Has remote working impacted capacity planning?
It’s difficult to set those boundaries, because we're all one instant message away. People send a Slack or text message here and there, and then it's like people start to assume everyone's available 24 hours a day to work on the 15 projects that we plan to finish this quarter. That piece has weighed on me, because burnout is real.
Burnout is very real. I've been creating loyalty on my team by being super empathetic. When an organization is still in the process of growing into what will be an enterprise-size company, it’s tough to drive as if you already have the same capacity or resources that an enterprise does. Shockwaves from that hit the team and it shows. They’ll say, “Do you know how much we have on our plates?” You have to shift your leadership style based on the current situation in order to drive productivity and get the results that you want.
However, another part appears to be processes falling down - we now get stories that are incomplete or not well-scoped and thus cannot be properly estimated, but yet are instructed these are high priority and must be acted on. We get multiple calendar invites from executives for ad-hoc "problem of the day" meetings right on top of standups or sprint planning/review sessions - despite these being in our calendar and the calendar clearly showing we are busy.
I think that remote working has massively increased the quantity and length of Teams/Zoom meetings and it is heavily impacting productivity, making things fall behind or be short-circuited.
There needs to be a pause-and-reflect, to give time to breathe and then to reset and redesign these processes in a new asynchronous, highly-distributed working model.