While company-wide strategies set the vision for an organization’s overall direction, it’s productive teams that bring that vision to life by meeting goals, serving customers and moving the business forward.
That’s why understanding team productivity is critical. How do you compare one team’s performance to another, and what makes one team outperform another? Most importantly, how do you measure and improve team productivity in a way that scales?
In this post, we’ll show you how to measure team productivity and take steps to improve it.
What is team productivity?
Team productivity is the total output of work from a group of people working together toward a shared goal. It measures how much a group of employees produces in a set amount of time, as well as how well they do it. To assess a customer support team’s productivity, for instance, you’d look at the number of tickets closed alongside customer satisfaction scores.
Team productivity goes beyond the performance of individuals — it reflects how effectively a group collaborates. It’s about how well team members align, communicate and support one another to drive meaningful results.
Why is it important to measure team productivity?
Measuring team productivity gives you a more complete view of performance — one that individual productivity metrics alone don’t provide. While tracking hours worked or tasks completed reveals how productive someone seems, it doesn’t tell you how well they contribute to shared goals or function within a team environment.
For example, consider a high-performing employee contributor. They may work efficiently, autonomously and quickly complete tasks. But do they collaborate well? Do they communicate clearly, resolve conflicts and contribute meaningfully in group settings? Without team-level insights, gaps in collaboration, alignment or even trust often go unnoticed.
There’s also the risk of social loafing — a well-documented phenomenon where individuals put in less effort when working in groups. Without measuring team dynamics, it’s hard to pinpoint whether the issue lies with workload distribution, unclear goals or disengagement.
Plus, studying and improving team productivity is good business sense. New hires who collaborate with coworkers from day one are at least 65% more likely than their isolated peers to stay long enough at a company to become productive and profitable.
How to measure team productivity: 5 different methods
While the basic formula for calculating team productivity is straightforward, successfully benchmarking and measuring it is anything but. The good news? Once you get used to assessing and addressing team productivity, those measurements become second nature. And with the latest developments in productivity management software, it’s easy to automate much of the work.
Here are five of the most common methods for measuring productivity at the team level.
1. Productivity measurement software
The simplest, fastest way to measure team productivity is with productivity management software like ActivTrak. This platform analyzes activities across teams and departments and delivers findings in easy-to-understand dashboards.
Using team productivity dashboards allows you to see how much time employees spend on different activities, both at the individual and team level. It shows you the total hours that go into getting a job done, as well as how work is distributed across team members. You’ll also see how productivity levels change based on where people work — a reliable method for measuring remote work against in-office collaboration.
If you want a high degree of accuracy, productivity management software is ideal. These tools automatically collect and analyze employee activity data, allowing you to compare productivity between employees on the same team, or productivity for entirely different teams as a whole.
2. Manual productivity tracking
If you prefer to calculate productivity yourself, you’ll need to maintain spreadsheets and conduct manual analysis. Some of the most common methods include:
- The basic productivity formula: Divide output (what your team produced) by input (what team members did, or which resources they used, to achieve that output). So if it took 100 hours for your IT team to resolve 80 help desk tickets, the calculation would be 100/80 = 1.25 hours per ticket.
- The planned-to-done ratio: Measure the amount of completed work and compare it to the amount originally assigned to your team.
- Cycle time metric: Measure the amount of time it takes to complete a team project from start to finish.
While these productivity measures provide a baseline for understanding team productivity, they won’t tell you the full story, such as why it took longer to complete less work than anticipated. You’ll need to incorporate other methods to answer those underlying questions.
3. Surveys and 360-degree feedback
To use surveys and 360-degree feedback, ask team members to rate each other in areas related to team productivity. Do employees show respect for each other? Do they understand team goals? Do they motivate one another? Sending out regular surveys will help reveal the answers to these questions and others like them.
However, it’s important to note limited responses or personal preferences often skew this data. Team members may give high ratings to employees they work closely with and mark others lower on the scale, simply because they haven’t had the opportunity to collaborate with them yet. This method also means adding tasks to team members’ to-do lists, which may limit their willingness or ability to answer fully.
4. Progress toward team goals
This method works well for teams with clearly defined goals and timelines. Start with the number of objectives your team set at the start of the month, quarter or year. Then calculate the percentage completed when your specified period ends. If your marketing team set a goal to create 10 new landing pages and ended the quarter with nine, this calculation tells you the team reached 90% of its goal.
When combined with surveys and 360-degree feedback, this method shows you how different team dynamics impact results. It also tells you when it’s time to change course. A team that repeatedly falls short of goals may need to get better at collaborating, or they may be overworked and need your help redistributing unbalanced workloads.
5. Focus time vs distractions
Another way to measure team productivity is to look at how team members spend their time. Why? Because while collaboration is key, not all team performance happens when everyone’s in the same room. For employees to achieve goals together, they must first devote individual time to critical thinking and deep work.
Start by calculating how much time your team spends in meetings. Then look at how many of those meetings are unnecessary or ineffective to see if team productivity is suffering as a result. If you use productivity management software, look at website and application usage dashboards to gauge how much time goes to productivity-draining distractions like endless team chats or constant pings. These metrics help you understand if you need to protect individual focus time, ensuring the time team members do spend together is actually productive.
Tips for improving team productivity
Once you decide how to measure team productivity, the next step is improvement. While every organization is different, here are some ways to improve team productivity:
- Support collaboration with the right tools, processes and policies
- Provide opportunities for feedback, allowing team members to learn from each other and align better
- Set clear goals and expectations so everyone understands priorities and what they’re working toward
- Create transparency and accountability so people know what success looks like and hold each other to standards
- Reduce friction and remove obstacles that slow down work processes
- Get more out of meetings by reducing unnecessary ones, limiting participants and ensuring all meetings have an agenda and stay on schedule
- Provide employees with opportunities for training and development, especially cross-team
- Consolidate tools so team members don’t have to navigate unfamiliar apps when collaborating on projects
- Fix unbalanced workloads so nobody is overburdened or underworked
- Recognize and reward good performance to reinforce positive behaviors and motivate the team
- Promote work‑life balance to prevent burnout and ensure sustainable productivity
Measure team productivity with ActivTrak’s award-winning software
Measure team productivity at your organization with real-time, actionable insights from ActivTrak. . Our award-winning productivity management platform provides the insights you need to enhance employee engagement, performance and well-being at your organization. More than 9,500 customers use it to:
- See how teams progress toward daily productivity goals
- Compare current progress to past productivity trends
- Balance workloads across team members
Request a demo for a behind-the-scenes look at ActivTrak’s team management dashboards and learn how to start tracking and improving team productivity today.
