Neuroscience-backed ways to improve workplace productivity

Disengagement is a silent killer of workplace productivity. It costs the global economy $8.8 trillion each year, nearly 9% of GDP. In the U.S. alone, it leads to $350 billion in lost output annually.

Yet while many leaders invest in wellness programs, flexible schedules or collaboration tools, they often miss the most powerful lever for performance: the human brain.

This article explores neuroscience-backed strategies to help leaders unlock focus, resilience and creativity in their teams by aligning workplace practices with how the brain actually works.

What if you conducted a survey and discovered that 85% of your employees were disengaged at work? That level of disengagement isn’t theoretical. It is real, and it is draining talent, productivity and profitability.

As neuroscientist Naomi Gower explains, understanding how the brain works in the context of work is not a luxury. It is a crucial part of any business strategy. The neuroscience of low engagement reveals how cognitive and emotional disconnects directly impact focus, decision-making and overall output. But here is the key: businesses with highly engaged employees see 17% higher productivity and 21% more profitability.

To unlock that kind of performance, leaders must rethink how they are equipping employees to succeed.

It starts with understanding what is happening inside the brain when people encounter new information. One of the biggest barriers to learning, adapting and contributing in the workplace is how the brain filters unfamiliar experiences, often without us even realizing it.

Understanding experiential blindness

Learning how to improve workplace productivity with neuroscience begins with understanding bias and the brain’s filtering processes.

The brain naturally tries to categorize unfamiliar information based on past experiences. This phenomenon — known as experiential blindness — can cause the brain to block out new, useful ideas, especially if they contradict existing beliefs. And it’s one of the biggest barriers to behavior change.

Why overcoming experiential blindness matters

In fast-changing times, your team’s ability to adapt is essential. If they don’t “see” new opportunities, they’ll make short-sighted decisions that could hurt performance. If employees feel like they have nothing new to learn, they disengage, often doing the bare minimum.

What you can do to remove experiential blindness

• Provide context early: When introducing new concepts or projects, give a clear background on why they matter and tie them to what your team already knows.

• Simplify: Break down complex changes into digestible chunks.

• Engage your team in developing new ideas: Involve them in the process so they build knowledge rather than resist change.

The outcome? Your team will adapt more quickly, contribute more new ideas and stay engaged, increasing their ability to absorb critical information and apply it effectively.

Embracing the neuroscience of leadership

According to Gower, mental fitness is often overlooked when it comes to leadership — but it shouldn't be. Most companies invest heavily in systems, analytics and AI, yet ignore their most important business intelligence asset: the human brain.

Gower argues that if you're not considering cognitive health, you're missing a major opportunity. An employee’s ability to focus, make good decisions and think creatively is impacted by brain health. When cognitive function is strong, productivity increases. So does creativity. But when it's impaired by stress or burnout, even the most advanced tools can’t make up the difference.

In high-pressure environments where decisions are made quickly, motivation fluctuates and creativity is at risk, leaders must understand the brain processes behind behavior. Gower outlined several key neuroscience principles that every leader should know:

• Change triggers discomfort: Organizational transformation is challenging because it causes physiological stress.

• Incentives and threats fall short: Traditional carrot-and-stick tactics rarely deliver lasting results.

• Empathy isn’t enough: While valuable, empathy alone won’t create meaningful engagement.

• Attention rewires the brain: Simply paying attention can cause chemical and structural changes.

• Expectations shape perception: How people interpret information is influenced by what they expect to see.

• Focused attention changes identity: Where we consistently place our attention shapes who we become.

To lead more effectively, Gower recommends applying these insights in practical ways:

• Design spaces for focus: Reduce distractions with quiet zones, noise-canceling tools and clear time blocks. The brain works best when it’s not constantly switching between tasks.

• Encourage regular breaks: Techniques like the Pomodoro method (where you set a timer for 25 minutes of focused work before taking a 5 minute break), walking meetings or short brain resets help prevent overload and sustain energy.

• Build psychological safety: Foster open communication, reframe mistakes as learning opportunities and recognize contributions without judgment. When employees feel safe, they’re more creative and engaged.

• Actively manage stress: Provide tools and flexibility that help employees maintain work-life balance. When stress is reduced, decision-making and performance improve.

By integrating neuroscience into your leadership approach, you’ll not only increase productivity but also improve job satisfaction, motivation and resilience across your team. Gower’s core message is clear: leaders who understand how the brain works are far better equipped to support high performance in modern workplaces. Why? Because the three C’s of high-performing teams will be better met.

Leveraging the three C’s of high-performing teams

In her keynote, Gower outlined three essential ingredients for high-performing teams: curiosity, courage and creativity. 

These aren’t soft skills — they’re cognitive capabilities that can be nurtured, measured and improved when leaders understand how the brain works.

Curiosity

Gower explained that curiosity plays a vital role in learning and memory. When people are curious about a topic, they absorb information more easily, and they also retain unrelated material better over time. This has major implications for training, communication and innovation.

Tip: Prime your team’s curiosity before introducing a new concept or task. Encourage exploration of topics they’re naturally interested in to increase focus, time spent engaging and long-term retention. The result? Sharper thinking and an increase in productivity.

Courage

Courage stems from psychological safety. Teams that feel safe to speak up, fail and experiment are more likely to take smart risks — and more likely to perform at a high level. According to Gower, research shows that high-trust teams report 74% less stress and 50% higher productivity.

Tip: Make it clear that failure is part of progress. When you normalize risk-taking and experimentation, you help employees feel safe enough to stretch beyond the bare minimum and pursue bold, new ideas.

Creativity

Creativity thrives when people feel psychologically secure. Gower emphasized that fear shuts down the brain’s creative processes. But in the right environment, where people feel heard and supported, creativity expands — even under pressure.

Tip: Celebrate original thinking, not just outcomes. Acknowledge small wins, early ideas and experimental approaches to foster an innovation mindset that can spread across the team.

By developing curiosity, courage and creativity, you create the cognitive conditions for sustainable, high performance. Gower’s research-backed framework gives leaders a practical way to shape team dynamics in line with how the brain actually operates — not just how we wish people behaved.

But even with the right mindset and environment, one major obstacle can derail it all — stress. When left unmanaged, it doesn’t just affect mood or morale. It disrupts how the brain processes information, undermines creativity and blocks the very traits that drive high performance.

Tackling the stress response for better engagement

As Naomi Gower emphasized, if you want to increase productivity, you first need to understand how stress impairs the brain.

Drawing on brain science, Gower explained that workplace stress is at an all-time high, and it directly impairs key cognitive functions like focus, planning and decision-making. When the brain is in a heightened stress state, it shifts into survival mode. This blocks higher-order thinking and narrows attention, making it harder for people to process change or tackle complex problems.

She cited data showing:

• 72% of employees feel overwhelmed.
• 44% struggle to stay focused.
• 35% find it hard to adapt to change.

These aren’t just feelings — they’re measurable breakdowns in cognitive performance. And they come at a cost to overall productivity.

What you can do:

• Manage workloads to prevent chronic stress and burnout.
• Encourage regular breaks to reset the brain and reduce cognitive fatigue.
• Provide decision-support tools so your team can act with clarity instead of reacting under pressure.

The outcome? By reducing stress, you protect your team’s ability to think strategically, generate new ideas and sustain momentum. You’ll see improved focus, faster adaptation and a measurable increase in productivity, even when demands are high.

Promoting focus and monotasking

One of the most effective ways to reduce stress and support healthy brain function is surprisingly simple: help your team focus. The brain isn’t built for multitasking — it’s built for depth. When people switch between tasks, their cognitive load increases, stress levels rise and the quality of their work declines.

Drawing on brain science, Gower debunked the long-held belief that multitasking improves efficiency. In reality, it slows people down, increases the risk of mistakes and drains mental energy. Teams that are constantly interrupted or juggling too many priorities may appear busy, but they’re rarely operating at high performance.

Research shows that monotasking — the act of focusing on one task at a time — helps increase productivity by improving clarity, memory and speed of execution. It also reduces the time spent recovering from distractions or correcting avoidable errors.

What you can do:

• Encourage monotasking: Block time for deep work and reinforce a culture of single-task focus.

• Reduce distractions: Help your team minimize notifications, noise and interruptions during critical work periods.

• Support brain-friendly habits: Promote short recovery breaks between tasks to protect cognitive energy and avoid overload.

What’s the outcome? Your team will make fewer errors, move faster and produce higher-quality output. Most importantly, they’ll increase productivity without burning out — because their work will align with how the brain works best.

But focus alone isn’t enough. To truly sustain high performance, organizations need to go deeper and support brain health. That means treating cognitive health with the same seriousness as physical well-being. As Gower explained, this is where the next competitive advantage lies.

Creating trust in your workplace

In his book ‘The Neuroscience of Trust’, Paul Zak defines high and low-trust workplaces based on the presence or absence of certain factors that influence employee engagement, performance and well-being.

Zak emphasizes that trust is not only a soft skill but also has tangible, measurable effects on employee performance and well-being. He ties this to the neurochemical oxytocin, which is released when trust is established, leading to positive outcomes like increased collaboration, motivation and productivity. Conversely, when trust is low, cortisol levels can rise, leading to stress and disengagement.

Trust creates the conditions for focus, creativity and resilience — but it’s only part of the equation. To fully support how the brain works, organizations need to align their environments, tools and practices around cognitive performance. That’s where building a truly brain-friendly workplace comes in.

Supporting cognitive health at work

While trust is foundational for creativity and resilience, it’s just the starting point. True cognitive wellness also requires the right tools, habits and environments. To fully support how the brain works, organizations need to design their environments, tools and practices around cognitive performance.

The brain is not a fixed organ. It’s adaptable, plastic and capable of change throughout life. Neurogenesis — the formation of new brain cells — can happen at any age, especially in environments that promote focus, learning and recovery. This has powerful implications for the workplace.

As Naomi Gower noted, most organizations invest in physical wellness but overlook cognitive wellness, even though the latter is equally essential to high performance. Cognitive function underpins decision-making, emotional regulation, learning and innovation. The World Economic Forum now ranks cognitive skills as the most in-demand capability across industries.

When workplaces are structured to support brain health, employees are more focused, more resilient and better equipped to navigate complexity. But when they’re left to manage overload, fatigue and distraction on their own, productivity suffers.

What you can do

A brain-friendly workplace requires more than good intentions. It needs practical design, cultural alignment and accessible tools. Start with:

• Equip your team with cognitive tools: Offer apps that support focus, stress recovery and mental clarity, such as Lumosity, Neurotracker, Happify or Headspace. These tools can help build attention, regulate emotions and support mental stamina.
  
  

• Design for deep work: Distractions drain cognitive resources. Create quiet areas, introduce no-meeting blocks, or encourage time-blocking with tools like Forest. Consider flexible furniture and layouts that let people shift between collaboration and solo focus.

• Integrate recovery into the day: Mental fatigue builds faster than we think. Promote walking meetings, time away from screens and short breaks between tasks. Encourage monotasking instead of constant switching.

• Foster continuous learning: Learning fuels neurogenesis and helps strengthen neural pathways. Offer access to training, courses and webinars. Host in-house skill-shares or gift learning resources like books at the end of the year.

• Make psychological safety a baseline: Brain performance depends on feeling safe. Create inclusive environments, normalize mental health check-ins and encourage open feedback to reduce cognitive strain from uncertainty or fear.

• Monitor and improve over time: Treat cognitive wellness like any other performance metric. Use pulse surveys or journaling apps to track stress and engagement patterns and adapt accordingly.

The outcome

When cognitive wellness is part of your workplace strategy, supported by both culture and design, your team doesn’t just feel better. They think more clearly, bounce back faster and make smarter decisions under pressure.

This kind of workplace doesn’t just support the brain. It unleashes it.

Lead smarter with a neuroscience-backed strategy

By applying neuroscience principles, you can enhance motivation, creativity and productivity within your team, even during challenging times.

The payoff? A healthier, more resilient workforce that can adapt to change and thrive under pressure.

Ready to lead smarter? Start small:

• Run a “monotasking Monday” to help your team focus without distractions.
• Hold a 10-minute learning huddle on the neuroscience of stress and focus.
• Audit your workspace for distraction zones — and create one space for deep work.

These quick wins can shift your team’s cognitive performance almost immediately. And over time, they create the foundation for a healthier, more focused, high-performing workplace.

Watch Naomi Gower’s presentation in full.