Improving team productivity starts by focusing on more than just efficiency. 

When many organizations think of productivity, they often misunderstand efficiency as the sole determinant. While efficiency is a crucial measure of how productive (or not productive) a team is, it’s not the only factor.  

In the article, Process Intervention for Better Productivity, respondents from a recent APQC study believe that effectiveness is the top core component of productivity beyond efficiency. 

Process Efficiency Isn’t Enough For Success

Organizations must ensure performance measurement includes a well-balanced perspective of productivity—which encompasses both effectiveness and efficiency.

Without a balance of both, productivity suffers and may be at risk for the following: 

• Over-Leaned processes—Consider the impact of just-in-time supply chains when the pandemic hit. Supply chain processes were leaned so thinly in the name of efficiency that they were fragile in the face of disruption and many crumbled as a result. 
• A focus on incremental improvements—An exclusive focus on efficiency creates a myopic view of what “better” looks like. Rather than thinking holistically about why they are doing things a certain way and finding ways to really move the needle (for example, by redesigning a process entirely), organizations tend to focus on doing the same things a little bit better. 
• Technology as a silver-bullet solution—When productivity problems are viewed as efficiency problems, organizations tend to look to quick solutions like automation. This inevitably leads to a reliance on technology as a magic bullet rather than working to find and address the root causes of issues in the process. 
• Measuring what’s easy instead of what matters—Efficiency measures are tangible and consequently easier to measure (e.g., costs, cycle times, headcounts, throughput). Organizations struggle with efficacy measures—such as value creation and quality—which creates a vicious cycle that reinforces the focus on efficiency.

5 Tips To Improve Team Productivity

Building a productive team requires establishing the norms and behaviors necessary to balance both efficiency and effectiveness with clear measures and qualitative efforts.

APQC recommends the following actions for improving your team’s productivity: 

1. Use communications. One way to understand both sides of productivity is through regular check-in team meetings. These conversations require prework and provide an opportunity to build trust through open discussion on accomplishments, progress of action items, problem-solving, or recent changes in priorities or context on what could affect current progress.  
2. Empower teams. While micromanagement is tempting, it can also hinder performance. Instead, managers can use the six R’s: respect, results, reason, resources, room, and reinforcement to drive better productivity.
3. Streamline processes. Complex processes make performance management ungainly, which can cause organizations to rely on the simplicity of efficiency measures to manage their productivity. Instead, organizations can streamline their processes to focus attention on critical work and manage its value. Streamlining requires organizations to assess their processes, prioritize based on value, simplify, or remove unnecessary tasks, and keep more details at the lower level in desktop procedures.  
4. Extend methods to look at process value. Lean and Six Sigma methodologies explicitly include the idea of efficacy in their focus on “value”. However, these methodologies tend to be applied in ways that don’t fulfill their full potential. Hence, process and performance teams have recently started to integrate additional methodologies like customer journey mapping and design thinking to move beyond incremental improvements and focus on whether their processes are driving desired results. 
5. Use frameworks and benchmarks. Process frameworks and benchmarking help organizations understand what good looks like. They also provide context for streamlining activities, measure selection, and comparatives for decision-making.

So, when building a productive team, it’s important to balance not only how quickly work is being completed, but how well the work is done. 

Learn more about achieving a solid efficiency/effectiveness productivity balance in Expanding How We Define Productivity.

For more tips and guidance on improving the workplace, team, and individual productivity please visit APQC’s collection, Fixing Knowledge and Process Productivity Problems.