Zoom, Teams, Slack Are Wreaking Havoc on Employee Productivity

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I get the additional context in a 'quick call', and when all is said and done, I get reviewed based on the severely outdated initial Notion Issue.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 &quot;guard rails&quot; in place, but not producing standards and ways of working.<p>As a consequence I spend too long sifting through emails, Team chats and Team sites looking for that document that I know I&#x27;ve seen, but cannot recall the method by which it was delivered to me.

It&#x27;s not the tools, it&#x27;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

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;VDu3b" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;VDu3b</a>

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.<p>I personally thought it mostly worked very well. Meetings were minimal:<p>* 5 minute DSU at about 10.00am * Weekly&#x2F;Bi-Weekly progress meeting<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s an absolute disaster.<p>There are multiple different teams often with overlap between them. It&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>The teams channels are generally all devoid of any useful info and everyone is scared of speaking there are several things I&#x27;ve noticed in this larger corp. that I didn&#x27;t appreciate:<p>* Some people are building empires. Some use teams as a sort of weird gatekeeping &#x2F; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s job is to post stuff dictated by the C-Level execs. I presume this is so you can&#x27;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, &quot;can I call you in 5 mins&quot;. 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&#x27;ve seen this pretty decent brand new laptop from last year struggle at near 100% CPU usage just to share my desktop<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s in channels ...etc all flashing away like bro I only just started.<p>There is no way to stop people contacting you other than switching the dam thing off. Even when I&#x27;m in the middle of a meeting presenting I&#x27;ll get direct messages from people who just didn&#x27;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&#x27;m sharing my screen!<p>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.<p>Back to back and overlapping meetings are common. I wish there was a setting at a team member level to say &quot;I don&#x27;t allow double booked meetings&quot; 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&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;ve had people be able to join but not create meetings even if they created the meeting themselves.<p>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 ...<p>Before anyone replies that these are the companies problem rather than teams I think you&#x27;re wrong. The problems here are really that teams is a blunt tool for being able to communicate with others. It doesn&#x27;t try to be anything other than that. I also think it&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s status in the industry the practices that seem to proliferate on it are downright wrong. I think MS knows about this but doesn&#x27;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 &quot;fix&quot; teams and they don&#x27;t have any want inside MS to do that at the moment.