When an employee underperforms, it’s easy to spot the missed deadlines, the dip in output, or the disengaged demeanor in meetings. What’s harder to see is what’s really going on beneath the surface.
Improving employee performance, then, isn’t just about implementing better systems or clearer KPIs. It’s about reigniting belief in the work, the mission, and most importantly, in themselves. It’s also about recognizing that every team member is a living, breathing, feeling human being navigating invisible battles.
When we address the root causes with compassion, honesty, and strategy, we don’t just get better performance, we build better people.
This blog covers all of it in detail.
What Is Employee Performance?
Employee performance refers to how well an individual fulfills their job responsibilities and contributes to organizational goals. It is a measure of the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of the work completed by an employee within a given time frame.
Employees who understand their roles, are motivated, and are aligned with the company’s mission tend to perform better. Their output reflects consistency, initiative, problem-solving skills, and the ability to adapt to change.
Unlike the common notion, employee performance doesn’t directly point to how capable a person is. There are a ton of factors influencing how much an employee contributes to the organization, and how they go above and beyond without anyone having to ask them to. Performance and potential are two different things, and more often than not, performance issues can be treated, and the employee can be turned into an asset for your organization.
Common Causes of Employee Underperformance
When people are doing the bare minimum in a team and fly under the radar, it sends the wrong message to those actually working to their fullest potential. That’s why, as a manager, you need to measure each employee’s contribution, measure their performance against the goals you’ve set for your team and for themselves.
Procrastinating and not taking action on underperformance is a huge mistake. It can quickly bring your morale down. When you see someone going off track, or slowing down than usual, or missing deadlines consistently, it’s definitely time to sit down and have a conversation with them, as a human and as a professional.
Don’t ignore the problem. If you do, you’re subconsciously signaling to the underperforming individual and the team that it is okay to underperform. Talk to the underperformer and understand what’s going on.
Here are a few common reasons why someone may be underperforming:
1. Workplace Tension
If people in your team have a worrisome power dynamic and don’t get along with each other very well, they are just working as a group of people, not as a real team. If they don’t talk freely or there’s a toxic environment prevailing, employees won’t be able to get and pass information freely to one another, and in the process, one or many people’s performance will be affected. This could hamstring even the most talented folks.
2. Personal Challenges
This is often swept under the rug, or employees understate it because they don’t want to mix the personal and professional, but if someone struggles in their personal life, it automatically spills over to their professional life too. Maybe they are facing mental wellbeing issues, or have to be a caregiver all of a sudden, going through a divorce, grieving the loss of a loved one, juggling a newborn and work, or just about anything that could be draining their emotional and cognitive bandwidth.
Be mindful of what is happening in the background. Gently nudge them in the direction and ask them if they are going through something personally, and be quiet. They will share to the extent they feel safe sharing.
3. Unclear on Goals and Expectations
Sometimes managers assume an employee will automatically know what’s expected of them in the role, especially experienced ones, but that’s far from the truth. Even within the same industry, and sometimes within the same role, responsibilities differ, and when the employee is foggy on the goals, they are stuck between underperforming and overstepping. Resolving this ambiguity on what exactly is expected from them can break this bottleneck altogether.
4. Work Overload
You know that feeling when your to-do list has its own to-do list? That’s what work overload looks like. It’s when employees are juggling so many responsibilities that they’re never really done; they’re just rolling over incomplete tasks to the next day, like unpaid bills. Eventually, the weight of it all starts to show. People stop caring about quality. They skip lunch, they stop speaking up in meetings, and even the most dedicated employee starts wondering, “Is this even worth it?” It’s not that they don’t want to do great work—it’s that they physically and mentally can’t anymore.
5. Skill Deficiency
Imagine being handed a complicated task, and the only instruction you get is, “Figure it out.” For employees who lack the required skills or training, this is their everyday reality. They’re constantly trying to stay afloat, Googling their way through projects, hoping they don’t mess up. And over time, the fear of being “found out” sets in. You’ll see hesitation, delays, and vague updates. It’s insecurity. These employees often feel embarrassed or frustrated because deep down, they want to do better—they just don’t know how.
6. Fundamental Work Unsuitability
Sometimes, it’s not about how hard someone tries—it’s about whether the job was ever meant for them in the first place. You’ll see it in their body language. The spark’s missing. They drag themselves through the day, doing the bare minimum, because nothing about their work actually fits. Maybe they’re in a people-facing role but would rather be working solo. Or maybe they’re stuck in repetitive tasks when they’re bursting with creative ideas. It’s like asking a fish to climb a tree. The result? Resentment. A slow detachment from the job. Eventually, the passion fades completely.
7. Poor Attitude
Not every poor performer is overworked or under-skilled. Some just have a bad attitude. You’ll hear it in their tone, sarcastic, defensive, disinterested. You’ll feel it in meetings, eye rolls, constant negativity, or radio silence when everyone else is engaged. Sometimes it comes from a place of burnout, sometimes it’s personal, and sometimes it’s just… their default state. But one thing’s clear: it’s contagious. When one person constantly brings the mood down, it chips away at team morale. And when people start dreading interactions with a colleague, collaboration takes a nosedive.
8. A Simmering Conflict with the Manager
This one’s trickier. Because it often flies under the radar. There’s no yelling, no open fights, just this constant, quiet tension between an employee and their manager. Maybe it’s because of a snide comment that was never addressed. Or a broken promise. Or simply feeling unheard and invisible. Whatever the trigger, it lingers. It shows up in short emails, skipped meetings, and missed deadlines. The employee stops asking questions, stops seeking feedback, and slowly pulls away. You might think they’re disengaged, but beneath that is someone who feels let down by the one person who’s supposed to have their back.
9. Using Outdated Tools
It’s honestly soul-crushing when you’re trying to do great work, but the tools you’re stuck with belong in a museum. Maybe your laptop takes 20 minutes just to boot up. Maybe you’re working on a content calendar that crashes every time someone opens it. Or you’re stuck in 50 email threads because there’s no decent project management system. At first, it’s annoying. Then it becomes exhausting. Over time, employees stop trying to be efficient because, well, what’s the point?
18 Actionable Strategies to Improve Performance in 2025
1. Form Employee Focus Groups to Facilitate Peer-to-Peer Learning
Sometimes, we overlook one of the most powerful employee development programs we could ever create: a space for people to learn from each other.
When we talk about ways to increase employee performance, we often jump to tools or metrics. But what if the answer lies in something more human, shared experience?
Focus groups bring people together beyond their daily deliverables. In these small circles, employees swap stories, vent, mentor, and uplift. They show each other tricks they’ve learned the hard way. They build bridges across departments. And without realizing it, they create a ripple effect that dramatically boosts employee performance.
Peer learning builds ownership. When people discover solutions from their own tribe, they retain more, care more, and try more. This isn’t just a feel-good initiative. It’s one of the most emotionally intelligent and effective employee engagement techniques you can implement.
2. Remove Any Problems They May Be Facing
You want to know how to increase employee performance? Start here: remove the thorns in their shoes.
Because no matter how talented, committed, or skilled someone is, if they’re facing silent barriers every day, they won’t thrive. It might be a laptop that crashes mid-task. A toxic colleague. A personal crisis they’re scared to talk about. A repeated miscommunication that leaves them confused and underconfident.
So, before asking “Why are you not performing?”, ask “What’s in your way right now?”
Sometimes, the most practical performance improvement plan isn’t more training or tighter deadlines, it’s taking something heavy off their back. When you step in to remove pain points, even quietly, you’re saying: I see you. I’ve got you. And that one act of care? That can unlock more than any incentive ever could.
3. Make Goals and Expectations Clear and Employee-Owned
We often underestimate how much employee productivity depends on simply knowing what “good” looks like. Vague goals confuse. Ever-changing expectations demoralize. And when people feel like they’re chasing a moving target, they give up trying to hit it altogether.
So many performance dips are not due to apathy, but ambiguity.
A powerful employee motivation strategy? Co-creating clarity. Sit down. Get honest. Define what success looks like, not in cold KPIs, but in shared language. Let them shape the goals. Let them ask questions. Let them claim it.
4. Push Back For Your Team Wherever Necessary
Here’s a workplace productivity tip no one tells you: Protect your people like hell.
If your team is constantly overcommitted, firefighting, or pressured into impossible deadlines, it’s not them who are underperforming. It’s the system.
And when they see you nod along to everything from leadership to clients, they start believing you won’t fight for them. And slowly, their spark dims. But the moment you say “My team needs more time to do this well” or “We’re not sacrificing quality for speed”, you do something profound.
You tell them: Your work matters. Your health matters. You matter. And in return, they’ll trust you. They’ll follow you. They’ll go all out for you, not because you asked, but because you earned it.
Sometimes, the most underrated way to improve employee productivity is to draw the line that no one else will.
5. Break Down Silos
You can’t expect high performance from people who feel like they’re working in isolation.
When teams don’t talk, don’t collaborate, don’t understand each other’s world, the result is always the same: delays, frustration, duplication, and burnout. That’s just heartbreaking.
Because every person wants to be part of something bigger than their inbox. They want to see how their work connects. How their effort drives impact. How their story fits in the larger picture.
So if you want to boost employee performance in a real, lasting way, break the silos.
Bring teams together. Not just in meetings, but in purpose. Let marketing sit in on a sales call. Let the product team hear customer pain points. Let support teams tell their stories.
This is one of the most human employee engagement techniques there is: making people feel connected. Because when they feel seen, not just as workers, but as part of an ecosystem, they’ll stop clocking in just for the paycheck. And start showing up for the mission.
6. Use the Feedforward Technique Instead of the Feedback Technique
“Can I give you some feedback?” is a phrase that tightens stomachs and raises defenses. Most employees have been burned by it: feedback delivered too late, too vague, or in a way that makes them feel attacked rather than uplifted.
What if, instead, we turned the page?
Feedforward is a technique that focuses not on what someone did wrong yesterday, but on what they can do better tomorrow. It’s solution-oriented, not shame-oriented. It’s energizing, not demotivating.
This subtle shift transforms the conversation. It becomes a tool for growth, not a reminder of failure. And that alone is one of the most compassionate, underrated employee motivation strategies out there.
Want to enhance employee efficiency without breaking spirits? Replace “Why didn’t you…” with “Next time, you could try…” And watch how people begin to breathe easier, try harder, and feel safer.
7. Reward Those Who Go Above and Beyond
People repeat what gets recognized.
If someone goes out of their way to take initiative, bring ideas, or uplift a struggling teammate, and all they get is silence? They’ll eventually stop trying. And you won’t even notice the quiet quitting creeping in.
Employee recognition isn’t a luxury. It’s a deeply emotional and effective way to improve employee productivity. Not every reward needs to be a bonus. A shoutout in the team call, a thoughtful note, or even a public “Thank you” goes a long way.
Recognition tells your team: You’re not invisible. Your effort counts.
In the long run, this simple gesture does more to boost employee performance than any performance tracker ever will. People work harder when they feel seen and feel valued for who they are, not just what they do.
8. Create Visibility Among the Team for Better Performance
You might have employees doing brilliant work behind the scenes, but if their contributions are never noticed, never shared, they’ll start to question their worth.
And here’s where creating visibility becomes a game-changer. When employees see what their peers are doing, they learn. They’re inspired. And without realizing it, they raise the bar for themselves.
It’s one of the smartest ways to increase employee performance, creating a culture where great work gets shared, stories are told, and wins are celebrated together. Set up channels where people can share their work. Let teams present their process, not just their results. Make heroes out of the quiet contributors.
9. Make Way For the Development of Every Team Member
When someone joins your team, they’re trusting you with something sacred: their growth.
And yet, so often, development is given only to the loudest, the top performers, the “high potentials.” What about the rest?
True leaders don’t just build stars. They nurture whole constellations.
Creating employee development programs for every single person, not just the rockstars, is how you build a team that’s resilient, loyal, and constantly improving. This is one of the most powerful, long-term employee engagement techniques out there.
Ask your people what they want to learn. Give them resources, mentors, and mini-projects that push them. Let growth be a daily culture, not an annual review discussion.
10. Take Prompt on Severely Underperforming Employees
When someone is consistently underperforming and it begins to affect team morale, deadlines, and overall progress, you can’t afford to look away. Because inaction sends a loud message: “It’s okay to not show up fully.”
Not only does this create resentment among top performers, but it also erodes your credibility as a leader.
Taking action doesn’t mean punishment. It means creating a performance improvement plan that is fair, transparent, and compassionate. It’s about sitting with them, understanding the root cause, offering support, and drawing a line.
Sometimes, underperformance is fixable with mentoring, clarity, or new tools. Sometimes, it’s about role mismatch. And sometimes, unfortunately, it’s about accountability. Whatever the case, prompt action protects not just the company but also the integrity of the team. You can’t increase employee performance across the board if you leave unresolved gaps unaddressed. Be kind. Be firm. But be clear.
11. Use External Recruiting to Increase Skill Levels
Sometimes, the team just doesn’t have the skill set you need to take a leap. That’s not a failure, it’s a growth signal. Bringing in fresh talent from outside the organization can re-energize your culture. It introduces new ways of thinking, new capabilities, and often, a new standard for excellence. It’s one of the more direct, but often underutilized, ways to increase employee performance across the board. When existing employees see high performers joining, it sets a quiet challenge: “Can I step up too?” This isn’t about threatening your team; it’s about raising the bar with love and fairness.
12. Unblock Communication by Inviting People to Speak Up
You’ll never boost employee performance if your team’s too scared to speak. When there’s a culture of silence, even the best employee development programs fall flat. Leaders often don’t realize that silence is not consent, it’s fear.
Unblocking communication means creating brave spaces, not just safe ones. It’s asking questions like, “What am I not seeing?” or “If you were in charge, what would you change?” and really listening. This is where employee engagement techniques come alive. When people feel heard, they give more. It’s that simple, and that profound.
13. Check If You Are Delegating Right
If you’re micromanaging or assigning without context, you’re not empowering your team; you’re exhausting them. Look deeper. Are you assigning the right kind of work to the right people? Are they growing through your trust, or are they drowning in misaligned responsibilities? Proper delegation is one of the most underestimated workplace productivity tips because when done right, it not only boosts employee performance but also builds future leaders.
How Do You Know If You’re Micromanaging?
| Pallavi Rajankar, a Counseling Psychologist, says, “A lot of times, micromanagement, in relationships or in the workplace, comes from trust issues. In the workplace, it’s because when the person started out, they weren’t given the space to do anything, and so they started repeating the same behavior. They might have also been constantly let down before, and they become very protective of their work.
Micromanagement can also stem from deep-seated personal issues. When the person wasn’t given proper care in childhood by their primary caregivers, they feel the need to become hyper-independent. They also feel like they can’t trust anyone, so they start doing everything themselves.” |
- You’re always on calls every second of the day, even when you have a big team
- You’re closely observing your team to catch them off guard
- You tend to jump the gun and give unsolicited feedback
- You set unrealistic expectations and deadlines without considering the human doing the work
- Your team is constantly telling you they have more bandwidth
14. Cross-Train Your Team
In high-performing teams, no one says “That’s not my job.” Cross-training creates resilience. When someone’s out, another steps in with ease. More importantly, it builds empathy. Your content writer understands your sales struggles. Your designer appreciates project timelines. This shared understanding dissolves silos and encourages adaptability, an underrated way to enhance employee efficiency. Cross-training also keeps work fresh and learning constant, which is a brilliant employee motivation strategy in itself.
15. Provide the Right Technology Tools
If your team is spending hours toggling between outdated software or losing time to tech glitches, you’re not just draining productivity, you’re killing morale. Investing in intuitive, reliable tools is the groundwork for performance improvement. Whether it’s project management software, CRM, or automation tools, technology should work for your people, not the other way around. The right tools don’t just support tasks, they unlock potential.
16. Revamp Your Meetings and Only Keep The Productive Ones
A calendar full of meetings is a graveyard for creativity. Start asking: “Is this meeting solving a real problem?” If not, replace it with a Slack thread, a quick Loom video, or a short email. This is not just about saving time; it’s about honoring your team’s mental bandwidth. Cutting down unproductive meetings is one of the most immediate ways to improve employee productivity. The best leaders don’t gather people just to talk; they protect their team’s deep work like it’s sacred. Because it is.
17. Encourage Your People to Templatize Everything
Every time someone does something valuable, encourage them to leave a breadcrumb trail. A doc. A checklist. A how-to. This turns individual brilliance into collective strength. Templatizing processes helps scale efforts without losing quality, and it also makes onboarding smoother, handovers easier, and burnout less likely. It’s a cornerstone of high-performance cultures. These shared templates become part of your team’s internal “performance improvement plan,” evolving with every lesson learned.
18. Give Room for Experimentation
Innovation doesn’t happen under surveillance. It happens in the margins, in the “what if we tried this?” moments. If everything your team does is tightly measured, scored, or approved, you’re training them to play safe. True performance, creative, scalable, magnetic performance, comes when people are free to experiment without fear of failure. So, build buffers into deadlines. Celebrate learnings as much as wins. This is one of the boldest employee engagement techniques, because it shows: “We trust your mind, not just your hands.”
Top 3 Ways to Improve Work Performance Culturally
1. Build a Culture of Psychological Safety
You can’t boost employee performance in an environment where people are afraid to speak up. Culture isn’t a policy. It’s how people feel when they show up to work. If someone is worried they’ll be punished for making a mistake, they’ll play small. They’ll stick to the safe zone, stop asking questions, stop innovating, and performance will plateau.
On the other hand, when psychological safety becomes a lived value, people begin to stretch, try new things, challenge old ways, and own their growth. It’s the foundation of every effective employee motivation strategy, because when your team knows they’re safe, they’re brave.
Create this by encouraging vulnerability from the top down. Normalize the words: “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.” Celebrate lessons learned from failed experiments. And most importantly, listen deeply when someone finally finds the courage to speak.
2. Create a Strong Shared Purpose
People don’t work hard just for pay; they work hard when they believe their work matters. And nothing boosts employee performance like meaning. A shared purpose aligns even the most diverse teams and fuels employee engagement techniques organically.
When team members understand why they’re doing what they’re doing and how their individual role feeds into the bigger picture, something shifts. They move from task execution to ownership. From passive to proactive.
So, embed purpose into your rituals. Start meetings by revisiting team goals. Share stories of how your work impacted a client. Let employees see the outcomes of their labor. Culture-driven performance comes when people stop working for the manager and start working for the mission.
3. Recognize and Reward in Meaningful Ways
Recognition isn’t about plaques or pizza parties, it’s about saying, “I see you.” When your culture consistently notices effort, intention, and growth, not just results, you create an environment that multiplies employee productivity without burning people out.
Performance accelerates when recognition is personal. Some employees may value public appreciation, others prefer a quiet message, or a new responsibility. Learn your team’s recognition languages. Make appreciation timely and tied to values (“You showed amazing initiative here”), not just metrics (“You hit 110% of target”).
Make recognition a team-wide habit. Peer-to-peer shoutouts, team rituals that highlight unsung heroes, and manager check-ins that ask, “What are you proud of this week?” all of these help cement a performance culture rooted in dignity, not pressure.
Employee Performance Metrics & KPIs
1. Productivity Metrics
In most organizations, the moment you mention KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) or performance metrics, people’s shoulders tense up. It sounds rigid, corporate, and impersonal. But let’s reframe this.
Productivity is about how effectively they’re moving the needle. In reality, high productivity means an employee is not only completing tasks but doing so in a way that creates momentum for the business.
In marketing, this could look like how many campaigns were shipped. In sales, it could be the number of leads contacted. But raw output is a double-edged sword. Someone might churn out tasks all day, but are those tasks valuable? Do they align with business goals? And most importantly, are they sustainable?
A highly productive employee doesn’t burn out. They’ve figured out systems. They understand priority. They’ve created mental clarity to focus. If you’re looking for ways to improve employee productivity, this is where it begins: measure what matters, not what’s merely measurable.
Examples:
- Tasks completed,
- Projects delivered,
- Number of client calls,
- Number of campaigns launched
2. Quality of Work Metrics
Quantity without quality is noise. Quality of work speaks volumes about a person’s dedication, attention to detail, and pride in their craft. This is where emotional connection to the work comes in.
You can’t measure quality with a stopwatch. It shows up in fewer reworks, cleaner code, higher engagement, glowing client feedback, and sometimes, complete silence. Because great work makes itself invisible. It just works.
Measuring this is less about surveillance, more about asking: Did this piece of work serve its purpose elegantly? Was it thoughtful? Did it make life easier for someone else? These questions help you build a team that values mastery.
Examples:
- Error rates,
- Client satisfaction scores,
- Project rework count,
- NPS
3. Timeliness & Deadline Adherence
When someone consistently meets deadlines, what they’re really doing is showing up for others.
Consistent delays may not always reflect laziness or apathy. Often, they point to deeper system issues, too much work, unclear instructions, shifting priorities, or even emotional burnout. When you start tracking timeliness, you also start uncovering hidden inefficiencies or overwhelm.
So, yes, track how long someone takes. But also ask: What’s slowing you down? What can I remove from your plate?
Examples:
- Project delivery timeliness,
- Turnaround time,
- Average task duration
4. Collaboration & Communication Metrics
This one is often underrated, but crucial. No one performs in isolation anymore. Great collaboration can double team output, and poor collaboration can bring even the strongest performer down.
Communication isn’t just talking. It’s about clarity, responsiveness, empathy, and the ability to disagree constructively. A team member who asks the right questions, documents their work clearly, or helps a peer debug a problem is gold. But it’s rarely captured unless you design for it.
Track this to understand who’s building bridges… and who’s unintentionally creating silos.
Examples:
- Peer feedback scores,
- Knowledge-sharing participation,
- Cross-functional project success
5. Goal Alignment Metrics
Employees crave meaning. When they don’t see the point of their work, they go into autopilot. But when their goals are aligned with the company’s north star, they tap into a deeper level of drive, not for bonuses, but for contribution.
This metric is about ensuring that what people are working on actually matters. Are their individual KPIs connected to team outcomes? Are they updated when business priorities shift?
Examples:
- OKR completion,
- Personal development goal progress,
- Alignment check-ins during 1:1s
How Does Flowace Help Employees Increase Their Performance?
What makes Flowace different is that it understands the full picture of how people work best, and helps them get there without pressure.
Flowace helps employees increase their performance by making clarity and focus a daily reality. Through automatic time tracking, employees get a clear, unbiased view of where their hours go. This is about awareness. Most people don’t even realize how much of their time is lost in context-switching or silent distractions. Flowace gently brings this to light, allowing each person to notice patterns, reclaim time, and build better habits.
And then there’s the magic of flow. The platform is built on the science of deep work—those undisturbed hours when you’re fully immersed in something meaningful. With features like focus mode, distraction alerts, and deep insights into productivity windows, Flowace protects the quality of that performance. It helps you do fewer things, better. That’s where real growth lies.
On a team level, Flowace drives transparency and trust. Managers can see project progress without hovering, and employees can reflect on their own working styles without fear. This mutual visibility reduces friction, promotes autonomy, and builds a culture of self-led accountability—one of the most effective ways to sustainably enhance employee efficiency.
But most importantly, Flowace champions balance. By showing people when they’re overworked, when meetings eat into thinking time, and when burnout is creeping in, it empowers them to reset before it’s too late. This is where performance actually begins: in giving people the space and awareness to do their best work without sacrificing themselves.
Conclusion
Real performance is about how you felt while doing the work, how aligned you were with your purpose, how much space your mind had to think creatively, and how deeply you were able to focus. It’s about leaving work with your energy intact, your confidence high, and your sense of progress deeply rooted.
That’s where Flowace truly stands out. It’s not another cold, clinical productivity tracker. It’s a human-first performance companion, one that recognizes your rhythms, respects your flow, and helps you build workdays that feel right. In a time where burnout is quietly stealing people’s spark and joy from their careers, Flowace offers something different: a system that cares not just about what you do, but how you do it.
