Working in Tech can be very exciting and rewarding, but it can also come with challenges. With many teams running lean due to layoffs, employees are feeling the pressure and often struggle to deliver their best work while managing burnout. What can you as a manager do to help with this? After all, you’re plenty burned out yourself! You can get back to the core of what has always made tech an exciting industry - innovation and problem-solving.
Working in Tech can be very exciting and rewarding, but it can also come with challenges. With many teams running lean due to layoffs, employees are feeling the pressure and often struggle to deliver their best work while managing burnout.
What can you as a manager do to help with this? After all, you’re plenty burned out yourself!
You can get back to the core of what has always made tech an exciting industry - innovation and problem-solving. As a middle manager, you may not be able to address every one of your team’s pain points, but you can still problem solve toward making their day-to-day work lives less stressful toward enhancing their own ability to deliver innovative, creative, and impactful work that surprises and delights both customers and company stakeholders. You can do this by implementing time- and money-saving tools and measuring their impact on your team’s productivity.
Put a stop to worrying about the green light
Twist by Doist - Twist is the internal messaging tool used at Doist, maker of Todoist, which is a remote and asynchronous-first company. Unlike Slack or Teams, there are no online status indicators, which can cause presenteeism, or the pressure to be present during certain hours rather than work when one is most productive.
If “keeping the green light on” is a company-wide expectation beyond your team, you may have limited options to advocate for the use of Twist or change the company culture, but you can encourage your team to take frequent breaks and lead by example to reduce the pressure to be ever-present and instantly responsive.
You can also implement “focus time” and “office hours” during which team members can have uninterrupted time for focused work and time for more spontaneous conversations and responding to messages and emails.
Free up the calendar
Chances are, you won’t be able to save your team members from every meeting on their calendar. But, you can save them some time on your own team meetings with tools that allow for asynchronous collaboration. With Loom, you can share narrated screen recordings with transcripts that your recipient can replay faster than original speed to save even more time.
With Yac, Voxer and Async, you can share voice notes back and forth to retain the energy of a call without waiting for a time that’s convenient for multiple parties. This is especially helpful for collaborating across time zones. Many of these tools offer free versions so you can enhance team productivity without even making a dent in your budget. There’s no risk!
Eliminate ambiguity
Ambiguity and miscommunications can cause a great deal of confusion, inefficiency and frustration on teams. This can lead to stress, interpersonal conflict, and dissatisfaction with one’s team and work. In the worst case, it can impact retention, as employees will leave a workplace where they feel misunderstood and unappreciated. You can prevent this by transcribing meetings and providing access to the rest of the team. This way, no one is left out of a conversation or forced to rely on (potentially inaccurate) memory to determine what was said. You can use Zoom’s transcription feature, various AI recording tools such as Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, or my favorite, Tactiq.io. I like Tactiq because it transcribes without having to record the meeting, and it will automatically notify participants in the meeting chat that it is transcribing.
Another way you can eliminate ambiguity is by providing an agenda for meetings and following up with team members with clear expectations regarding next steps so no one is left guessing or wastes time or energy on unnecessary work.
You can also practice and encourage direct communication among your team by using tools like goblin.tools/Formalizer (select “More to the point (unwaffle)”) and Hemingway to ensure your messages come across as intended, especially since it’s difficult to indicate tone and other nonverbal communication in text alone. Even though emoji can help, they don’t mean the same thing to everyone and can further confuse the issue at times. This isn’t to say never use emoji or adverbs, but the more directly (there, an adverb!) your team communicates as a unit, the less time and energy will be spent potentially interpreting communication the wrong way and causing conflict or disharmony among colleagues.
How to Implement These Tools
You might think you have limited ability to advocate for your team and the way they work. Since every company’s culture is different, it’s of course important to weigh the risks, but you may have more influence than you realize, especially when using these tools shows undeniable improvements in productivity and team retention. If your workplace is on the stricter side and you anticipate pushback from your managers about making even subtle changes, ask for approval to run this experiment as a productivity trial and set metrics to show changes in productivity.
If, for example, you run the trial for three months, you can survey team members at the beginning and end of the trial and measure their happiness at work, how efficiently they feel they can get their work done, how well they feel they get along with their teammates, etc. You can also measure whether or not any team members leave during the trial period, customer metrics such as NPS, and changes in existing team metrics to look for improvements in speed or efficiency.
Another important reason: it’s inclusive and the right thing to do
How excited were you to implement these tips to improve team productivity? Do you think that would have been an easy sell to your boss? Now, if I had introduced these tips instead as a way to create a more inclusive workplace, especially for neurodivergent people, how motivating would that have been for upper management at your workplace?
Sadly, while many companies are vocal about caring about inclusivity and the well-being of their teams, in reality, they care more about their bottom line. While these tips and tools are especially helpful to create neuroinclusive cultures, they really do create happier, healthier workplaces for everyone, and they really do save companies time and money.
I look forward to the day when companies are as excited to help every team member thrive, regardless of neurotype or ability, as they are to watch the number go up on their quarterly report. If that future excites you, too, I’d love to hear from you. I help compassionate leaders create oases in the corporate desert where employees can be themselves and build careers they love toward reducing the 85% un- and underemployment rate for autistic folks.
These tips are part of a more extensive webinar called How to Be a Neuroaffirming Leader (Even If You’re Not the Boss), which you can access by emailing webinars@hiretechladies.com.
Resources for women in tech, and the companies that want to build inclusive workplaces where they can thrive.
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