Improving productivity has always been a central business objective. Better productivity can increase output, profitability, and ultimately help the organization grow without increasing costs proportionally. Yet, despite decades of investing in technology and workplace optimization, inefficiency remains, and it is expensive. In fact, businesses may lose between 20% and 30% of their annual revenue because of low productivity, including duplicated effort and ineffective processes.

The problem is that most companies approach productivity issues with relatively straightforward solutions to produce more in the same amount of time: hire additional employees or increase workload. But in 2026, many organizations are faced with the practical limits of that strategy. Ultimately, labor costs are high, which means that increasing productivity through workforce numbers may still reduce annual revenue.

As a result, productivity discussions need to focus more on removing barriers that make work harder than it needs to be.

A Meeting Culture

Businesses frequently assume employees struggle because they don’t have good time management skills. In reality, the issue is more complex than it seems, and the increasing use of remote teams has not made things easier.

There is a lot to be said about the rise of digital collaboration between teams in different offices. Teams can now connect instantly across offices, cities, and even countries. Yet, the convenience of digital communication also introduced a new problem: online meeting overload.

Many employees now find their calendars filled with recurring meetings and overlapping discussions. Those who don’t attend use AI to take notes and provide a summary. Additionally, there are further discussions following meetings that carry on through chat.

The problem is that sending a meeting invite takes less than a minute. So, it’s easy to involve a large group of people when a meeting only requires the input of a few people.  Digital meeting culture is more difficult to manage than in-person meeting culture. If you don’t have to leave your desk, it doesn’t feel like it is taking time off your day. However, meeting culture costs employees on average over 11 hours a week, which represents around $29,000 per employee per year.

The bottom line: Some meetings could truly have been an email. But the solution is not to replace some meetings with emails. It’s about making sure that the right information is being delivered to the right people and in the right format.

Digital Friction

Technology can also become an obstacle. Digital friction refers to moments when technology creates disruptions instead of removing them. Ultimately, in a world where businesses increasingly rely on digital tools for nearly every aspect of work. When tech doesn’t operate smoothly, it comes at a cost. In fact, digital friction contributes to approximately 470,000 lost business hours linked to tech-related disruption and inefficient digital experiences.

So what does digital friction actually look like in real work life?

• Login errors
• Application crash
• Slow loading times
• Repeated authentication requests
• Poorly connected systems
• Etc.

Individually, these issues tend to appear insignificant and not disruptive. But the problem is that multiple disruptions can happen in a day and repeat hundreds or thousands of times across the employees of the business. Ultimately, logging into a system twice may feel like a minor inconvenience only until you multiply it by the time it costs when it affects multiple employees.

This can be frustrating because tech investments are designed to improve efficiency. But it is worth mentioning that sometimes tech can become the source of inefficiency.

Physical Friction

Businesses often focus heavily on software systems and automation while overlooking how physical comfort affects concentration and performance. Factors such as the workstation setup, repetitive movements, and ergonomics can influence the way employees interact with their work throughout the day.

Even relatively small environmental adjustments can affect daily work experiences. Something as simple as reducing friction when using the mouse by improving the setup and comfort of the workstation can make a big difference. Repeated interactions with a quality setup can instantly improve concentration, comfort, and productivity over time.

Why? Because a movement that may appear frictionless once can hide frictions when repeated hundreds of times throughout the day. These frictions can indirectly have productivity costs through discomfort and time cost.

AI, the Productivity Hero

Artificial intelligence has quickly gained business attention because it addresses one of the most difficult productivity challenges: reducing effort without increasing headcount.

Unlike many previous workplace technologies, AI often produces immediate results. Employees can complete tasks quickly. Additionally, AI can reduce repetitive work and make information more accessible and visible. Businesses that have successfully implemented AI have reported productivity improvements of around 30% to 40%.

The importance of these gains extends beyond time saving. Data-based work is difficult to optimize because many tasks involve decision-making and information gathering. AI is changing this approach by reducing the time required to collect and analyze information, which makes the whole decision-making process easier and faster.

Beware of AI Silos

As businesses adopt more AI tools, another productivity challenge emerges.

Indeed, departments tend to select AI systems independently based on their needs. So, a business may have different AI solutions for different teams. While this may make sense when considering individual teams’ needs, this also creates fragmented environments where information is isolated across multiple tools.

The consequences can include duplicated work, inconsistent information, and low visibility across the organization. That is where businesses are exploring solutions to create more connected environments, such as GTM AI, where workflows, information, and AI systems can operate with shared context.

Productivity gains grow when information can move efficiently across teams.

Productivity Metrics Are Changing

Traditional productivity metrics focus on visible activity, such as hours worked, tasks completed, and output quantity. While these are useful, they can be limited.

Modern work depends heavily on collaboration, information processing, and decision-making, so businesses need metrics that reflect what productivity means in 2026:

• Decision speed
• Workflow continuity (how smoothly work progresses across teams)
• Information accessibility
• Reduced friction
• Employee effort (how much unnecessary work is performed to complete a task)

Productivity and the way businesses approach the productivity challenges in 2026 are changing. In a world that puts technology first, it is essential to make the way we interact with it and how it affects the workplace the central piece of the productivity formula.