Your team doesn’t need more time, it needs better processes: how to find where the day goes

When a team cannot keep up, the first reaction is often a productivity course. People come back with new planning techniques, and two weeks later everything looks the same as before. The reason is simple: training changes one person’s habits, but it does not change the system that person works in.

Blocking out time in the calendar will not help an employee who waits three days for a director’s signature. A to-do list will not help someone retyping data from emails into a system. These are process problems – the order of steps, rules and tools – and the manager, not the employee, is responsible for the process.

A 2025 Microsoft study shows the scale of the problem. The most heavily loaded Microsoft 365 users are interrupted on average every two minutes. Almost half of the employees surveyed describe their work as chaotic and fragmented.

In most companies, time slips away in the same five places. The table below shows what each looks like in practice, what can be changed straight away and what is worth automating later.

Note the order of the columns. Every row includes a change that requires no software at all. Often that change alone delivers most of the effect.

A people problem usually concerns one person or one role. A process problem is visible across the whole department, and often persists after the team changes. If a new person has the same difficulties as their predecessor after three months, the cause lies elsewhere.

It is worth checking the signals below before deciding on training, recruitment or a change of manager. The more of them fit your department, the more likely it is that changing the process will help.

You do not need an external audit to see the main problems. A week and the four simple steps below are enough. If you then want to calculate the cost precisely in money terms, we describe how in a separate article on measuring the time spent on manual work.

The second step usually yields the most. A case that needed an hour of work often sat idle for several days. It is the waiting, not the work itself, that drags out customer service.

Many of the changes that take the most load off a team require no software at all. They do, however, require decisions by management, because they concern authority, deadlines and responsibility. An employee cannot introduce them alone.

Automating a badly organised process only speeds up the mess. If everyone handles an order differently, you first need to agree one way of doing it. Only then do you know what the tool should do.

Once the process is in order, automation takes over its repetitive part. Most often this means retyping data, reminders, reports and answers to typical questions.

Take a hypothetical order processing team at a distribution company. The team receives 40 orders a day by email, and entering one into the ERP takes 6 minutes. That is 240 minutes, or 4 hours a day.

Assume a tool reads the order and enters it into the system, and an employee just checks the result in 2 minutes. The time drops to 80 minutes a day. The team gets back 160 minutes a day – 56 hours a month over 21 working days.

For purchase invoices from Polish suppliers, the situation today is different from a few years ago. Since 2026, most of them have arrived through KSeF, Poland’s National e-Invoicing System, as structured data that only needs to be downloaded into the accounting software. Retyping now mainly concerns foreign invoices, receipts and documents from outside KSeF.

Do not try to change everything at once. One well-executed project convinces a team more than five that were started. The criteria in the list below help you choose the first process.

A process that meets three or four criteria is a good candidate to start with. If it meets only one, leave it for later.

The people who do the work know best where the process gets stuck. Leaving them out when designing changes is the quickest route to a solution that does not fit reality.

Be careful with the word “savings”. Employees hear it as a warning of redundancies. It is better to say specifically which tedious task will disappear and what the team will do instead.

After the change goes live, collect feedback for the first few weeks and act on it. If the problems people report go unanswered, they go back to their old spreadsheets. We write about this in more detail in our article on preparing your team for automation.

A better process does not automatically mean a shorter working day. The time saved can go into work there was previously no room for: talking to customers, quality control, development. Decide this before you start and tell the team directly.

Do not promise a specific improvement in results within a set time, either. The effect depends on the scale of the problem, the quality of the data and how consistently the company applies the new rules. It is more honest to measure the situation before the change and compare the same figures after three months.

Sometimes changing the process is not enough. If the number of orders has doubled and the team is already working efficiently, you need another person. A well-organised process does, however, help that new person get up to speed faster.