How To Improve Team Efficiency: A Guide For Marketing Leaders

Key Takeaways

Meetings Cost Money: Inefficient meetings cost companies up to $25,000 per employee annually, with workers spending 18 hours weekly in meetings. Companies like Shopify have taken dramatic action to cut the number of meetings they require, saving millions of dollars in resources.

The Best Teams aren't Necessarily Working Harder: they're just better at figuring out what really matters. High-performing teams prioritize 36% more effectively than their peers, using frameworks like the Eisenhower Matrix to distinguish between urgent and important work.

Technology Is Key to Addressing Inefficiency: A majority of employees say automation could help them finish 30% more work daily, while AI is helping teams complete tasks faster while delivering higher-quality work.

"Most people spend 20% of their time doing what they were hired to do because they spend all their time doing other things," says Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp. "That's why people think they need to work longer because they don't have time to actually do the work."

So, just implement “No Meeting Fridays” and watch your team efficiency soar—right?

Not so fast. Weak processes are another culprit, according to Andrea Fryrear, author of Mastering Marketing Agility, who points to solutions like Kanban boards, task prioritization, and daily standups. There’s an impressively long list of obstacles to team efficiency: a lack of goals, poor communication, and dated technology are just a few.

In this comprehensive guide, you'll discover proven strategies to improve team efficiency, backed by research and real-world examples. Whether you're looking to streamline workflows, improve collaboration, or build a more productive team culture, you'll find actionable approaches you can implement today.

Why Team Efficiency Matters

You might conflate team efficiency with productivity, but they’re not quite the same. Team efficiency captures how well people work together to achieve results with minimal waste and maximum impact. Productivity measures raw output, like tasks completed or hours worked.

Efficient teamwork is more important than it’s ever been: today's marketing teams spend 42% of their time collaborating with others. Yet many organizations struggle to optimize these collaborative hours. U.S. companies are running at just 33% efficiency according to Gallup, suggesting massive room for improvement in how teams work together.

The challenges run deep. 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, highlighting widespread issues in how groups coordinate and communicate. This inefficiency doesn't just hurt team productivity—it takes a heavy toll on morale and project success.

Benefits of Improved Team Efficiency

When organizations optimize team efficiency, the benefits extend throughout the business:

• Better Decisions: Teams outperform individual decision-makers by 66% when working efficiently together, leading to better strategic choices and fewer costly mistakes.
• Higher Profitability: Companies with efficient teams see 18% higher productivity and 23% higher profitability through improved engagement.
• Greater Productivity: Beyond team-level gains, individual employee productivity improves as people spend less time on coordination and more time on important tasks.
• Employee Satisfaction: Effective teams boost employee satisfaction and retention, becoming more attractive to the 41% of workers who consider leaving due to poor collaboration experiences.
• Cost Savings: Beyond the obvious savings from reduced meeting time, efficient teams see lower recruitment and training costs through better retention.

Practical Strategies To Improve Team Efficiency

Great teams don't just happen by themselves. Let's look at some proven ways to recognize and reinforce the habits that actually move the needle.

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1. Set Clear Goals and Priorities

When teams lack clear direction, efficiency suffers. Only one-third of senior managers can name their organization's top priorities, creating confusion that cascades through every level of work.

The solution starts with SMART goals, which make your objectives Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This framework provides the clarity teams need to stay focused on high-impact work.

To implement SMART goals effectively:

1. Use a priority matrix to categorize tasks by urgency and importance
2. Leverage project management tools to track progress and dependencies
3. Schedule regular priority review sessions to maintain team alignment
4. Create visual dashboards that keep common goals visible and top-of-mind

It’s also worth noting that your team’s goals are 42% more likely to be achieved if they write them down. Reviewing goals regularly can pay off, too: companies using quarterly goal-setting generate 31% more returns than those using annual goal-setting.

2. Optimize Team Workload and Prioritization

Prioritizing tasks is crucial to team efficiency: high-performing teams prioritize 36% more effectively than their peers. To prioritize tasks, your team needs to be able to distinguish between important work and work that is simply urgent.

The Eisenhower Matrix is a classic way to manage this dynamic:

• Not important and not urgent? Delete it.
• Not important but urgent? Delegate it.
• Important but not urgent? Schedule it.
• Important and urgent? Do it now.

A similar approach is the "delete, defer, delegate, diminish" framework, which focuses entirely on task elimination or delegation:

• Delete: Eliminate low-value tasks that consume time without driving results.
• Defer: Build a prioritized backlog that sequences work based on impact and timing.
• Delegate: Match tasks to team members' strengths and capacities.
• Diminish: Scale back scope on tasks that matter but don't warrant full resources.

Optimizing your team’s workload is important, but trying to squeeze out every possible ounce of performance is bound to backfire. Greg McKeown, a consultant, suggests coaching your team to practice the “85% rule,” in which they purposefully give less-than-total effort to build in time for rest. (Counterintuitively, this maximizes productivity by avoiding burnout.)

3. Encourage Open Communication and Collaboration

Poor communication extracts a heavy toll—workers lose three hours of productivity a week due to ineffective collaboration. To address this issue, you’ll want to focus on both cultural and practical changes.

37signals, a software development firm, offers a model with its internal communication guidelines. (The mere act of setting communication guidelines and sharing them transparently is a lesson in itself—not many companies do it.) 37signals’ list is worth exploring in its entirety for inspiration, but here are a few notable guidelines:

• If it’s important, write it: "Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down."
• Ask better questions (regularly): "If you want an answer, you have to ask a question. People typically have a lot to say, but they'll volunteer little. Automatic questions on a regular schedule help people practice sharing, writing, and communicating."
• Be proactive about communication gaps: "Ask if things are clear. Ask what you left out. Ask if there was anything someone was expecting that you didn’t cover. Address the gaps before they widen with time."

Another thorny communication issue is that a communication style that makes sense in one context doesn’t always make sense in another (e.g., budgetary debates are a different ballgame than brainstorming sessions).

Research by McKinsey suggests it’s worthwhile to tailor your communication approach for different scenarios. For example:

• Decision-making: Designate clear decision-makers (while ensuring others can provide input)
• Creative work: Cultivate psychological safety for your team and reduce micromanagement
• Updates: Use asynchronous formats, like memos, instead of meetings

4. Eliminate Unnecessary Meetings

The cost of excessive meetings is staggering. Companies with 100 employees could save $2.5 million annually by reducing unnecessary gatherings, while big companies could save as much as $100 million per year. The problem runs deep: employees spend 18 hours a week in meetings—and nearly six of those hours are unproductive.

37signals—which wrote the communication guidelines in the prior section—is also a vocal proponent of sharply reducing meetings. (As they bluntly put it in Getting Real, their manifesto for SaaS companies: “Meetings are toxic.”)

Why avoid meetings? 37signals offers a long list of reasons. Meetings:

• Tend to drift off subject
• Prevent deep work by interrupting your flow
• Reward the loudest and most confident voices (not the best ideas)
• Only help the people in the room (writing, by contrast, helps everyone)
• Cost more than you think (a five-person one-hour meeting uses five hours of work time)

Take a careful look at which meetings provide value, and which don’t. For example, Shopify eliminated recurring meetings with three or more participants—resulting in the removal of 12,000 scheduled meetings—and instated a “no meeting Wednesdays” rule.

If the rest of your C-suite needs some motivation to put your meeting-heavy culture on the chopping block, remind them that noncritical meetings waste $25,000 per employee every year.

5. Use Technology to Optimize Work Processes

In today's office, most work goes unseen, locked away in Excel sheets and mental to-do lists. Modern tools can make collaborative work more visible and manageable while preventing overload through better task management.

AI is transforming how we think about efficiency. For example, it’s now possible for artificial intelligence to automatically assign tasks to your team members—and also provide the tools to help them get those tasks done faster.

Mithu Storoni, author of Hyperefficient, explains, "Our idea of efficiency really stems from the era of assembly line work... But right now, we are going through a period of tremendous change in AI and in technology, and the productivity of a company is no longer proportional to the quantity of output of its human workers."

By bringing together AI, automation, and collaboration tech, the impact is clear:

• 72% of employees believe they could finish 30% more work daily with automation tools
• 75% of leaders whose teams use AI report better collaboration
• Leaders using AI see strong results: 85% complete tasks faster, 84% are more productive, and 81% deliver higher-quality work

Just keep in mind that adding too many tools into the mix can backfire: employees using more than 10 apps report 54% more communication issues than those using fewer than five apps.

6. Use the Best Marketing Project Management Software

Your team's efficiency is directly tied to the quality of your project management tools. When evaluating marketing project management solutions, look for:

1. Marketing-Specific Features: Look for tools designed specifically for marketing workflows (like campaign planning, content calendars, and asset management).
2. Collaboration Tools: Your platform should handle both internal team coordination and external stakeholder communication.
3. Integrations: Choose software that connects seamlessly with your existing marketing stack—from creative tools like Adobe Creative Cloud to your CRM and marketing automation platforms.

For a quick comparison of the top marketing project management software, check out our guide below.

1. 1. Kantata — Best for task, resource, and financial management in one
2. 2. Wrike — Best for collaboration between marketing teams
3. 3. Productive — Best for project budget tracking
4. 4. Accelo — Best for project tracking functionality and automation
5. 5. Bonsai Agency Software — Best for end-to-end agency project management
6. 6. Planable — Best for content planning
7. 7. Teamwork.com — Best for global data control
8. 8. Basecamp — Best for project organization and communication
9. 9. Asana — Best for efficient team collaboration
10. 10. Jira — Best for streamlining marketing processes

Show More (5)

7. Encourage Work-Life Balance and Well-being

The modern workplace often equates busyness with productivity, but research shows this approach is misguided. Mithu Storoni, author of Hyperefficient, emphasizes that progress matters more than output. As she explains, "Progress is a key indicator of engagement... It's not about completing more work, but about finding fulfillment in the work."

Supporting your team members’ well-being directly impacts performance. For example, setting up a hybrid schedule that allows employees to work from home just one day per month makes employees 24% happier and more productive.

Another structural way to cultivate work-life balance is to establish a firm "done for the day" time. In addition to preventing decision fatigue and boosting employee well-being, this can also help your recruitment efforts: 61% of workers would reject jobs that disrupt their work-life balance. By proactively avoiding a toxic “hard work” hustle culture, you can build a more supportive work environment that allows your team to do their best work.

8. Recognize and Reward Productive Behaviors

Recognition is a powerful retention tool—well-recognized employees are 45% less likely to change organizations. But recognition can also provide efficiency benefits if you use your efforts to reinforce productivity-boosting work practices.

Build recognition into your regular workflow by:

• Starting team meetings by highlighting recent wins
• Creating a digital kudos channel where team members can praise each other
• Implementing a points-based reward system for efficiency improvements
• Establishing monthly or quarterly recognition programs that specifically celebrate efficient work practices

Remember: recognition should be specific, timely, and aligned with your efficiency goals. When team members see their productivity improvements acknowledged and celebrated, they're more likely to maintain and build upon those positive behaviors.

How To Measure Team Efficiency

Start by tracking essential metrics that directly impact your team's success:

• Utilization rate shows how teams split time between productive work and administrative tasks, providing ideas for process improvement.
• Quality indicators ensure efficiency gains don't compromise the quality of your output. (Monitor data like error rates, revision requests, and customer satisfaction scores.)
• Velocity metrics help you understand your team's natural pace and capacity.
• Response times show how quickly your team handles requests.
• Resource allocation tracks how effectively you're using team skills and budget across projects.
• Cost per deliverable helps identify which processes are most resource-intensive.
• Employee engagement scores show how your efficiency initiatives are impacting your team’s satisfaction.

Use this data to make informed decisions about process changes, resource allocation, and team development needs. Set clear baselines by documenting your team’s current performance levels. Then, create a consistent rhythm of reviews: weekly check-ins for short-term feedback, monthly sessions to adjust processes, and quarterly strategy reviews for making big-picture adjustments.

A Smarter Path To Team Efficiency

Team effectiveness is about working smarter—not harder. You can use the team efficiency strategies outlined in this article to rethink how your team operates. By moving beyond the "busy = productive" mindset and adopting data-backed approaches to boost productivity, you can unlock higher quality decisions, significant cost savings—and supercharged productivity.

For more insights on building high-performing marketing teams, explore our guides to digital transformation and the role of the fractional CMO. And don't forget to subscribe to The CMO Newsletter for weekly strategies to transform your team’s performance.