Building our Team - Burnout

Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash

I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is a compilation of a whole week's takeaway. You can read more about the reason for it in the article?Restart.

How to create a community within the company to build skills that will help us grow in our career so that we can use them in future to have a massive monetary advantage?

I thought this was a courageous question because it had nothing to do with 73bit and also day to day work. The underlying question was how to leverage the smarts within the team so that we know who are like-minded people and with whom we can create trust, rapport and collaboration. I think everyone knows here that single-handedly 1 person can only do so much and a small dedicated team can move a mountain with the right skills and tools. My answer to this is the future of work especially in the tech world will always involve a major component of virtual and remote work. What that means to you is you will have to learn how to build and grow using a virtual community. It also means that the world is your playground. You could pick 1 to 3 topics and find your tribe.?

Here is my prescriptive advice to the person. Create a "Doing Book Club". I referred to the person who also is interested more in growth mindset and likes the book named Atomic Habit by James Clear. I ask them to both buy the book, read it and do exercises mentioned in it to the task they do at work. Measure it for and month. Discuss the outcome and results using the method. Experiment with multiple observations and have some fun while doing it. Share your goals and aspirations with each other and help each other achieve them. Once you achieve your set goals share them with the rest of your team and be an example. You could go ahead and write about it on your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts too to build your personal brand. Thus leveraging social media for building your career. I would even recommend documenting your journey like I am doing here by sharing these insights which are normally shared within the team with the rest of the world.?

There are no secrets here. 1-on-1 is the oldest leadership tool ever and the book club idea is there for many centuries. Technology has only enabled us to low-cost publishing and sharing it with the world so that others don't have to go through the pain of building a good working culture.?

Why sharing the problem in great detail is important?

In this discovery, we found that the current pressure of work that seems to be around for another 3 months resulted in reflecting the process and team. While I was trying to understand the difficulties, it was brought to my notice that one of the challenges was getting stuck. This is about the Data Sets feature we have in our product named Probench. Since it gives the flexibility to create any kind of scorecard. That means our users can apply any formulae they use in a spreadsheet to be codified onto our data sets. It creates the possibilities for infinity. It also means you could get stuck for hours when the formula is complex and you are not able to simplify or break it down. As the saying goes "How Do You Eat An Elephant? One Bite At A Time!" At times you don't know where to start and how to think about the problem it can be tiring and time-consuming. This also makes the task interesting and fun like solving a Rubik's cube. The original 3x3x3 Rubik's cube has 43 252 003 274 489 856 000 combinations or 43 quintillions. That's 21 digits in a number. It blows my mind when I see a simple toy has so much going on. Our Dataset has similar qualities.?

Too much pressure converts fun into frustration.?

One of the internal solutions we concluded was to add more people within the team or ask existing people to extend working hours. Now there are two things that are against the culture we are trying to build. 1) Extended Hour 2) Too much Work Pressure. We discourage both of them because we believe it is unhealthy for our people. As you already may know by now after reading our 73bit's culture charter (https://73bit.com/Culture) we believe in the team first. These two problems will lead to burnout. Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. Once you reach burnout we no longer want to continue in the same company. We would like our people to stay and grow to their maximum potential with us.?

Now when there was new information added about getting stuck for hours when the formula is complex, would it be advisable to have a full-time developer dedicated to the operation team who will play the role of customer support to the 6 operation team members. Now, this could be viewed as a cost centre or creation centre. Imagine this is a rotational 3-week role. That means a developer-only comes here twice a year for an 8 member developer. It also means it could be a source of improving the user experience. It could also mean that there can be an injection of automation for a repeated manual task. It also means creating a bot for some repeated tasks which need logical interventions. The will help developers prepare themselves to be good at customer interaction by starting with internal clients aka the operations team. The developer can find interesting ways to use our tools. The developer can watch the screen of the user for multiple hours to see glitches in user experience etc.

It's a tendency to hide our errors, mistakes or lack of skills. In a collaborative culture, they need to share more than the good news because it will only help us to think of alternative ways to put in as many solutions as possible. Like the Rubik's cube when three mind thinks together we could come up with 120 possible solutions. Think about it for a minute. Let your mind blow.?

What is data science and aren't we far away from data science?

The short answer is not exactly. We come in the interdisciplinary field of data science. We currently cannot claim a pure data science company. We want to aspire to become one in future. The reason for this aspirational vision is that like software was the truth of the future in the year 2000 it's our bet into the future is data science will become a common technology by 2030. We want to help every sustainability analyst find insights into data science.

Let's see some definitions of Data Science and learn more about it. You can see if we are aligned with some of them and can we move towards it in the future.?

Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge and actionable insights from data across a broad range of application domains. ~ Wikipedia

Simple Formula:- Computer Science/IT + Math and Statistics + Domain Knowledge

73bit derived formula:- IT +?Statistics (Benchmark/Assessment/Rating/Ranking/Index) + Sustainability Data

Data science in simple words can be defined as an interdisciplinary field of study that uses data for various research and reporting purposes to derive insights and meaning out of that data. Data science requires a mix of different skills including statistics, business acumen, computer science, and more.?

Data science is the field of study that combines domain expertise, programming skills, and knowledge of mathematics and statistics to extract meaningful insights from data. ~ datarobot.com. Data science practitioners apply machine learning algorithms to numbers, text, images, video, audio, and more to produce artificial intelligence (AI) systems to perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence. In turn, these systems generate insights that analysts and business users can translate into tangible business value.

Data science uses techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to extract meaningful information and to predict future patterns and behaviours. ~ investopedia

Data science is the study of data. It involves developing methods of recording, storing, and analyzing data to effectively extract useful information. The goal of data science is to gain insights and knowledge from any type of data — both structured and unstructured. ~ techterms.com

Data science is related to computer science but is a separate field. Computer science involves creating programs and algorithms to record and process data, while data science covers any type of data analysis, which may or may not use computers. Data science is more closely related to the mathematics field of Statistics, which includes the collection, organization, analysis, and presentation of data. Because of the large amounts of data, modern companies and organizations maintain, data science has become an integral part of IT.

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