RDEL #1: What’s the best way for eng teams to communicate via Slack?
Understanding "burstiness".
Welcome to our first edition of Research Driven Engineering Leadership (RDEL). Each Monday, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership, and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer. We’re kicking off the newsletter with a question that applies to any remote or hybrid engineering team - what’s the best way for teams to communicate via slack?
The context:
Engineering teams are often distributed and communicate across timezones to get work done. While some collaboration is done synchronously (i.e. syncing up on a zoom call), a large amount of discussion happens via chat applications like Slack. Slack opens opportunities to connect with teammates across broader timezones, but often raises questions of whether frequent distractions or slow response times may reduce productivity in engineering teams who need focus.
The research - on burstiness:
Anita Wooley and her team studied communication patterns of distributed software engineers using Slack to determine which style led to the highest-performing teams. Using 52 remote teams of 5 tasked with the same development challenge, researchers discovered that teams who were “bursty” (aka communicated and responded quickly) correlated with higher performance than teams who were more asynchronous or delayed in communication. Importantly, these bursts were often followed by long periods of silence.
“The temporal ‘burstiness’ of team activity and the diversity of information exchanged among team members are strong predictors of performance, even when inputs such as incentives and member skills are controlled. Further, we found that higher performing teams were more “bursty,” as they coordinated their activities such that at least some messages received rapid responses, for example, through appropriate prioritization” - Anita Wooley et. al.
Figure 2 demonstrates burstiness visually. C shows the most accurate example of a “bursty” team, including some longer wait times followed by bursts of activity, especially in the beginning, middle, and toward the end of the challenge.
The application:
Engineering leaders have often debated the best structure of geographically distanced teams to promote collaboration and performance. Wooley’s research provides strong evidence that the best-performing remote teams have the following conditions met -
(a) Some overlap in working hours
(b) A culture of “bursty”, or synchronous, collaboration, even when geographically distanced
(c) Periods of silence between bursts
For managers thinking about their team’s remote collaboration style, here are some potential strategies to improve team “burstiness” -
Observe your team’s communication style over a period time to diagnose their baseline culture of communication. Make a note of how synchronous or asynchronous different conversations are (whether in meetings or on chat), and whether teams get prolonged periods of silence between communication bursts.
Survey the timezones within your team to d
etermine if any teammates are non-overlapping with others, and readjust key meetings or conversations accordingly. For example, teams with key contributors in far-away timezones may struggle to contribute to communication bursts when conversations distribute over a longer period of time
Encourage a culture of burstiness by talking to your team. Likely, they already sense the increased productivity that comes with a burst of conversation on slack. This doesn’t mean teammates need to monitor slack constantly - a great example is to encourage communication during overlapping hours (ie between meetings), as well as deep work time during non-communication hours.
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Thanks for reading this week. If you have any topics you’d like us to cover, reply to us and let us know. Happy Research Monday!
Lizzie
From the Quotient team