Is Your Team Productive or Merely Busy?

When I was growing up, one of four kids, my mother used to say, “The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” Running around after us kids, she was often doing a lot of tasks but not making any progress. She was busy, but she recognized that she wasn’t being productive.

As the leader in a midsized company, you’re dealing with a restrictive combination of lean teams, tight budgets, and big growth goals. Productivity is vital to reaching those goals. There’s a lot you can do to support your team in its productivity goals—and you don’t have to wait until the kids grow up.

But what is productivity? It’s easy to confuse it with busyness. People are getting things done, after all. Yet they’re likely not always doing the right things. And they aren’t doing them as efficiently or effectively as they could be.

Before you can help your team become more productive, you first need to recognize when they’re being productive and when they’re just busy.

What Is Productivity?

Productivity is a measure that many companies use to understand the relationship between their input, that is the time, labor, and resources used, and their output, such as the goods and services they sell or the value they offer. By measuring productivity, companies can identify weaknesses and allocate resources more effectively, set more realistic goals, improve workflows, and more.

Stated more simply, productivity is about how well you use your resources to achieve your goals. It’s about focus, efficiency, and task prioritization, with a goal of improving overall company performance.

Busyness, on the other hand, tends to be about the number of hours you work, the number of tasks you complete, and even how exhausted you are. Yes, it’s about doing things but those things don’t necessarily relate to the results you’re aiming for. When you’re busy rather than productive, you’re just checking boxes.

Why Productivity Is Important

When a company optimizes its resource and reduces costs, it can become more competitive in its market. And when it streamlines operations connected to customer needs, it can make its customers happier. Better resource allocation can also mean being able to invest in new products or services.

And productivity is the thing that can help companies get there.

But maybe your company doesn’t have strong growth goals right now. Maybe you’re satisfied right where you are. You can still benefit from productivity by avoiding the costs of simple busyness.

Productivity is part of an employee’s engagement with their work. Gallup reports that disengaged employees cost $8.8 trillion annually in the global economy. Unproductive companies miss out on revenue and opportunities because projects become delayed or so mired in busyness that they fail to launch at all. Employees become discouraged and eventually burn out and quit. Replacing one employee can cost up to two times that employee’s salary, according to Gallup. The more employees you lose, the more it costs you to replace them.

Larger companies generally have the advantage with productivity, says Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in its 2021 Compendium of Productivity Indicators. For midsized businesses looking to compete, every team needs to work as productively as it can. Leaders need to make the most of their resources and every person on the team.

Whatever size team you lead, you can be instrumental in helping your employees improve their efficiency and effectiveness. The first step is identifying where your team isn’t as productive as it could be.

Identifying Unproductive Busyness

Let’s look at several characteristics you can observe to get a sense of how your team is performing.

There can be many reasons for actions that look like busyness, however, and there are other characteristics associated with productivity. Don’t assume; investigate. When you do spot signs of busyness, you can come up with a plan for moving your team toward being more productive.

Helping Your Team Become More Productive

Let’s look at each of the characteristics from the table above.

Communication

• Encourage more open feedback. Lead by example with your own communications. Ask team members directly for their feedback. Be sure everyone in a meeting has a chance to speak.
• Set up good communication protocols. Who should be included in a communication? When during a project should team members communicate? What needs to be communicated?
• Discourage sending messages outside of work hours. A key to productivity is getting enough down time. Help your team protect their time off.
• Use the right tool for the message. Are your current communication tools appropriate for your team? For every message? Would they benefit from having different ways to communicate, depending on the message or the recipient?

Deadlines

• Missed deadlines. Are deadlines too tight for the workload your team carries? Could you create roomier deadlines? Could you redistribute duties or add staff to meet current deadlines?
• Lower-quality work. Could instructions be clarified? Consider checking in part way through the project to identify problems earlier. Could additional training help?

Goals

• Clarify goals. Try using SMART goals or another type of structured goals.
• Check in periodically. Is your team making progress? If not, ask them what they need to help them move forward.
• Avoid micromanaging. It can be hard to perform productively if you’re fearful of being corrected or interrupted every step of the way.

Responsibilities

• Clarify roles and duties. Look at your org chart for any unnecessary duplication.
• Review processes and workflows. Are there unnecessary steps or missing steps that cause delays? What inefficiencies could you help resolve?

Adaptability

• Ask team members individually and as a group what their concerns are about this change. Are there issues you can resolve? Can you relieve their concerns? How can you help them adapt?

Outlook

• Create a culture of wellbeing. Encourage your team to take breaks during the day and their allotted paid time off. Encourage them to take care of themselves at work and outside of it.
• Offer flexible working situations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that employees working at home need just 5.8 hours to do the same work it takes them 7.6 hours in an office to do.
• Deal with toxicity immediately. Be alert for sabotage, manipulation, and negative interactions that will severely harm your team and, by extension, their productivity. Work with the employees involved and bring in HR if necessary.

By implementing these strategies and regularly monitoring progress, you can effectively address productivity problems and create a more efficient, engaged, and high-performing team.

Erin Brenner is the owner of Right Touch Editing, a boutique editorial agency that specializes in helping small and midsize businesses to be more engaging with their audiences, more persuasive in their marketing, and clearer and more precise in their communications.

Erin is also the author of The Chicago Guide for Freelance Editors: How to Take Care of Your Business, Your Clients, and Yourself from Start-Up to Sustainability, Marketing Yourself Guide (with Sarah Hulse), Copyediting’s Grammar Tune-Up Workbook, and 1001 Words for Success: Synonyms, Antonyms & Homonyms. She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute for Editing and Proofreading and a Full Member of ACES. Follow her on LinkedIn and Bluesky.