Productivity Pit: How Slack Hurts Our Workflow

Work programs like Teams, Slack, and Workplace were supposed to increase our productivity. But did not do it.

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

If you have been sitting in a slack for some time, you probably saw such a message floating under the text box of the communication program used in your company.

It can mean a lot of things. An active discussion, indicating a joyful collaboration with you and your colleagues. The emergence of important news that everyone wants to know about. Or, more often, nonlinear disputes in which everyone wants to be the first to insert the last word, and the system that should support the organization of the work process is shrouded in chaos.

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

However, the ever-increasing enthusiasm for new technology that should drive the workflow does not necessarily improve our work or increase our productivity. When used improperly, technology can only make matters worse.

Slack is one program out of many types of working software that companies use to improve collaboration and communication in our world, which is constantly becoming more and more digital. Teams is part of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office suite, 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. Facebook also caught up with its Workplace - an attempt to get its 2.7 billion users to use network products was somehow more productive than for disseminating conspiracy theories. This list goes on.

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

This type of working software is part of the “teamwork applications” market, which is estimated at $ 3.5 billion worldwide, according to IDC research , and is expected to grow by 70% over the next three years.

These services are necessary to ensure that everything goes smoothly in companies, since work is gradually becoming remote and global, and mental workers - in the professional, managerial or technical fields, such as programming, science or journalism - are becoming more and more.


Increasing the number of knowledge workers in the United States

At McKinsey, a consulting company in 2012, it was estimated that communication technology in the workplace has the potential to increase labor productivity by 25%.

“The average employee 28% of the work week understands e-mail, and 20% of the time spent on searching for internal information or employees who can help him,” the study said. McKinsey decided it would be easier for people to complete these tasks using new software for work.

In a sense, this happened, but new problems arose.

Software such as office in a single room should help different parts of the company work together, destroy hierarchies, and encourage random interactions and innovations.

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

On average, employees of large companies send 200 messages a week in slack, according to a study by Time Is Ltd., a productivity analytics company that connects to the company's office programs - slack, calendars, Office Suite - to give them recommendations for improving productivity. The most active users sending more than 1000 messages per day, "are no exception."

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

In addition, the software for work could 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 work productivity less often than what they used to,” said Sarah Lacey, founder of the Pando technical site and the working women community, Chairman Mom. But this does not happen.

People now have problems with too many emails, meetings, and messages. For them, the program for working chat has become another time devourer.

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

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

The email eventually suffered from its own prevalence, and the "inbox" to the brim were filled with various requests for a part of a person’s attention, and most of the letters were spam. The threads of the conversation have become too long and complicated to navigate. People answered everyone at once.

It’s ironic that now for some people the email has become a place for well thought out communication, and the software for work is full of meaningless memes and emojis.

“Personally, I believe that until we invented a tool that would be perfect for corporate communication of large teams,” said co-founder and director of Time Is Ltd. Ian Rizab.

We are again trying to find a compromise. Or, as Darius Foro, a productivity blogger, wrote, we need to know where to draw the line in our use of technology, before our productivity begins to experience a reduction in revenue.



“If we are not critical of the use of tools, then we will simply be the same people in a new place. We won’t work more or less efficiently if we don’t think critically about our solutions 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 make the search by messages worse.”

Problem

Messaging is a good thing, but in moderation. Since it’s 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 of the slaka is that it is amazingly easy to use, but it is also its main weakness: it is too easy to use the default slaka for messaging, even for the many things about which it makes no sense to communicate in the slack," the programmer wrote Alicia Liu in an article on Medium.

“By lowering the barrier to starting a conversation, we get a side effect - the ability to exponentially increase message overload. Because of what we get much more voluminous communication of much worse quality. " In other words, words are worthless, and we spend them at an 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 slack than there are employees. The company estimates that not one of the employees will be able to physically read all the channels and messages in the slack of their company. And every minute of employee’s time lost is lost money.

Remote workers are particularly under pressure due to the need to prove that they are working. For people who are not working in the office, sending messages or uploading information to channels becomes a way to demonstrate their work.

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

And in fact, the chat from the tiny part of the working day turned into the second most popular computer action, after the email - this is evidenced by the data of the RescueTime program, which works in the background on users' computers and phones, and compiles reports on the waste of time for them.

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


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 5.5 hours that the average user spends on the computer at work.

RescueTime only considers the application or website when the application is active and in use. It does not take into account 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 we did six years ago. That is, adding chat applications has not reduced communication costs for us. And this is bad for productivity.

When June 27, 2018, Slack lay for several hours, people who used RescueTime behaved more productively than at the same time as in the previous week (RescueTime measures productivity both by the time the site / program was used and by evaluating the productivity of this program for work according to more than 12,000 users).


Orange chart - productivity of users during a slack failure, blue - last week

RescueTime users consider work chat programs to be “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 such as 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 way to flood people with digital noise, splitting attention. First place is occupied by our ubiquitous smartphones , which drag our social and working lives.

Still, working applications exacerbate the problem. And it’s not so easy to give up on them, as on other habits on which our livelihood does not depend.

“People can opt out of social networks,” said Foro, who also runs the Vartex industrial automation software company. “It’s much harder to say:“ I'm leaving the slaka. ”

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

In a survey commissioned by Economist magazine, respondents “primarily noted that poorly functioning communications in the workplace can lead to stress, hamper career growth, and interfere with performance and sales performance.” It also leads to the loss of millions of dollars annually by large companies due to low productivity and makes workers hate their jobs .

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

Peck estimates that “the level of specificity of communications is 10% of the optimal”.

And even well-functioning communications can impair our ability to perform work responsibilities. After you are interrupted, it may take you up to 25 minutes to return to your task again, according to a study from Microsoft. Even more time may be required to enter the “stream”, which is sometimes called “deep work”. These terms describe a focused state of consciousness that appears in a person immersed in work, during which time passes quickly. And it is in this state that you achieve the best results.

Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, recommends doing this work in blocks of 90 minutes .

If you receive an average of 45 messages in slack over an eight-hour working day, then, according to Time Is Ltd., it is impossible to allocate such a long period of time for concentration. Every time you are distracted by Teams, Hangouts or Slack, it can be compared to the fact that a person comes to your table and interrupts you. Add emails, calls and appointments that happen on any working day, and your productivity is over.

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

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

“When I come across a typical economy-class office for intellectual workers, where constant unstructured discussions buzz like bees in a hive, I don’t see a tightly interconnected, fast-paced and flexible organization,” Newport wrote on his blog on why “More communication” does not mean “better”. “I see a poorly designed distributed system.”

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

On average, brainworkers spend three minutes completing any task before they are interrupted or they switch to another, a study from Microsoft noted, which used wearable sensors and software to track actions on a computer. According to him, multitaskers are 40% less productive.

And if you do not have time to do enough during the working hours, you have to work in your personal. It upsets your work-life balance.fundamental to health and productivity.

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

“Before, everyone used AIM. There you could ask a message in case you were not in place. You were literally split up with your device, ”Galligan said. “Now that won't work.” You are present 100% of the time. "

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

“Fuss is cool, and all that, but show me an athlete who only does exercise all the time — doesn’t rest, doesn’t eat right - and I will show you a person who quickly burns out,” Galligan said. It’s hard to promote such an idea, especially in Silicon Valley, where processing and work all night get a romantic touch.

And it’s not even necessary that the problem lies with instant messengers - the problem is that we respond to messages. “It all starts with a message in the slack, and then goes to social networks and reading the news,” Foro said. - The meaning of sending messages, communication - the effective execution of work. Everything that happens after that is a negative side effect. ”

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

“We did not know that internal work chats would turn into social networks,” Foro said. - They turn into social networks, and we often don’t notice it. 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 advertising revenue, recognize the destructive influence of their products and offer ways to limit their use.

The social aspects of work may seem less subject to control.

In general, frequent distractions have been associated with shortened concentration times , decreased IQ, and increased 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 mental workers will look for another better option.

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

Unexpectedly, such software can slow down communication a bit more, inviting users to think twice before sending a message.

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

This year Microsoft will roll out templates to facilitate the optimization of Teams applications that are best suited for a certain type of activity, for example, for marketing. Slack offers many ways to manage notifications, mute dialogs, and inform colleagues that you are busy. Sometimes Slaka offers you to optimize your settings, but she could definitely do it more actively.

“Technology must aggressively tell us how to behave,” Peck said.

Another problem is that these companies want to see you on their platforms more often, and not less. Business 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.

Brain workers switch between windows on average 373 times a day, or about every 40 seconds, while working on their tasks, Microsoft wrote in a study.

The idea is that if you can perform more tasks under one roof, you will spend less time switching between programs. But if the platforms themselves are filled with distractions, these attempts will fail.

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

“We have great search research when you know you're looking for certain things,” said Michael Chewy, a research partner at McKinsey, the author of the 2012 report. “It will be harder for the machine to proactively tell us: This is the information you need now.”

“If we don’t have good systems capable of handling the huge volumes of communications generated by industrial social instruments, they will simply overwhelm us,” Chui said.

Elements of working software can cause addiction no worse than Candy Crush.

“The developers of these tools have specifically designed them to attract your attention,” said Chui. “They divert attention from other things that we would like to do according to our ideas about spending time.”

There are reasons that you check your work program at night - and not because you love your job. This is because communication and digital confirmation from your colleagues makes you feel good. “Our brain was not adapted to this. It's 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 company's culture.

Correction of corporate culture

Company culture is harder to fix than a program. This is especially so in Silicon Valley, which suffers from the worship of the cult of young male programmers. This archetype, which does not have children, programs at night, drinks soilent in the workplace and has time at the impossible time.

And for the most part, it does not exist.

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

“The power to kick anyone whenever you want is great power,” Galligan said. “You need to respect so many people.”

Some believe that respect can be enforced in company rules by writing instructions on how and when to use these programs.

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

Foro believes that such a policy will have to be imposed by regular training and constantly updated. At the very least, an introductory familiarization process is needed before giving workers working software in their hands.

“I think the critical problem is slacks in the absence of an introductory course in large companies,” said Rizab. - Usually they have no idea what is happening and how to approach this. 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 draw up a book of rules on how to behave in a working chat, and then engage in moderation in it. This person can be instructed to delete unused channels, make optimizing settings, remind other employees when other teams take up working hours.

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

“Yes, we can set rules, but as with any rules, not everyone will follow them,” Foro said. - It is rather 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 using a journalistic saying: show, not tell. This emphasizes that management behavior sets the tone for the entire company.

Lacey said part of the problem is the wrong emphasis on the number of hours worked. “I think companies should refuse to evaluate people by the amount of working time. That would change the way people use these apps, ”she said.

“The issue is not the setting of rules, but what management models, what it rewards,” she said. - People look at directors, listen to what they are talking about, and what not. Most employees look at what kind of work they are rewarded for, and follows this observation. ”

Namely: my boss once gave me edits on this article at about 11 p.m. But that was not a problem. After conducting research on this material, I began to turn off notifications for slacks after hours, and did not find out about his message until the next morning. It is important that he did not expect me to check incoming messages at night or work at night. He was able to work at a time convenient to him - although perhaps he should take a break - and I - in his own.

Personal decisions

To some extent, the way we use software for work is our personal preference. Obviously, your work tasks and your superiors are important things, but we can underestimate our own role in improving or worsening our working life.

“Our problem is not technology, but borders,” Peck said. “It doesn’t matter if this is an email or a text message, we set boundaries poorly and report them even worse.” We need to understand what these borders are, define them and adhere to them.

“My strategy is personal responsibility: I am responsible for my own productivity and monitor efficiency,” Foro said. - I constantly wonder if my actions bring me closer to work goals. Conversations with colleagues in slack hour by day do not bring me closer to my goals. ”

But first, however, you need to recognize the problem, and then actively deal with it. As Galligan said: "If you open the application again and start to hang in it, then you are to blame for this."