priorities are important; I can work sufficiently focused; Meetings contribute to my work; Handovers between teams run smoothly; I have the tools to do my work well.
How often should you measure productivity?
That depends on the situation. With major changes, growth or low team results, more frequent measurement is useful.
In stable periods, productivity can be part of a broader periodic employee survey. What’s important is that you follow up on results before measuring again.
How do you ensure employees answer honestly about productivity?
Honest answers emerge when employees understand that the survey is not intended as individual performance measurement. Communicate clearly that it is about work factors, report at group level and show what improvement actions follow. Trust is essential on this topic.
How do you prevent productivity measurement from feeling like monitoring?
Make it clear from the start that the research is about circumstances that enable productivity, not about individual accountability. Ask questions about focus, collaboration, processes, priorities, and obstacles. Share results at group level and visibly provide feedback on which improvements are being implemented.
What role does leadership play in productivity?
Leadership has a significant impact on productivity. Managers partly determine how clear goals are, how decisions are made, how much space employees get, and how well obstacles are removed. Strong leadership helps teams maintain focus and direct their energy toward work that truly contributes.
What is labor productivity?
Labor productivity is the ratio between employees’ output and the labor needed to achieve it, for example revenue or orders processed per hour worked or per FTE. It is a useful measure for production work, but says little about quality and knowledge work.
What is the difference between productivity and efficiency?
Productivity is about how much value you deliver with the time and people available. Efficiency is about how little time or resources you waste doing so. A team can work efficiently on the wrong work; real productivity also requires the right priorities.
How do you measure productivity in knowledge work?
In knowledge work, you combine results, such as goals achieved, lead time and quality, with employees’ experience: how much focus time they have, how clear priorities are and where time is lost to meetings or waiting.
Do fewer meetings help to increase productivity?
Often, yes. Meetings without a clear purpose cost focus time and interrupt concentrated work. By giving meetings a purpose, an agenda and a fixed duration, and sharing status updates in writing, teams have more time left for the work itself.
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