Data-driven visibility for the remote workplace

Workplace visibility is the ability to see and be seen - the appreciation, acknowledgment, and reward of an individual’s work by virtue of being visually noticed in a workspace.?For managers, workplace visibility is critical because, in addition to answering the question of “what” their teams are working on, visibility also helps answer the question of “how” their teams are working.

Gaining visibility is also how people managers and leaders ensure that teammates are aligned with the organization’s goals and culture and find avenues to help their team members to perform better. A viewpoint of processes and people allows managers to?gauge bottlenecks, emulate success patterns, and prepare for process improvements.

Visibility in the remote workplace

In the remote workplace, where employees work from distributed physical spaces, peers and managers do not have the advantage of seeing what work is being done by an individual. This disadvantages the entire team’s dynamics -

• On the one hand, managers are unable to fully grasp the effort and time contributed by a teammate nor are they able to spot and preempt bottlenecks. They are also unable to evaluate performance, follow up on task commitments, or help their teams be more productive.
• On the other hand, employees are unable to showcase their contributions until a task leads to a successful outcome. In the meantime, employees are left?overcompensating for the lack of visibility, leading to a myriad of short and long-term issues.?

The solution

A solution currently being adopted by high-performing dev teams is the inspired use of engineering analytics to capture different dimensions of their team's processes, tooling, and people management. ?

• Workload allocation using data-driven visibility helps managers to?allocate workload?that is fair and considerate of their teams’ existing work share, location/time zone, and past indicators of learning and progress.
• With insights into their team’s productivity?from data on how teams communicate and collaborate, EMs can identify gaps in communication, collaboration, or processes to inform training and development.

• The bird’s eye view of workflows created by app usage analytics is also equipping managers to notice trends of context switching or app fatigue and preempting the pitfalls of such tool fatigue by structuring more?focus time and deep work?slots into their team’s everyday work schedules.?
• Analytics can help managers identify?signals of stress, exhaustion, burnout, or a dip in productivity. This can equip managers with the necessary data to structure well-being programs or employee experience programs to build more resilient and healthy teams.

?? Visibility is tricky, especially as we navigate remote and hybrid workspaces and use a multitude of digital tools to get work done. We believe that this problem is best solved with analytics that can equip engineering teams with visibility into their workload, contributions, and processes to help them work effectively without burnout.

Gain visibility into the teams and processes that power your workplace.

For more articles on engineering management, productivity, and well-being, check out our blog!