Productivity Pit: How Slack Hurts Our Workflow

Work programs such as Teams, Slack, and Workplace should have increased our productivity. But they did not.

Several people write messages.
[Several people are typing.]

If you have been sitting in a slak for some time, you have probably seen such a message floating under the text field of the communication program used in your company.
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It can mean a lot of things. An active discussion denoting the joyful collaboration of you with your colleagues. The emergence of important news that everyone wants to know. Or, more often, non-linear disputes, in which everyone wants to insert the last word first, and the system, which should keep the workflow organized, envelops chaos.

“The work takes place in Slack,” it is written on the company's website. “Imagine what you can achieve together.”

However, the ever-increasing enthusiasm for new technology, which must manage the workflow, does not necessarily improve our work or increase our productivity. If used improperly, technology can only worsen the situation.

Slack is one program of many types of desktop software that companies use to improve collaboration and communication in our world, which is constantly becoming increasingly digital. Teams is part of Microsoft's ubiquitous Office package, which also includes programs such as Word and Excel. Google’s G Suite includes Gmail, Hangouts Chat and Meet, Calendar, and cloud-based document sharing programs. Facebook's social network has also tightened up with its Workplace - an attempt to force its 2.7 billion users to use the products of the network somehow more productively than to spread conspiracy theories. This list can be continued.

These services take money monthly for the number of users, and often offer all kinds of services, from video conferencing to structuring the workflow and places to chat with a digital cooler. (The online editions of Recode and Vox use Slack for scheduling articles and distributing news) [we switched from Habré to Mattermost - its free clone, with the ability to deploy on our own server / approx. trans.].

This type of working software is part of the “teamwork applications” market, which is estimated at $ 3.5 billion worldwide, according to an IDC study , and it is estimated that in the next three years it will grow by 70%.

These services are needed so that everything goes smoothly in companies, as work gradually becomes remote and global, and knowledge workers — in professional, managerial, or technical areas, such as programming, science, or journalism — become more and more.


Increasing the number of knowledge workers in the US

In 2012, consulting company McKinsey estimated that communication technologies in the workplace have the potential to increase labor productivity by 25%.

“The average employee 28% of the work week understands e-mail, and 20% of the time he spends searching for inside information or employees who can help him,” the study says. McKinsey decided that it would be easier for people to perform these tasks using new software for work.

In a sense, this happened, but new problems have emerged.

Software of this kind, like an office in a single room, should help different parts of the company to work together, destroy hierarchies, encourage casual interactions and innovations.

In practice, it can turn into hell. Adding one more tool for communication can lead to an excess of information.

On average, employees of large companies send 200 messages per week in a sleek way, according to a study of Time Is Ltd., a productivity analytics company that connects to the company's office programs — weak, calendars, Office Suite — to advise them on how to improve productivity. Most active users who send more than 1000 messages per day are “not an exception.”

It seems that in order to keep pace with all these conversations, it takes all the working time. And after some time, the software, instead of helping to work, makes it impossible to perform its duties.

In addition, the software for work did not cope with the replacement of the tool that it was supposed to fix: e-mail. Most people use both of them.

“People should use the program to increase their productivity less often than they used to,” said Sarah Lacey, the founder of the Pando technical site and the working women community of Chairman Mom. But this is not happening.

Now people have problems with too many emails, appointments and messages. For them, the program for the working chat has become another time eater.

“There is definitely some kind of perfect balance,” said Matt Galligan, director and co-founder of the company Interchange, which provides crypto-financial services, who wrote about his experience in working on Medium. "As with any new tool, you need to learn how to use it responsibly."

“I am sure that at the very beginning of the email was an extremely productive tool. And only after some time it began to be used incorrectly, ”he added.

The email eventually suffered from its own prevalence, and the "incoming" to the brim was filled with various requests for a piece of human attention, and most of the letters were spam. The threads of the conversation have become too long and difficult to navigate. People answered all at once.

Ironically, now for some people, email has become a place of well-designed communication, and the work software is full of meaningless memes and emoji.

“Personally, I think that so far we have not invented a tool that would be ideally suited for corporate communication of large teams,” said the co-founder and director of Time Is Ltd. Jan Rizab.

We are again trying to find a compromise. Or, as Darius Foro, a productivity blogger, wrote, we need to know where to draw a line in our use of technology, until our productivity began to experience a decline in income.



“If we don’t critically use tools, we’ll just be the same people in a new place. We will not work more or less efficiently if we do not think critically about our decisions in using the tool, ”said Sarah Peck, founder and CEO of Startup Pregnant, an online community where people ask questions about motherhood and entrepreneurship. “We just move the email to another place and worsen the ability to search by message.”

Problem

Messaging is a good thing, but in moderation. Since it is so easy to communicate with colleagues through work programs, many of us print too much. And not all of these messages are helpful.

“The main strength is weak in that it’s amazing to just use, but this is also its main weakness: it’s too easy to use the default for messaging, even for that many things about which it’s pointless to communicate in a slack,” the programmer wrote Alicia Liu in an article on Medium.

“By lowering the barrier to start a conversation, we get a side effect — the ability to exponentially increase the overload by messages. Because of what we get a much more voluminous communication of a much worse quality. ” In other words, words cost nothing, and we spend them at insane speed.

In each of the 10 large companies, from 500 employees and above, with which Time Is Ltd. works, there are more channels in the channel than employees. The company estimates that none of the employees physically can read all the channels and messages in their company. And every lost minute of employee time is money lost.

Remote workers are under particularly strong pressure because of the need to prove that they work. For people who do not work in the office, sending messages or posting information to channels becomes a way to demonstrate their work.

“They feel a lot of pressure due to the need to demonstrate that they are working,” said Lacey. As a result, people spend time on chat platforms, which are an integral part of remote work.

And in fact, chat from a tiny part of the working day turned into the second most popular action at a computer, after an email - this is what the RescueTime program, which works in the background on users' computers and phones, and makes up for them time-consuming reports.

Since the launch of Slack in 2013 — followed by Workplace in 2016, Teams in 2017, Hangouts Chat and Meet in 2018 — the time spent behind the email has decreased, but still remains the main eater of working time, occupying 10% of the total time spent behind the monitor.


The distribution of time spent behind the monitor (5.5 hours on average daily). Orange - chat / messengers, red - email.

Now chat apps — Slack, Teams, Workplace — take up about half the time, according to RescueTime. Half of the approximately 5.5 hours that the average user spends on a computer at work.

RescueTime only considers the application or website when the application is active and in use. It does not take into account the time for sites opened in other tabs, or when the screen goes blank.

Interestingly, we spend about the same amount of time on messaging as six years ago. That is, adding chat apps did not reduce our communication expenses. And that's bad for productivity.

When Slack lay for several hours on June 27, 2018, people who used RescueTime behaved more productively than they did at the same time last week (RescueTime measures productivity both in terms of site / program use and in evaluating the performance of this program for over 12,000 users).


Orange graph - users productivity during failure is weak, blue - in the previous week

RescueTime users find work chat programs “distracting.” They rate Twitter and other social networks as “extremely distracting.” Usually, people who spend time on them consider themselves less productive than when they work in business programs like Excel or Google Docs, or other “very productive” applications. The higher the score, the greater your productivity.

results

It is important to note that applications for work are far from the only time eater. This is just one of the ways to fill people with digital noise that splits attention. The first place is taken by our omnipresent smartphones , which pull our social and working lives.

And yet, work applications exacerbate the problem. And they are not so easily abandoned as other habits, on which our livelihood does not depend.

“People can turn away from social networks,” said Foro, who also runs Vartex, an industrial software automation company. “It’s much harder to say:“ I'm leaving the Slaks ”.”

Stormy discussions on working platforms inevitably lead to misunderstandings, and senseless chatter like emoji, memes or messages distracts from work.

In a survey commissioned by The Economist magazine, respondents "mainly noted that poorly functioning communications in the workplace can lead to stress generation, slow down career growth, and prevent them from achieving performance and sales indicators." It also leads to losses of millions of dollars annually from large companies due to low productivity and makes workers hate their jobs .

“Faster is not better or worse, bad or good. Faster means simply faster. If you send a bunch of stupid messages faster, there’s nothing good about it, ”Peck said. "We combine the tool and the ability to do something with importance and reason to do it."

Peck assesses "the level of specificity of communications at 10% of the optimal."

And even well-functioning communications can impair our ability to perform our duties. After being interrupted, it may take up to 25 minutes for you to return to your task, as stated in a Microsoft study. Even more time may be required to enter the “stream”, sometimes referred to as “deep work”. These terms describe the focused state of consciousness that appears in a person immersed in work, during which time flies by. And it is in this state that you achieve the best results.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: The Rules of Concentrated Success in the World of Distractions [Deep Work: Recommends that you do this work in blocks of 90 minutes each .

If you receive an average of 45 messages in a slak for an eight-hour working day, then, according to Time Is Ltd., it is impossible to allocate a similar length of time for concentration. Every time you get distracted in Teams, Hangouts or Slack, this can be compared with the fact that a person comes to your table and interrupts you. Add to this email, calls and meetings that are on any working day, and your productivity end.

“With a large number of channels and people, time is littered,” Foro told us. "If our brain is littered and we process too much information, our productivity and concentration will decrease."

Reckless speed and unsystematic working environment created by working chats can be perceived as an extra mess.

“When I come across a typical economy-class knowledge-based office where constant unstructured discussions are buzzing like bees in a hive, I don’t see tightly interconnected, rapidly evolving and flexible organization,” wrote Newport in its blog on why “More communications” does not mean “better.” "I see a poorly designed distributed system."

Over time, distractions in the workplace can begin to spread. Many workers try to compensate for the lack of time by doing several things at the same time. But it does not work . Instead of doing one thing qualitatively, you simply switch between tasks, doing all of them badly.

On average, knowledge workers spend three minutes on performing any task before they are interrupted or they switch to another, according to a study from Microsoft, which used wearable sensors and software to track actions on the computer. According to him, multi-tasking is 40% less productive.

And if you do not have time to do enough during the working time, you have to work in your personal one. It upsets your work-life balance , which is fundamentally important for health and productivity.

“This becomes a problem as soon as we bring chats out of the workplace,” Foro said. Unfortunately, we know that the software for work does not remain at work: applications for smartphones allow workers to get you at home, and you can participate in video conferences even when you are on the beach on vacation.

“Everyone used to use AIM. There you could set a message in case you were not there. You were literally separated from your device, ”Gallygan said. - Now it will not work. You are present 100% of the time. ”

Our mind is not designed for such behavior. “We don’t feel the difference between a leopard and a terrible message in a slug,” Galligan said. “Upload enough messages to someone and get a psychological problem.”

“Fuss is cool and all that, but show me an athlete who only does all the time — not resting, not eating right — and I'll show you a man who quickly burns out,” Galligan said. This idea is hard to promote, especially in Silicon Valley, where processing and working all night long get a romantic touch.

And even the problem is not necessarily in the messengers - the problem is that we respond to messages. “It all starts with a message in the slaka, and then goes on to the social networks and reading the news,” said Foro. - The meaning of sending messages, communication - effective work performance. Everything that happens after that is a negative side effect. ”

For many people, working communications become something of a special social network - and bring with them similar problems. It is natural to be friends with colleagues, but because of this weakness can turn into a chat that has nothing to do with work.

“We didn’t know that internal working chats would turn into social networks,” Foro said. - They turn into social networks, and we often do not notice this. As soon as we start using work programs in the same way as social networks, we come to the same type of negative behavior. ”

It is characteristic that even the social networks themselves, whose business depends on the time spent by users on their platforms and generating revenue from advertising, recognize the destructive influence of their products and suggest ways to limit their use.

Social aspects of work may seem less controllable.

In general, frequent distractions were associated with shortening the concentration time , lowering IQ and increasing anxiety and depression . As a result - a general decrease in the quality of our work.

Software solution

Companies that produce work programs are well aware that some elements of their programs and behavior on their platforms are not productive, and are actively working on fixes. If they do not do this, then knowledge workers will look for another better option.

By the standards of software development, Slack, Teams, G Suite and Workplace are very easy to use. Everyone can send messages to anyone. Just write his name, enter the message, and send!

Unexpectedly, but such software can slow down communication a little more, suggesting that users think twice before sending a message.

The problem is that sending a message is much easier than figuring out how to use fewer messages or find and enable software settings that increase productivity.

Microsoft will roll out templates this year to make it easier to optimize the Teams application, best suited for certain types of business, for example, marketing. Slack offers many ways to manage notifications, silence conversations, tell colleagues that you are busy. Sometimes Slacka offers you to optimize your settings, but she certainly could do it more actively.

“Technology must persist in telling us how to behave,” said Peck.

Another problem is that these companies want to see you on their platforms more often and not less. Desktop software companies believe that the more time you spend on their platform — and the less you switch to others — the better. They achieve this by integrating other common work tools into their platforms, such as Office or Google Drive.

Mental workers switch between windows on average 373 times a day, or approximately every 40 seconds, while working on their tasks - this is what the Microsoft study says.

The idea is that if you can perform more tasks under the same roof, you will spend less time switching between programs. But if the platforms themselves are filled with distractions, these attempts will not work.

To become more useful, work programs will have to much better learn how to deliver the necessary information to us - bring up conversations on topics of interest that occurred, perhaps a few months ago, or help you find channels for your needs.

“We have great research on search when you know that you are looking for certain things,” said Michael Chewie, a partner in the research unit of McKinsey, the author of the 2012 report. “It will be harder for the machine to proactively tell us: Here is the information you need now.”

“If we don’t have good systems that can handle the huge amounts of communications generated by industrial social tools, they will just overwhelm us,” said Chewie.

Elements of a working software can cause dependence not worse than Candy Crush.

“The developers of these tools specifically designed them to attract your attention,” said Chewie. “They divert attention from other things that we would like to do according to our concept of pastime.”

There are reasons that you check your work program at night - and not because you like your job. This is because the communication and digital confirmation from your colleagues makes you feel good. “Our brain was not adapted to this. This is a treat, said Galligan. “And we need to eat vegetables.”

However, sometimes the problem is not in software, but in a more complex area: in the culture of the company.

Corporate culture correction

Company culture is harder to fix than a program. This is especially so in Silicon Valley, suffering from the worship of the cult of young male programmers. This archetype, having no children, programs at night, drinks soylent in the workplace and succeeds in impossible times.

And for the most part, it does not exist.

In fact, workers are completely different, and they have a very difficult life, not necessarily revolving around work. Yes, it should not be. A happy and well-adjusted worker is less likely to burn out at work and quit. The quality of their work is also better.

“There is great power in the ability to kick anyone anytime,” said Gallygan. “We need a lot of respect for a lot of people.”

Some people think that respect can be imposed in the company's rules by writing instructions on how and when to use these programs.

“I think this is a difficult task for management,” said Foro. “If we just distribute all these tools to everyone and there will be no rules, I would not be surprised that they will be filled with all sorts of different content.”

Foro believes that such a policy will have to be planted with regular training and constantly updated. At the very least, an introductory familiarization process is required before giving workers work software to their hands.

“I think the critical problem is weak in the absence of an introductory course in large companies,” said Rizab. “Usually they have no idea what is happening and how to approach it.” As a result, employees use slaka as an instant messaging platform. ”

To organize the training, it would be necessary to introduce a new position in the company, for an employee who would compile a rule book on how to behave in the work chat, and then be engaged in moderation. This person can be assigned to remove unused channels, make optimizing settings, remind other employees when other teams take their time.

Ideally, this would reduce the total number of sent messages, and those that would be sent would fit into a more pronounced structure.

“Yes, we can assign rules, but as with any rules, not everyone will follow them,” Foro said. - It is quite difficult to engage in control in this area. The technology is new, and everyone is trying to learn how to work with it. ”

Others advise to use the journalistic proverb: show, not tell. This emphasizes that management behavior sets the tone for the entire company.

Lacey said that part of the problem is the wrong focus on working hours. “I think companies should abandon the assessment of people by the number of working hours. That would change the way people use these applications, ”she said.

“The question is not in the appointment of rules, but in what the management models, what it rewards,” she said. “People look at the directors, listen to what they are talking about, and what they don’t. Most of the staff looks at what work is being rewarded, and follows this observation. ”

Namely: my boss once gave me edits for this article at about 23 o'clock. But it was not a problem. , , . , , . – , , – – .

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