Productivity is firmly back on the agenda.
With economic growth once again dominating political and business conversations, organisations are under increasing pressure to improve performance. The UK’s long-standing productivity challenge has become a familiar talking point, with renewed discussion about how businesses can achieve more with the resources they already have.
It’s an important conversation. But one that often starts in the wrong place.
The question we tend to hear is: How do we make people more productive?
After working with organisations across a wide range of sectors, we’d suggest a different question entirely.
What’s stopping people from being productive already?
It’s a subtle shift, but it leads to a very different conversation.
Most employees don’t come to work intending to waste time. They want to do a good job. They want to make progress, solve problems and contribute something meaningful. Yet many spend large parts of their working day overcoming obstacles that have very little to do with the work itself. That’s why, in our experience, productivity isn’t primarily about encouraging people to work harder. It’s about removing the barriers that stop them doing their best work in the first place.
Looking beyond individual performance
When productivity becomes a concern, it’s understandable that attention often turns towards people. Organisations invest in management development, introduce productivity tools, provide additional training or encourage employees to improve the way they manage their time.
Sometimes those interventions are exactly what’s needed.
But just as often, they overlook a more fundamental issue.
Across the organisations we work with, the biggest barriers to productivity are rarely a lack of capability or motivation. More often, they are built into the way work has gradually evolved. Processes become increasingly complicated, governance expands, technology is layered on top of existing technology and priorities continue to grow while capacity stays the same. None of these changes happen overnight and very few are introduced with the intention of making work harder. Yet over time they create an environment where even highly capable people struggle to work as effectively as they could.
The hidden cost of organisational friction
Although every organisation is different, the patterns we see are remarkably consistent.
People spend time searching for information that should be easy to access. The same data is entered into multiple systems because those systems don’t communicate with one another. Work passes through several layers of approval before decisions can be made. Meetings multiply while time for focused work becomes increasingly scarce. Teams unknowingly duplicate effort because responsibilities have become blurred.
Individually, each of these frustrations can feel relatively minor. Together, they create a significant amount of organisational friction.
We’ve seen this first-hand in client work. An organisation concerned about management capability discovered that many of its managers were spending more time navigating administrative processes than leading their teams. Another found that employees were creating their own workarounds simply because official processes no longer reflected how work actually happened. In both cases, the challenge wasn’t a lack of commitment or skill. It was that the organisation had unintentionally made good work harder than it needed to be.
Removing that friction delivered far greater improvements than asking people to simply work faster or work longer.
Productivity and engagement are part of the same conversation
This is where productivity and employee experience begin to overlap.
The same barriers that reduce organisational performance also shape how people experience work every day.
If employees spend hours chasing approvals, repeating tasks, switching between disconnected systems or trying to reconcile conflicting priorities, they don’t just lose time. They also lose energy. The satisfaction that comes from making progress is gradually replaced by frustration, and the feeling of being able to do great work becomes harder to sustain.
It’s one of the reasons we believe organisations sometimes separate productivity and engagement when they should be thinking about them together.
One team is asked to improve operational performance. Another is tasked with increasing engagement scores. A third focuses on employee experience.
Yet many of the issues they’re trying to solve have the same underlying cause.
When work becomes unnecessarily difficult, productivity suffers because people achieve less. Engagement suffers because the experience of work becomes more frustrating. Improving one often means improving the other.
Perhaps that’s why organisations that consistently achieve high engagement scores also tend to create environments where people can perform at their best. It’s not because engaged people magically become productive. It’s because well-designed work supports both outcomes.
You can’t remove barriers you can’t see
One of the challenges with organisational friction is that much of it is hidden.
Processes often look perfectly sensible on paper. It’s only when you spend time understanding how work actually happens that the gaps begin to emerge. A task that appears straightforward takes three times longer than expected. Employees have developed unofficial workarounds because the formal process no longer fits reality. Valuable time disappears into activities that nobody would deliberately design if they were starting from scratch today.
This is one of the reasons we’re such strong advocates of combining employee feedback with observation. Surveys, interviews and workshops all have an important role to play, but they don’t always reveal where work gets stuck. Sometimes the most valuable insights come from seeing work unfold for yourself. That’s often where the hidden barriers become visible and where the biggest opportunities for improvement begin to emerge.
A different way to think about productivity
As the national conversation around productivity continues, there will rightly be discussion about investment, technology, AI and skills. All of those things have an important role to play.
But perhaps there’s another opportunity that receives far less attention.
Before asking how people can become more productive, it may be worth asking how much of their working day is already being wasted by unnecessary complexity.
Every duplicated process, every avoidable approval, every confusing handover and every disconnected system quietly reduces the amount of time and energy people can devote to work that genuinely adds value.
The organisations that improve productivity most successfully may not be the ones that ask more of their people.
They may simply be the ones that become better at removing the things that stop great work from happening in the first place.
