The Problem Isn’t the Team: It’s the Work System You Created

When results fall short of expectations, where does leadership usually look first?
To the employees.
Is the team demotivated? Is there a lack of commitment? Do people need to be more productive? Would it be necessary to replace professionals?
These questions are frequent, but they can lead the investigation in the wrong direction.
Competent professionals also underperform when working within inefficient structures.
Bureaucratic processes, excessive meetings, conflicting priorities, and communication failures can compromise the execution capacity of entire teams.
Before questioning people’s performance, it may be necessary to assess the operational environment that the organization itself has built.

1. Competent people can also produce little in inefficient systems
A team can bring together experienced and qualified professionals, but still face difficulties in delivering results.
This happens when the work depends on lengthy approvals, fragmented information, constant changes in priority, or processes that hinder execution.

McKinsey’s State of Organizations 2023 report identified that more than 40% of participants in its survey considered their organizations’ structures excessively complex.
Organizational complexity can create obstacles that limit companies’ responsiveness.
In this scenario, demanding more productivity without reviewing working conditions may yield few results.
A team cannot indefinitely compensate for the inefficiencies of the system in which it works.

2. Excessive processes are consuming execution capacity
Imagine a professional who needs to complete a strategic activity.
Before starting, they participate in an alignment meeting. Then, they need to request information from another department, wait for approval, and update different systems.
When they finally manage to execute the task, they have already consumed a significant part of their workday.
This phenomenon is related to the so-called “work about work,” an expression used by Asana to describe activities of coordinating and organizing one’s own work.
In the Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023 study, knowledge workers dedicated, on average, 58% of their workday to these activities.

Not all coordination activity represents waste. However, the volume of these tasks can indicate important opportunities for simplification.
When managing work consumes more energy than executing it, the structure needs to be investigated.

3. Leadership may be creating the obstacles it tries to solve
Many companies adopt new controls when they perceive a drop in productivity.
More reports.
More meetings.
More approvals.
More monitoring.
The goal is to increase visibility, but the result may be just the opposite: a more complex and fragmented operation.
According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2025, 48% of employees and 52% of leaders surveyed considered their work chaotic and fragmented.
When leadership responds to a lack of clarity by adding bureaucracy, it may amplify the problems it intends to solve.
The challenge is to understand which controls truly help the operation and which only consume time.
Efficient management does not depend on the quantity of monitoring mechanisms, but on the quality of the information available to make decisions.

4. Before evaluating people, assess working conditions
Individual indicators are important, but they need to be interpreted considering the operational context.

A professional may show low activity in a particular application because they are participating in meetings.
A team may show delays because it depends on external approvals.
A department may demonstrate overload because it concentrates responsibilities that should be distributed.

Therefore, managers need to investigate issues such as:

• Do processes allow activities to move forward smoothly?

• Are there meetings or controls consuming excessive time?

• Are priorities clear?

• Are there relevant differences in the distribution of activities?

• Do teams have adequate conditions to perform their functions?

These questions help avoid hasty conclusions and direct the analysis towards possible structural causes.

Individual performance should be understood within the work system, and not in isolation from it.

5. Productivity Radar: See the operation before blaming the team
Identifying structural problems requires more than just insights into employee behavior.
It’s necessary to understand how the workday is being used and which operational patterns deserve investigation.
The Productivity Radar offers indicators that help managers and HR analyze the use of corporate applications, meetings, and telephony, according to the available integrations.
With the platform, your company can:
• Better understand the distribution of the workday.
• Identify relevant operational patterns.
• Analyze meeting participation in activities.
• Investigate potential bottlenecks and signs of overload.

• Support decisions on work organization.

• Supplement management evaluations with objective data.

The Radar does not automatically determine the causes of a performance problem. Its indicators provide evidence for leadership to investigate the operation in a contextualized way.

This allows for replacing hasty judgments with more strategic questions.

Before concluding that a team needs to produce more, the company can investigate whether it is offering adequate conditions for this to happen.

Because competent professionals need processes that favor their performance, not structures that hinder their deliverables.