Productivity: Noise Is the Problem

Nowadays we live in a world ruled by trending topics, and sometimes we forget the basics like being more effective and productive. I see more and more how companies' technology leaders look for new technological products or new architectural patterns to solve the company's needs, and they forget that working hard can provide strong efficiency principles for their organization.

Have you ever wondered how many hours your team works on irrelevant or unnecessary tasks? Squads and engineers are usually people involved in their work and make a great effort to achieve their goals, but many times a large part of this effort is dedicated to tasks without any business impact.

C-levels, engineering managers, or tech leaders should be focused on increasing engineers' productivity. Effectiveness and productivity can be increased with the help of ChatGPT, Data Mesh, or Cloud, but you can also increase it by promoting a strong company culture oriented to increasing focus time for our engineers.

In the last few months, I have also seen a wave of companies that are requesting their employees to come back to the office, as they have realized remote work is not efficient. In my opinion, the problem is that we have brought the inefficiencies of the office to remote work and sometimes we have even increased them.

Main Noise Generators

There are several noise generators in our day-to-day. The following are the most important:

• Message systems such as Slack, Discord, or Teams.
• Meetings: People love them.
• The emergent tasks: Everything is important and urgent.

Message Systems

A few years before the pandemic, message systems such as Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams were not the main communication channel for companies that did not work remotely.  The main communication channels were email, phone calls for urgent issues, or to go to a workmate's desk:

• Managers spend a lot of time reviewing emails and replying to them, but always in an asynchronous way.
• At the office, managers or principal engineers had always people sitting next to him/her solving doubts three or four times a day.  

In those days and for the engineers of those companies, working at home meant an amazing amount of focus time. The world has changed a lot in the last few years. Many companies have adopted remote work, but not many of them applied any good practices; they projected their way of working in the office to the remote model. In addition, nowadays, we are continuously unfocused because of mobile and social media applications, and unfortunately, this is being transferred to society as a whole and to the way we work.

New message systems are great communication tools that make communication easier and more effective. If we were to use these tools in a good way, we could increase productivity. But often these tools generate a lot of noise and unfocus people's attention. These are some of the symptoms of improper usage:

• There are too many messages all day in general channels.
• People usually reply the messages instantly.
• Several engineers of the same squad reply to messages during the same hours.
• Requests, incidents, and emergent tasks are requested and resolved in global channels.

We do not have to stop using them, but we do need to use them better and try to guarantee focus time for our teams. The message systems have to be an asynchronous chat for most of the team, and of course, there are special cases like support teams or on-call engineers that should be focused on the chat.

Tips to Improve

Some recommendations to improve efficiency:

• Reduce and optimize the number of public channels, since the more channels there are, the more noise is generated.
• Set times for posting messages on general channels regarding global communications, for example early in the morning.
• On the public squad channel, always establish an on-call person.
• It is a fully asynchronous system, except for the channels used for on-call and incidents.
• Policy for muting non-priority channels.

Meetings

There are three main characteristics of meetings:

• People love to create meetings because it is a way to socialize.
• Meetings kill productivity.
• There is always time for another meeting.

This problem has increased a lot with remote work. At the office, these meetings were usually done in the meetings rooms so there were physical restrictions. If there were no available rooms, there were no meetings. Remote work and the new communication tools have eliminated these physical restrictions, so now there are more meetings than ever.

These are some of the symptoms of improper usage:

• Often several people are not paying attention or participating in the meeting.
• Many brainstorming meetings.
• Managers with a full calendar of meetings.
• Many mid-morning meetings.
• People do not come prepared for meetings.
• No documents or very long documents, without clear goals, business value, or impact analysis.
• Many meetings with more than 6 people.

In addition to sharing the agenda and goals, it is a good practice to write a summary of the contents and share it before the meeting. This helps people to establish the messages they want to convey and the rest of the participants to prepare for the meeting. Often this prevents the meeting and can be solved asynchronously.

Here is an exercise to check the productivity of the meetings we have in the coming week:

• On Monday morning, we have to review all the meetings scheduled for the next 7 days.
• We are going to create a table with the following information:
  • Meeting name.
  • Meeting description.
  • Date and duration.
  • Number of people
  • Are the agenda and goals indicated?
  • What are my goals for this meeting?
  • Were the meeting goals achieved?
  • Were my goals achieved?
  • Has a follow-up meeting been scheduled?
  • Good and bad decisions were taken in the meeting.
  • What do we need to improve at the next meeting?

After a month, analyze the results and share them with the team.

Tips to Improve

Some recommendations to improve efficiency:

• Set hours of guaranteed focus time without meetings. For example, if everyone works in the same time zone and similar hours, avoid meetings in the mornings.
• All meetings must have a previous document summarizing the topics to be discussed, who is responsible for each point, what is the goal, and the information required to work on it.
• The premise of resolving points in the asynchronous model should always be applied and the meeting should only be scheduled if it is really necessary. A clear example is the reporting meetings; you do not need to create meetings to analyze the progress. Firstly, you should review it asynchronously, and if you have doubts that require a meeting, then you plan it.
• If the meeting is not prepared, it is better to cancel it even during the meeting. Don't worry about being honest. Unprepared meetings are useless.

Reducing the number of meetings requires difficult decisions because most of them love to meet. 

Emergent Tasks

These tasks are unplanned but can be very important. All teams have emergent tasks, usually, operation and support teams have more but engineering teams work on product development too. The following tasks are an example:

• Security bug.
• Incidents with business impact.
• Request from the manager.
• Support to clarify customer questions.

Unplanned tasks change the focus of the team and often involve significant cognitive changes. There are four main problems in managing these tasks:

• Are always urgent for the person requesting them, and sometimes it is difficult for teams to know what the real priority is.
• generate chaos, often a large part of the team is working on them.
• When they are extended over time, they generate a lot of demotivation in people.
• A lot of time is dedicated to tasks that have no business value or high impact.

We have to define a management model for these types of tasks that will end up generating a big impact on the team both in terms of effort and value delivery. The time of our teams is a limited resource and should be invested in tasks that add business value. There are many tasks that if we don't execute, surely no one will ask about them.

Tips to Improve 

It is important that these recommendations are aligned with the company's OKRs and agreed upon at the company level:

• Allocate a percentage of weekly effort dedicated to this type of task, except for serious incidents with business impact.
• Assign a rotating role for the management of such tasks and prevent them from impacting the focus of the team.
• Define a must information for this kind of request such as:
  • Summary
  • Description
  • Priority
  • Business impact
  • Expected resolution date
  • Alignment with OKRs
• Define a decision matrix to determine what is important and what is not. The Eisenhower matrix is a good example method for prioritizing tasks.

Conclusions

I see many companies requesting their engineers to come back to the office and abandon remote work stating that employees are less productive. Many CEOs are analyzing how new AI solutions can increase the productivity of their engineers in many cases without having analyzed or tested the real value of these solutions on engineer day-to-day, I don't think these are the only solutions but the easiest and most obvious ones to choose.

More focus time means more productivity and that should be one of our goals as managers. Promoting a culture in our organization where the focus is an important part is key to achieving success in the most optimal way possible.

Productivity starts primarily with the C-levels, directors, and managers because they are the main ones responsible for promoting culture and also one of the largest generators of noise.