Feature
Organizations today face a paradox: While digital tools, automation and data are intended to streamline operations, they often create new layers of confusion, fragmentation and inefficiency. The promise of automation has given way to a messier reality in which systems that are supposed to improve work frequently introduce friction instead.
Now, we know just how much. Nearly 60% of workers don’t meet daily productivity goals, a shortfall that represents $11.2 million in untapped capacity annually per 1,000 employees, according to the ActivTrak Productivity Lab's first Workforce Utilization Benchmarks report. The analysis, which examined digital activity data across 5,619 organizations and 304,083 tracked workers, reveals that organizations deliver only 87% of expected output while paying 100% of salaries, creating a gap totaling $2.86 billion in annual losses across the organizations studied.
"Words like 'seamless' and 'automation' are great," said Tyler Higgins, managing director at AArete. "But we typically find manual intervention and misaligned outcomes causing the most significant waste." This disconnect between the promise of digital workplace technologies and their actual impact has created a growing productivity gap that demands fundamental rethinking of how we approach work.
Identifying and Quantifying the Productivity Gap
The data reveal troubling patterns across organization sizes. While 58% of staff fall short of productivity goals (averaging six hours and 50 minutes per day), it’s worse for larger organizations. Organizations with 251 or more employees average seven times the annual productivity loss compared with smaller organizations, with the most-affected companies wasting the equivalent of one in five worker salaries in untapped capacity.
"Productivity deficits are a serious and often underestimated drag on growth, stifling innovation and impeding progress,” Gabriela Mauch, chief customer officer and head of productivity lab at ActivTrak, said in a statement.
The first step toward closing this gap means organizations need to map their digital ecosystem and examine how it fits with people's roles. This diagnostic process shows areas where system integrations are overly complex or ownership is unclear. These silent killers of productivity compound rapidly, especially in large organizations where digital complexity magnifies every inefficiency.
Why Digital Workplace Design Matters
Benchmarking data varies across industries, suggesting that digital workplace design challenges affect sectors differently. Computer hardware organizations show the highest underutilization rates at 71%, while logistics companies demonstrate better performance with only 41% of workers below productivity goals and the lowest untapped capacity at 9%. These disparities point to the importance of industry-specific approaches to digital tool integration and workflow design.
"High performers get frustrated and leave, replaced by people who prefer stability over progress," warned Todd Hagopian, a business transformation expert. "The bigger the company, the more layers of bureaucracy slow everything down." The resulting digital drag not only wastes time but also risks losing top talent who grow frustrated with technological inertia.
Symptoms manifest in familiar ways through our digital tools: redundant meetings scheduled through calendar systems, tool overload across multiple platforms and fragmented communication scattered across email, chat and collaboration software. Yet these are not signs of laziness — they are symptoms of poorly integrated digital systems. "If knowledge workers spend half their day in meetings, but their value comes from focused output, the math won't add up," Higgins said.
From Digital Surveillance to Digital Support
The most effective approach to restoring productivity through technology requires a fundamental shift in perspective from using digital tools to squeeze more out of people to instead using them to remove obstacles. This reframe recognizes that performance issues often stem from how we design and implement our digital workplace technologies rather than from individual failings.
"If more than half your team is falling short, it's not about grit. It's about design," explained Lena McDearmid, CEO of Wryver. This insight challenges the traditional assumption that more digital oversight leads to better performance, an approach that often backfires by adding technological pressure rather than removing friction.
As organizations seek to understand and improve productivity through digital means, the conversation around workplace monitoring must evolve beyond surveillance toward support. Dee Anthony, director at ISG, emphasized the importance of transparency in digital tracking: "Make it clear what's being tracked, why it matters and how the data will (and won't) be used."
"If more than half your team is falling short, it's not about grit. It's about design."
- Lena McDearmid
CEO, Wryver
Anthony also advocates for adopting data-driven insights from digital workplace technologies that reflect actual behavior rather than self-perception. "Digital activity data is more reliable because it captures behavior as it happens," she explained. "It's also detailed and pattern-rich and can capture insights and nuances like task-switching frequency or hidden idle time that surveys often miss."
By analyzing real workplace digital activity data, organizations move beyond aspirational self-reporting to understand genuine performance patterns. This shift from subjective to objective measurement becomes particularly important as Mauch noted in the press release: "As companies navigate slowing growth, margin compression and cost escalation, measuring and optimizing workforce productivity is one of the most effective ways to protect performance and sustain a competitive edge."
Real-time signals from digital tools, such as focus fragmentation, collaboration overload or burnout symptoms, provide a warning before issues escalate. However, the goal is not to create a digital panopticon but to ground performance discussions in reality while maintaining trust. Digital tools should help organizations support rather than suppress the natural fluctuations in attention and energy that are part of knowledge work.
"Underperformance is rarely about effort," McDearmid said. "More often, it's a signal that something deeper isn't working." Rather than defaulting to tighter digital controls, leaders should investigate whether there is a mismatch between technological systems and human needs, or if someone is exhausted by tool overload, isolated by fragmented communication systems or confused by unclear digital workflows.
Designing Digital Systems for Human Success
Real change begins when productivity and wellness are treated as interdependent through thoughtful technology design. This requires simple but powerful practices aided by digital tools: short team huddles using video platforms, regular feedback loops built into project management systems and co-designed plans that let teams test new digital approaches together. These are not dramatic technological overhauls but operational habits that take advantage of existing tools to build momentum and reduce digital noise.
"Most teams want to perform. But the system has to make it possible," said McDearmid. This means conducting regular audits of digital work routines to identify where time is wasted in switching between tools, where decisions get stuck in approval workflows and where priorities become unclear across multiple communication channels. It also requires helping managers evolve into coaches who use digital dashboards not just to track performance but to guide, clarify and problem-solve.
Effective digital productivity solutions must accommodate the diversity of work styles rather than forcing everyone into a uniform technological mold. Not everyone thrives in the traditional 9-to-5 model, and digital tools provide the flexibility to support different working patterns. Organizations need to use their digital systems to find untapped capacity and rethink how work gets assigned through these platforms.
For organizations ready to close the productivity gap, Hagopian advocates for a faster, more agile approach built on digital enablers: rapid improvement cycles supported by real-time data, the 70% rule to avoid decision paralysis in digital workflows and the willingness to abandon low-value activities identified through digital analytics.
"You have to be willing to kill the bottom 20% of activities that are destroying value," Hagopian said. "It's not just about doing more; it's about stopping what doesn't work." Digital workplace technologies help identify these low-value activities and the automation to eliminate them.
The goal is sustainable performance through intelligent technology use. Digital tools should help this focus by automating routine tasks and providing clear signals about where attention is most needed.
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A Smarter Approach to Digital Tools
Ultimately, closing the productivity gap is not about replacing humans with digital tools but about making them work together. Flexible automation, data-guided decision-making through digital platforms and clear performance expectations supported by real-time dashboards help organizations regain focus and deliver value consistently without burning people out.
This integration requires facing the reality of how digital workplace technologies actually function in practice, reducing technological complexity and centering the human experience of working with these tools. When digital systems support people rather than the other way around, sustainable performance becomes possible.
The most successful organizations will be those that close the gap not just with more tools and dashboards, but with transparency, trust and thoughtful design of their entire digital workplace ecosystem.
Editor's Note: Read more about the productivity paradox below:
- To Resolve the Productivity Paradox, We Need to Get Comfortable With Change — Effective change management can move us forward.
- Perplexed About Productivity? You're Not Alone — Leaders cite low productivity as their biggest challenge, but do they even know what to measure?
- 10 Best Productivity Tools to Enhance Efficiency — Discover the best productivity tools of 2024. Learn how to streamline tasks and improve efficiency in your workplace with our guide.