Zoom, Teams, Slack Are Wreaking Havoc on Employee Productivity | Hacker News Reader

Zoom, Teams, Slack Are Wreaking Havoc on Employee Productivity

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47 pointsrekahrv23 comments

Teams and Slack need better notification settings. I was part of this org that I had to mute multiple channels because Slack would still show the unread counter mixed in with my real messages I had to go in and clear. These tools need a notification delay option where you can say "Notify of mentions every 15/30 minutes". You couldn't, as a programmer, get any work done if someone stopped by to say something to you at your desk every 5 minutes and I'm surprised they don't have these settings in place already.

I get my task outline in Notion, the details in Teams calls, I request clarifications in GitHub, I get answers in Slack, I get the additional context in a 'quick call', and when all is said and done, I get reviewed based on the severely outdated initial Notion Issue. There's also some order of business that gets discussed in Whatsapp. I feel H.P. Lovecraft couldn't have envisioned this kind of cosmic horror.

The issue I have with IT departments is that they see their job as implementing the technology and then putting the "guard rails" in place, but not producing standards and ways of working.

As a consequence I spend too long sifting through emails, Team chats and Team sites looking for that document that I know I've seen, but cannot recall the method by which it was delivered to me.

Crucial insight.

Everyone has to agree to use the right tools for the same nature of things. One possible lineup among many:

Email - external interactions, basically

Team groups / channels: team-scoped information of value, should be associated with a ...

... Team-scoped file store: Teams does this well, as the File tab are Sharepoint subsites which can also be seamlessly used via OneDrive, importantly allowing live doc editing during meetings instead of screen sharing documents

Ad-hoc chats: one or many person conversations that take the place of most meetings, can be ongoing, but the information isn't usually needed by a future team member (action items are not here, they go in P below)

KB store (Notion, Confluence, whatever*): See PARA (Projects, Areas of Responsibility, Reference, Archives) but only meta information about a project or product goes here, the actual work goes in ...

Kanban/Task manager (Trello, Linear, Monday, Asana, Jira): Everything about the P in projects or products that structurally fits

Live meetings : workshop with tangible outcomes (decisions, priorities, etc.) captured as artifacts created by meeting participants during the meeting (likely requires using tools during the meeting, to avoid double-do)

* I say whatever, but I prefer knowledge capture that's a KB site, and live editable, with per user cursors and comments, preferably using Markdown so sections can be published by almost any doc/site gen tool these days

I've used this workflow, and it's generally terrible. There's so many repositories of information that the definitions of what goes where become nebulous and subjective.

E.g. does an architecture diagram for an app go in the team-scoped file store so it can be live edited during architecture discussions, or does it go in the KB store because it is meta information in a way, or does it go in the task manager because that architecture is an artifact of some actual work? I could see valid arguments for any of the 3.

My experience is that things become better by using fewer tools, even if that means the chosen tool is somewhat less well suited than a more specialized tool.

E.g. I would replace the team-scoped file store and the KB store with a git repo. It's not as good, but it's good enough, and one less place to search. A company should use either chat or email, but not both (both is fine as long as it's explicit that email exists largely for HR to mass-email people and to get calendar events).

That cuts it down to a file store/KB, a digital communication method, a task manager, and in-person events. Removing potential duplicate use cases makes it much harder to use the wrong tool for a particular thing. Nothing but the KB is suitable for storing documentation. Nothing but the task manager is suitable for organizing work.

I think some of these features just aren't worth the overhead of having another location to search through. Live editing is neat, but I'd happily get rid of it to not have to search through another data source.

It's not the tools, it's how you use them. If it is an issue at your company, be truly agile and inprospect the process to improve how you use them

exactly. Just set yourself to DND and answer everything that is not sent as urgent 3x a day in bulk if you have problems otherwise.

This is not a solution, rather it's being part of the problem.

The real solution involves talking it out, revising policies, and changing behaviors

The headline does a poor job at explaining the article. It’s not really focused on notifications grabbing your attention. It’s about having to cycle through multiple apps just to get your tasks done.

For example, someone asks you (on Slack) a question about a document (on Google Docs). You open the doc, but the part you need is referenced in a Jira ticket. You open Jira and it says to look at Confluence.

Yes, this is inline with my point, it's how you use the tools, which includes how you manage knowledge and inquiries

I think that makes sense but while you can control that yourself, controlling those workflows in a company of 1000+ employees with all these tools that their disposal is a large task in and of itself.

Yup, I left a company like this because of cultural issues. Sometimes the best thing for yourself is to move on, because you cannot fix everything

For all the hate that Teams gets, it does this the best. Felt this acutely when moving from Teams to Slack+Zoom+Gsuite. Open and edit docs quickly right in Teams.

But honestly the thing I miss the most is having persistent meeting chats, I don't want to create a slack channel for every ad hoc zoom meeting or having to slack someone for a link they shared on zoom I forgot to copy

Have you tried Slack's huddle feature? It entirely replaces Zoom for us now. However, Slack's screenshare capabilities are just not as robust.

A big client of mine just got a new biz development hire that is a former marine. I’ve never been in better run virtual meetings. Everything happens (and finishes) on time, expectations are properly set, and meetings are only held when necessary.

This is really interesting. Can you share a bit more about specifically how the marine achieves this? What do they say/do that achieves this outcome? Thanks!

Lots of little things, but the number one thing he did that I liked was take control of every lull in the conversation and direct everyone back to the agenda. Keeps things moving. I also liked that he would let everyone know how much time we had left at different intervals.

Thanks for replying!

"We shape our tools and then our tools shape u" "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail"

I think it's pretty evident that tools matter in how different actions are performed. If not, what would be a point of FB a/b testing smallest things? They can get us to spend more time on their site, even though there is a given optimal that users want to spend there.

Or lets look at one extreme comparison. JIRA and SLACK. Pretend you use one and not the other. The companies communication is going to look extremely different, because these tools have "an agenda" about how users should use them

>even though there is a given optimal that users want to spend there.

Are you sure? It seems to me that the amount of time people would want to spend on a website surely depends on the website.

I agree. For nearly 10 years I've felt that we've continued to look to "new tools" to solve our problems, always hoping/expecting that the next tool will get it right!.

When it comes to internal ticket systems, but tracking systems, internal wikis or blogs, I've long felt that each one needs a "benevolent dictator", or as I prefer to call it, a "curator".

For example, if you have an internal bug tracking system, the curator should have a custom query set up where they sort by new and keep an eye on incoming things, or look for bugs that are missing certain fields (if your system isn't configured to require them), spot-checking for duplicates, poorly written and unclear, etc... Same thing with an internal Wiki. Then reaching out and coaching and providing polite guidance.

You'll have some users who do these things well, but you'll always have some users who don't. If it's left entirely to the users and there is no curator, then things always deteriorate. Cruft builds up, things become difficult to find, and folks abandon the system in favor of the next thing, and the cycle repeats.

https://archive.ph/VDu3b

Coming from a small company which was fully in office which transitioned to fully remote and then to hybrid over the pandemic I actually recommended teams as they already had it all setup and it seemed like a great idea.

I personally thought it mostly worked very well. Meetings were minimal:

* 5 minute DSU at about 10.00am * Weekly/Bi-Weekly progress meeting

Then you had people direct messaging you but overall the whole thing was pretty chill. Then only issue was that the manager wanted us to say good morning in the channel (spying on when we started the work day). I never felt anyone breathing down my neck or any weird monitoring other than that.

I moved to a much large org (about 35x the size of the previous company). Teams had been the standard here for years and it's an absolute disaster.

There are multiple different teams often with overlap between them. It's not obvious which ones you should be in. The important ones are private and invite only everything else seems to be just noise. It's self service to which teams you should be in and most ignore everything other than what they have to be in to do their work.

The teams channels are generally all devoid of any useful info and everyone is scared of speaking there are several things I've noticed in this larger corp. that I didn't appreciate:

* Some people are building empires. Some use teams as a sort of weird gatekeeping / walled garden sort of thing were they put themselves in as the admin of a channel or maybe they add an open recurring meeting that they are in control of. It's hard to explain but when you see it very strange * Some people in a big org are too important to even write their own email or teams message. We have employees part of who's job is to post stuff dictated by the C-Level execs. I presume this is so you can't reply * Due to all of the shenanigans there are some (actually) who wish to kind of just be under the radar and literally never put anything on teams other than, "can I call you in 5 mins". Rather than have the discussion out in the open they always want a personal 1 to 1 discussion about all of their work. So all that detail is lost in the team and teams itself does nothing to help try to steer people away from private closed discussions * The teams client does not work well with Sophos. Granted nothing works well with Sophos but I've seen this pretty decent brand new laptop from last year struggle at near 100% CPU usage just to share my desktop

Doing anything cross timezone in teams is a bad experience. For small teams it can work but once you have a team in UK, central and Eastern Europe, India it breaks down badly. You'll come in to people who have started working at 3am your time and are mad they had to wait 6 hours for you to sleep. They will just send you messages as normal. I regularly log in and teams has direct messages and @me's in channels ...etc all flashing away like bro I only just started.

There is no way to stop people contacting you other than switching the dam thing off. Even when I'm in the middle of a meeting presenting I'll get direct messages from people who just didn't care that their message may popup on the screen. Like multiple pings in the middle of showing my screen. Even setting myself to out of office during my 30 minutes of lunch will not stop people. They expect you to to answer them always and immediately. Teams should basically stop that like stop people messaging me when I'm sharing my screen!

Like outlook teams meetings will often have 0 agenda. Nothing in the software stops someone spamming me with 6 meeting requests all of which could have been a couple of emails.

Back to back and overlapping meetings are common. I wish there was a setting at a team member level to say "I don't allow double booked meetings" and if someone tried to double book me it auto rejects the meeting with a standard response. The company is supposed to stop back to back meetings but it doesn't happen in practice and teams allows it. There again should be something on a person level to tell the meeting creator they are booked back to back meetings and stop them.

Intra-org is a disaster. This big org uses multiple offshore companies for development and testing. It can be days to get people the correct access which can be revoked at any time often by mistake. I've had people be able to join but not create meetings even if they created the meeting themselves.

The company is obsessed with tracking and monitoring devs to a frankly insane level. Teams now send me an email on Monday to say I have less meetings this week so I should be able to get more work done ...

Before anyone replies that these are the companies problem rather than teams I think you're wrong. The problems here are really that teams is a blunt tool for being able to communicate with others. It doesn't try to be anything other than that. I also think it's based on an old fashioned way of working. Like digitising a paper process rather than creating something that works properly in a digital world.

It could try to stop people doing anti-social stuff like allow me to stop people messaging me out of hours for example (it actually will send an email in that case just to be super annoying). All this is really disappointing given MS's status in the industry the practices that seem to proliferate on it are downright wrong. I think MS knows about this but doesn't care, they have the marketshare now why would they try to help the people being forced to use their tools. It is effort to try and "fix" teams and they don't have any want inside MS to do that at the moment.

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