How to increase efficiency at workplace in 10 easy ways

Most of us spend way too much time doing things that don't move the needle at work. You know what I'm talking about: the endless email threads that could have been a quick chat, the meetings that should have been emails, and those repetitive questions you've answered so many times you could answer them in your sleep.

Finding out how to increase efficiency at work isn't just about making your boss happy; it's about reclaiming your time and sanity. Imagine wrapping up your day knowing you've accomplished what matters, rather than just putting out fires and drowning in busy work.

According to Inc., most of us are only truly productive for about 3 hours in an 8-hour workday. The rest of the time? It's eaten up by distractions, unnecessary processes, and work that could be automated or eliminated.

The good news? You don't need to work harder or longer hours to get more done. Small, strategic changes to how your team works can dramatically boost your output while reducing stress. It's about working smarter, not harder (yes, I know that's a cliche, but clichés exist for a reason!).

In this guide, we'll walk through ten practical ways on how to increase efficiency in the workplace. We'll show you how tools like Trengo can transform chaotic communication into streamlined workflows, and share real-world tactics that actual companies have used to accomplish more in less time.

What is work efficiency?

Work efficiency refers to the ability to accomplish tasks with minimal wasted effort, time, and resources while maintaining high-quality output. In essence, it's about working smarter, not harder, maximising productivity by optimising processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and focusing on high-impact activities.

Efficient work isn't about rushing through tasks or cutting corners. Rather, it involves:

• Completing work accurately the first time, reducing rework
• Accomplishing tasks within reasonable timeframes
• Allocating resources appropriately
• Prioritising activities with the highest value
• Minimising wasted effort and redundant processes
• Leveraging appropriate tools and technology
• Maintaining quality standards while optimising output

Work efficiency differs from productivity, though the terms are often used interchangeably. Productivity typically measures output quantity, while efficiency considers the relationship between output and the resources used to achieve it. An efficient worker produces high-quality work with minimal waste, potentially accomplishing more with less effort than someone who appears busy but works inefficiently.

In today's workplace, how to increase efficiency in the workplace has become a critical question as organisations face increasing pressure to deliver more value with limited resources. The most efficient workplaces combine thoughtful processes, strategic resource allocation, and technology that eliminates friction rather than creating it.

Why does work efficiency matter?

Improving how to increase efficiency in a business isn't just an abstract goal; it delivers concrete benefits that impact every aspect of your organisation. Here's why efficiency should be a priority for every workplace:

Cost reduction

Efficient processes require fewer resources to achieve the same or better results. When employees can complete tasks in less time without sacrificing quality, your operational costs decrease. This includes reduced overtime, lower error rates, and better resource utilisation.

💡Inefficient employees cost the US workplaces $483 to $605 billion per year due to lost productivity.

Competitive advantage

In crowded markets, efficient companies gain an edge. They can respond faster to market changes, deliver projects more quickly, and often offer more competitive pricing while maintaining healthy profit margins.

Employee satisfaction and retention

Nothing burns out employees faster than inefficient processes that create unnecessary frustration. When team members can accomplish meaningful work without battling outdated systems or redundant tasks, job satisfaction improves and turnover decreases. Efficient workplaces create environments where employees can focus on high-value work rather than administrative busywork.

💡According to a survey by PwC, 23% of participants said that having a job where they can make a meaningful impact is the most important aspect of their career.

Improved customer experience

Efficiency directly impacts customer experience. Faster response times, more accurate deliverables, and streamlined service delivery all contribute to higher customer satisfaction. When internal processes work smoothly, the results are visible to customers through better service experiences.

Innovation capacity

When teams aren't bogged down by inefficient processes, they have more time and mental energy for innovation. Efficiency creates space for strategic thinking, creative problem-solving, and continuous improvement rather than merely keeping up with day-to-day demands.

Scalability

Efficient organisations can scale more effectively. As your business grows, inefficiencies that were manageable at a smaller scale can become significant bottlenecks. Building efficient systems from the start makes growth more sustainable and less painful.

Stress reduction

Inefficiency creates stress. Missed deadlines, communication breakdowns, and constant firefighting take a toll on team morale and mental health. Efficient workplaces tend to be calmer, more focused environments where employees can work with purpose rather than panic.

In an era of rapid technological change and increasing customer expectations, learning how to increase work efficiency isn't optional; it's a business imperative that affects everything from financial performance to company culture.

Top 10 strategies to increase efficiency in workplace

1. Streamline communication with unified platforms

Communication inefficiencies are among the biggest productivity killers in modern workplaces. When messages are scattered across multiple platforms, email, chat apps, project management tools, and support tickets, information gets lost, context disappears, and team members waste precious time searching for what they need.

💡A large majority—88% of business leaders, employees, and educators—believe that poor communication is a major contributor to failures in the workplace.

Implementing a unified communication platform like Trengo addresses this challenge head-on. By centralising all customer and team communications in one place, Trengo eliminates the need to switch between different tools and interfaces. This consolidation creates a single source of truth for all conversations, regardless of whether they originated from email, social media, WhatsApp, live chat, or other channels.

The efficiency gains are substantial: team members save up to 2 hours daily when they no longer need to juggle multiple communication tools. With a unified inbox, everyone can see the complete conversation history with any customer or stakeholder, leading to faster responses and more informed decision-making. Additionally, managers gain visibility into workloads and can distribute incoming messages more effectively across the team.

Tips to implement

1. Start by auditing your current communication channels and identifying redundancies. 
2. Then, gradually transition teams to your unified platform, providing proper training and establishing clear protocols for which communications belong where. 
3. The goal isn't just tool consolidation but creating a more coherent communication ecosystem.

2. Automate repetitive tasks with AI

Research shows that employees spend approximately 40% of their workweek on repetitive tasks that could be automated. This represents an enormous efficiency opportunity that forward-thinking organisations are increasingly addressing through AI-powered automation.

Trengo AI offers powerful automation capabilities designed specifically for customer-facing teams. By analysing incoming messages, Trengo's AI can automatically categorise tickets, suggest responses, route inquiries to the right department, and even handle common questions without human intervention. For example, standard inquiries about business hours, pricing, or shipping policies can be answered instantly by AI, freeing human agents to focus on more complex or sensitive customer needs.

The efficiency impact extends beyond just saving time. Automation ensures consistency in responses, reduces human error, and enables 24/7 responsiveness even when your team is offline. Many organisations implementing AI automation report handling 30-40% more inquiries with the same team size while improving response times by up to 70%.

Tips to implement

1. Begin by identifying repetitive patterns in your team's workflow. Which questions come up most frequently? Which tasks follow predictable steps? 
2. Once you've mapped these opportunities, configure your automation tools to address them, starting with the highest-volume, lowest-complexity tasks. 
3. Remember that automation works best when combined with human oversight; use AI to augment your team's capabilities rather than replacing human judgment entirely.

3. Implement strategic meeting protocols

Meetings consume a significant portion of workplace time, yet studies consistently show that up to 70% of meetings are considered unproductive by participants. Creating more efficient meeting practices can reclaim hours of productive time each week while improving decision-making quality.

Start by establishing a company-wide meeting protocol that includes these efficiency-boosting elements:

• Require clear agendas for every meeting, distributed at least 24 hours in advance
• Assign specific time limits for each agenda item
• Implement a "no agenda, no meeting" policy
• Designate standard meeting-free blocks during the week for focused work
• Classify meetings by type (decision-making, information-sharing, brainstorming) and apply appropriate structures to each
• End each meeting with clear action items, responsible parties, and deadlines

Trengo's team coordination features can support this strategy by providing shared calendars, automated scheduling, and integration with your meeting tools. The platform can help track action items from meetings and ensure they're properly assigned and followed up on.

4. Create standardised workflows and templates

Inconsistent processes create inefficiency by forcing team members to reinvent the wheel for routine tasks. When every customer interaction, project kickoff, or internal request follows a different path, quality suffers, and time is wasted figuring out how to proceed.

Standardised workflows and templates create efficiency by establishing clear paths for common scenarios. With Trengo, customer service teams can implement standardised response templates for frequent inquiries, ensuring consistent quality while dramatically reducing composition time. Similarly, sales teams can create templated follow-up sequences, and project managers can deploy standardised project frameworks that capture best practices.

Beyond just saving time, standardisation improves quality by incorporating lessons learned and best practices into your default processes. It also makes onboarding new team members more efficient, as they can follow established patterns rather than developing their own approaches through trial and error.

Tips to implement

1. Identify your most common and time-consuming processes. 
2. Document the optimal way to handle each one, creating visual workflows and templates that team members can easily access and adapt. Trengo's template library makes this easy by allowing teams to create, categorise, and share response templates across the organisation. 
3. For maximum efficiency, combine templates with automation rules to suggest or apply the appropriate template based on message content or customer attributes.

5. Implement time-blocking and deep work sessions

The modern workplace is filled with distractions that fragment attention and reduce cognitive performance. A research study at the University of California at Irvine found that an average of 23 minutes is needed to fully refocus after an interruption, making constant task-switching extremely costly for knowledge workers who need sustained concentration.

Time-blocking addresses this challenge by designating specific periods for different types of work. Instead of reacting to every incoming message or request immediately, team members schedule blocks of time for specific activities: deep thinking work, meetings, email and communication processing, administrative tasks, and breaks.

This approach pairs perfectly with tools like Trengo that allow for asynchronous communication. Using Trengo's team availability settings and automated responses, employees can communicate when they're in deep work mode and unavailable for immediate response. Colleagues know exactly when team members will be back online to address requests, setting appropriate expectations.

Organisations implementing time-blocking report productivity increases of 20-50% for complex knowledge work. The technique is particularly valuable for roles requiring creativity, problem-solving, or detailed analysis, tasks that suffer most from fragmented attention.

Tips to implement

1. Start by analysing when team members are most energetic and focused, typically scheduling deep work during these peak periods. 
2. Use calendar tools to visibly block this time and establish team norms around respecting these blocks. 
3. Encourage employees to batch similar tasks together (like processing all emails at once) rather than handling them piecemeal throughout the day.

6. Leverage data analytics for process improvement

You can't improve what you don't measure. Many workplace inefficiencies persist simply because organisations lack visibility into how work flows through their systems and where bottlenecks occur.

Advanced analytics provide the insights needed to identify and eliminate these inefficiencies. Trengo's built-in analytics suite offers detailed metrics on team performance, response times, customer satisfaction, and workflow efficiency. These insights enable data-driven decisions about resource allocation, process changes, and performance improvement.

For example, analytics might reveal that certain types of customer inquiries consistently take longer to resolve than others, indicating a need for additional training or specialised knowledge. Or you might discover that response times lag during specific hours, suggesting a staffing adjustment. By transforming raw data into actionable insights, analytics becomes a powerful efficiency driver.

The most effective approach combines regular monitoring of key performance indicators with periodic deep-dive analysis to uncover underlying patterns. Look for metrics that directly connect to business outcomes, like first-contact resolution rate or customer satisfaction scores, rather than focusing solely on activity metrics like number of tickets processed.

Tips to implement

Involve the team members closest to the work in interpreting the data and developing solutions. Their frontline perspective often reveals context that raw numbers miss, leading to more effective interventions that address root causes rather than symptoms.

7. Prioritise tasks based on impact and urgency

Not all tasks are created equal. In most roles, roughly 20% of activities generate 80% of the value, yet many employees spread their attention evenly across all tasks in their queue, regardless of relative importance.

Effective prioritisation frameworks help teams focus on high-impact work first. The most useful approaches distinguish between urgency (time-sensitivity) and importance (value contribution), ensuring that truly important work doesn't get perpetually displaced by urgent but less valuable tasks.

Trengo supports sophisticated prioritisation through its automated ticket routing and priority tagging features. Messages can be automatically flagged based on sender, content, or other attributes, ensuring that high-priority communications receive immediate attention. For example, messages from VIP customers or containing specific urgent keywords can be instantly elevated.

READ MORE: What is AI automation? Revolutionising business efficiency in 2025

Beyond technical solutions, establishing clear organisational priorities helps teams make better decisions about how to allocate their time. When everyone understands which projects and activities directly connect to key business objectives, they can more confidently prioritise work that doesn't contribute meaningfully to those goals.

Tips to implement

1. Develop a simple prioritisation framework that works for your context, train teams to apply it consistently, and regularly review whether time allocation aligns with actual priorities. 
2. The goal isn't perfect optimisation but a thoughtful approach that continuously shifts resources toward your most valuable activities.

8. Foster cross-training and knowledge sharing

Efficiency suffers when knowledge remains siloed within individual team members or departments. When only one person knows how to perform a critical task or access important information, bottlenecks inevitably form around these knowledge monopolies.

Cross-training team members creates redundancy that prevents these bottlenecks while providing developmental opportunities that increase engagement. When multiple people can perform each essential function, work continues smoothly despite vacations, illnesses, or unexpected departures.

Trengo facilitates knowledge sharing through its collaborative features. Team members can observe how colleagues handle similar situations, access shared knowledge bases, and collaborate on complex cases. The platform's internal notes feature allows experts to add context or guidance to messages that less experienced team members are handling, creating organic teaching moments.

Beyond tools, establishing a culture that values and rewards knowledge sharing is crucial. Consider implementing structured cross-training programs, creating detailed process documentation, and recognising team members who actively contribute to organisational knowledge.

Organisations with strong knowledge-sharing practices report 35% faster onboarding times for new employees and greater resilience during personnel changes. The collaborative approach also tends to improve solution quality, as diverse perspectives contribute to problem-solving.

9. Optimise your digital workspace

Digital clutter creates the same efficiency problems as physical clutter; it makes information harder to find, increases cognitive load, and wastes time. Most workers now spend their days in digital environments that have evolved haphazardly rather than being intentionally designed for productivity.

Optimising your digital workspace involves organising digital assets, streamlining app ecosystems, and creating an intuitive information architecture. Start by auditing the digital tools your teams use daily. Are there redundant applications that could be consolidated? Are team members using consistent file naming conventions and folder structures? Do important documents have predictable homes where everyone can find them?

Trengo contributes to digital workspace optimisation by centralising customer communications and related workflows in one platform instead of fragmenting them across multiple tools. Its clean interface and customisable views allow team members to configure their digital environment based on their specific role and working style.

Tips to implement

1. Create clear guidelines about where different types of information should live and how they should be organised. 
2. Establish regular digital decluttering sessions where teams archive outdated materials and reorganise active projects. 
3. Minimise context-switching by integrating your essential tools wherever possible. Trengo's integration capabilities with CRMs, help desks, and other business systems help create a more seamless digital experience.

Organisations that thoughtfully optimise their digital workspaces report that employees save 30-60 minutes daily just from reduced searching and context-switching. This translates to significant productivity gains while reducing the frustration associated with disorganised digital environments.

10. Cultivate a continuous improvement mindset

The most efficient organisations don't achieve this status through one-time initiatives but through ongoing, incremental improvements driven by everyone in the organisation. When team members at all levels actively identify inefficiencies and propose solutions, the collective impact is transformative.

Creating a continuous improvement culture starts with leadership that explicitly values efficiency and demonstrates openness to change. Managers should regularly ask team members, "What's getting in your way?" and "How could we make this process better?" Importantly, they must act on the feedback received, implementing viable suggestions and explaining why others might not be feasible.

Trengo supports continuous improvement through its feedback collection capabilities. Teams can gather customer insights about service efficiency and quality, then use these perspectives to refine their approaches. The platform's adaptable workflows can be easily modified as better processes emerge, allowing teams to implement improvements without complex technical changes.

Consider establishing formal mechanisms for surfacing and implementing efficiency ideas, such as regular process review sessions or a digital suggestion system. Recognise and celebrate improvements, no matter how small, to reinforce the value of incremental progress. And ensure that efficiency gains translate to better work experiences, not just higher expectations, so team members see personal benefits from improvement efforts.

Organisations with strong continuous improvement cultures typically achieve 3-5% efficiency gains year over year, which compounds into significant advantages over time. Perhaps more importantly, these organisations tend to be more responsive to changing market conditions and customer needs, as the habit of thoughtful adaptation becomes embedded in their operations.

Increase efficiency for your team

How to increase efficiency at the workplace isn't about working harder or longer hours, it's about fundamentally rethinking how work gets done. The strategies outlined in this guide offer practical approaches for eliminating friction points and creating smoother workflows that benefit both your team and your customers.

The future of work efficiency lies in intelligent automation that handles routine tasks while empowering humans to focus on judgment, creativity, and relationship-building, precisely the areas where people add the most value. Platforms like Trengo exemplify this approach by combining AI-powered automation with tools that enhance human collaboration and decision-making.

Start your efficiency journey by selecting one or two strategies from this guide that address your most pressing challenges. Begin with small, manageable changes, measure the results, and build on your successes. Remember that efficiency improvement is a continuous process rather than a destination; there are always new opportunities to work smarter, not harder.

By focusing on how to increase efficiency in the production of your team's work, you'll create a more agile, responsive organisation capable of thriving in today's fast-paced business environment.