Productive Teams Keep Communications Intermittent and Bursty

We’ve all experienced the creeping growth of meetings, chat and other communication over the past few years, but perhaps not realized the magnitude of what’s happened. A Microsoft report published in March 2022 showed that over the previous two years “the average Teams user saw a 252% increase in their weekly meeting time and the number of weekly meetings has increased 153%.” Chats have grown by 32%. Assuming that Teams users are a fairly good proxy for the population as a whole, this is disturbing.

work is more flexible, but digital overload is still a risk

While the length of meetings has fallen, meetings are taking up more of our time. Much more. And the consequences of those trends are mostly negative. People’s days are fractured into small pieces, with large costs associated with shifting attention from the topic of a 9 AM meeting, just barely getting up to speed on a report shared by a team member in a chat when it’s time for a 10:30 AM meeting on a third topic, and so on, all day long.

How are we supposed to operate as high-performing teams when we hardly have a chance to catch our breath?

The Microsoft researchers behind the study offer a glint of hope. They write, “as a team, consider designating certain days or time blocks meeting-free.”

A great deal of science supports that recommendation — and for making other times “meeting-full.”

On a Project Level: Intermittent Communication Is Best

Harvard Business School professor Ethan Berman and colleagues demonstrated in a series of experiments that always-on communication leads to sub-optimal results in collective problem-solving.

Remaining closely connected is not detrimental to a group gathering information during a problem-solving exercise. However, the best problem solutions came from intermittent interactions during the more creative half of the test sessions.

Apparently, the social influences in group behavior — amplified by greater interaction — lead to premature convergence on less-good solutions because group members naturally adopt peers’ opinions and parrot their ideas.

When group members have time to reflect on their own and their peers' proposed ideas independently, the best solutions are more likely to be found.

It’s true that constant communication leads to better results than groups working totally independently, and they converge to something like the mean of solutions from other groups. Still, they rarely discover the best solutions when they fall into groupthink, which is hard to avoid.

The takeaway is compelling: groups will come up with more creative solutions when they leave serious time to individuals to think independently. For example, meeting one afternoon as a group and then members working independently on the problem the next day before reconvening on day three to share ideas and insights. This iteration of time together and time apart should be the norm for creative group work, but, alas, it isn't.

Day to Day: Burstiness Is Best

Christopher Riedl, associate professor at Northeastern University and Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business associate professor Anita Williams Woolley corroborated Berman’s research on a day-to-day level:

Our research suggests that such bursts of rapid-fire communications, with longer periods of silence in between, are hallmarks of successful teams. Those silent periods are when team members often form and develop their ideas — deep work that may generate the next steps in a project or the solution to a challenge faced by the group.

Basically, they recommend a head shift about the use of communication tools. We default to treating email, text and chat tools as synchronous, with messages flying back and forth at all times of the workday and with the implicit convention that these should be responded to as quickly as possible. In some organizations, the convention is explicit, where people are directed to respond to emails within an hour, for example. And simply treating communications as asynchronous — where individuals can decide when to respond to inbound communications — may decrease the fragmentation of individual work, but doesn’t address the need for regular coordination of work.

However, their research shows that dedicating certain constrained periods of the day to maximal communication — where all are online and writing and reading communications at the same time — allows other times of the day to be communication-free. This is the convention of burstiness. As the researchers state [emphasis mine],

To facilitate burstiness, you have to find time when team members can actually focus on individual task work. This can be challenging if they are also managing childcare and home-schooling, or caring for other family members, and may not have access to dedicated workspace. Some teams have managed to find flexibility and common times very early or late in the day. Coordinating this can be complicated and stressful, but figuring out when teams can be bursty together can help smooth out the jagged edges of our Covid-induced remote-work constraints.

A telling observation about the need for face-to-face interaction to foster serendipity:

The bottom line: Worry less about sparking creativity and connection through watercooler-style interactions in the physical world, and focus more on facilitating bursty communication.

This reminds me of the old observation that we use our calendars in a backward fashion: we schedule all the interruptions but not our most important work.

The researchers also make a recommendation about how to make those periods of bursty communication most productive: “each piece of communication should focus on a small set of topics,” they tell us, “because that creates more information diversity across messages. Small chunks of information help focus the mind and declutter communications.”

The fact that this is the natural style of the most productive teams should be a simple sell, but I have found that few practice these disciplines.

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