Blog | 10 June, 2022

Efficiency in IT During the War. AMC Bridge Experience and Business Coach’s Advice

Source: Senior.ua

The war has highlighted strong and shown weak points in all spheres of our life. One of the things impacted by the war is performance. Is it that easy to work in the times of air alerts and situations that cannot be planned beforehand? And how to stay efficient when emotions get the upper hand?

The IT industry managed to continue functioning almost without falling and to become a reliable back for the economy and Armed Forces of Ukraine. But what problems did IT teams actually face? AMC Bridge managers shared their teams’ experience and what they did to avoid a performance decrease. An expert in personal efficiency, Natalia Averina, also provided her recommendations.

Team performance through the technical manager’s eyes

Volodymyr Volosiuk, Project Manager, AMC Bridge. Has been working at the company since 2009. In 2019, has become a Project Manager. Has experience in managing projects that number up to 35 team members. As of the end of February, there were 19 specialists on his teams.

People were bewildered and confused in the first week of the war. Some of our teammates were moving to safer cities and were on the road. Others were staying at home but could not fully concentrate: air alerts, news, chats. In addition, on February 24, one of the clients decided to be on the safe side and closed access to work accounts for us. So, the work was blocked even for those who had the possibility to perform tasks.

In this situation, team leaders and I had to specify several things. Firstly—the location and plans of our team members and their families. Secondly, we had to make sure that employees who moved to other places have all the required for work. In parallel, we had to convey information about the situation to clients correctly and find a way of renewing access to the closed accounts to unblock the work.

When those technical moments got resolved, the work started to resume more or less. But there were still problems with electricity, the Internet (mostly in the Sumy region), and alarm breaks. So, in order to work the full 40 hours per week, employees who had the possibility and emotional strengths worked overtime.

We could not immediately estimate the performance decrease. But we explored that in the second half of March, my teams’ efficiency was approximately 90%. Some employees did not experience the decline at all. Also, there were no significant problems with communication if not considering connection issues.

About changes

At the moment, team performance is close to the pre-war state, with several exceptions. Some employees who worked part-time asked to switch to the full working day to supply the company with more billable hours. Clients supported that. Also, they suggested our teammates take paid overtime work if necessary.

As for specific things: now, almost all conversations with clients focus on whether everything is good with team members and their relatives. I can say it is a mandatory question at every meeting.

How we helped our teammates

As a PM, I held meetings with all team leaders every day to understand what difficulties teams had. The teams also reacted to problem issues promptly. If someone had no electricity or the Internet, they found a way to inform about it. Hence, a team leader could report instead of them at the meeting or pass a task to some other team member if it was technically possible and the task blocked the work. In addition, clients postponed the closest releases.

In parallel, I conducted one-on-one meetings with all my team members. It was important for me to evaluate their state, the conditions in which they were, and understand who was at risk of losing productivity. I coordinated that information with HR specialists and team leaders. We identified what employees needed more attention, who could and who could not be given tasks of critical importance at that moment, and so on.

I allocated 30 minutes for such meetings with teammates. The wish to continue the conversation even after the planned half an hour had passed was an evident sign for me that a person was not in a very stable condition.

AMC Bridge sometimes organizes training with psychologists, but probably, not all employees can always attend it. That’s why when I saw that training sessions might be of use to somebody, I shared the recordings or advised them to contact HR specialists of our company. I watched younger team members especially closely. As practice showed, seniors bore it all a bit easier.

What we did when someone was losing productivity

One of our teammates got COVID in the first weeks of the war. He was recovering for a long time, plus there was stress due to the situation. His productivity dropped to 50%, if not lower. In that case, we first had to make sure that the problem was not related to technical issues and that the boost in productivity could not be received simply by analyzing the work task. It was the team leader’s job to find it out.

Knowing that there are people not involved in projects at the company, I invited the other employee to the team. Certainly, the new person needed time to delve into the task. But at the same time, we had to cover only 50% of the drawdown, not all 100%. As a result, such a rotation proved its value.

We got huge support from clients. They insisted, ‘Choosing between taking care of your safety and finishing the task in time, do not be embarrassed to choose the former.’ In my case, clients did everything possible to unblock our work from their side despite some fears. They shifted release dates due to expectations of a productivity decrease and officially declared that they understood it might happen and that they would not have any complaints.

Even despite it, we surely did our best to maintain efficiency and started tracking metrics at the earliest possibility.

Below, you can find three points that helped us avoid performance drawdown and possible problems.

  1. Keeping track of reporting, billable hours, and everything that affects the budget. For example, in spite of the fact that clients agree to overtime work in case of necessity, limits should be specified. Employees can do more than expected to help the company and the country. But the budget most likely does not cover it. Therefore, everything related to financial issues must be determined at the outset.

  2. Gathering actual data about the situation. If we talk about communication with clients, they, for example, can ask about the current situation in Ukraine at any time. So, it is important to know what to answer (in my opinion, the answer to this question should be better agreed upon with an account manager). As for the work with the team, knowing the information about everyone, we could understand that if there was news about explosions in areas where, for instance, their relatives live, it was likely that people would be more distracted. Hence, I tried to predict what colleagues might be at risk in terms of efficiency.

  3. Building a team before a critical situation. I think the fact that there was no considerable productivity decrease in my teams is the achievement of the teams themselves and team leaders. In fact, in wartime, we continue doing the same we did earlier. The only thing that changed in our regular processes is that there are even more communications.

    You may be wondering what personal traits helped the team work so well in the critical situation. Having the experience, I will say—responsibility and discipline. A timely report or response to an email is always important, and now—in particular. Everyone understood that if they disappeared from the radar, it was crucial to notify others as soon as possible so that we would have more time to react. Employees also treated working hours responsibly, trying to work the required amount in full. And since all hours reported by the team had to be compared with the initial task estimates, I was sure it would not be a problem.

    Another important factor was that all the teams had already been formed. A number of problems were solved before the big war, and the team worked with a certain level of trust, which helped resolve issues quickly.

How to understand that something went wrong

Certainly, there is always an option that a client will tell you about it. However, in most cases, it means a failure (although not always a complete one). It is important to understand that client processes can be disrupted and their internal communication can malfunction. For example, we had situations when, despite the normal performance of our employee, management from the client side began to ask unpleasant questions. Such cases occurred when the client’s contact person did not coordinate priorities with stakeholders who we could not contact directly. In such situations, it is important to have a clear understanding of the work performed, to be sure that all planning processes are followed and that everything can be presented to the client in a written form.

However, the actual performance issues should be identified before the client says about it. It is important to understand tasks the team is working on, evaluate them, and monitor progress on a regular basis.

If you see a discrepancy, analyze the cause. If there is a reason for such a discrepancy, decide what to do with it and how to react. If there is no objective explanation, pay attention to that fact. Some people do better with one type of task and worse with another. Most often, I ask team leaders to provide a person with the first type of tasks, and ideally—with tasks in the estimates of which we are maximally confident.

Team performance through the HR manager’s eyes

Mariia Diachkova, HR Manager, AMC Bridge. Has been working in the HR sphere for 14 years, 3 of which at AMC Bridge.

Twice a year, we conduct the Salary and Performance Review at AMC Bridge. Its results help managers see each employee’s progress and respond quickly to problems; the results also show the points of growth to the employees themselves.

Our next review was supposed to take place in summer, but the war started, and the team performance dropped. The decline in productivity was the most noticeable in the first half of March. Therefore, we urgently had to assess at what level our employees were at that moment, if there were problems that required our attention, and what employees or teams needed help.

We asked all PMs to evaluate their team members according to two parameters: the performance and communication level. After that, we compared the results with the winter review data.

The survey results showed that at the beginning of April, the performance almost leveled up to the pre-war state. According to PMs’ assessment, 78% of employees had the same performance level, and 88%—the same communication level as before the war. At the same time, 18% experienced temporary performance issues, and 9%—communication problems. We detected a regularity: almost always, if a person has communication problems, he or she also has issues with performing work tasks. So, we can assume that by improving our communication level, we indirectly make our performance better.

Why HR specialists conduct one-on-ones

One of our major tools of establishing communication with team members is one-on-ones, at which an HR specialist has a conversation with an employee and which help us single out employees’ particular requests. Sometimes, during such meetings, we get information that does not refer to any existing procedures. It is mostly related to personal questions that impact the emotional state and, accordingly, the efficiency of our employees. We also learn if employees receive regular feedback on their work. If we see that feedback is lost, we work on rectifying the situation. Also, each HR specialist has access to the score a PM has left to his or her team member. Hence, we can understand from a conversation with an employee what the problem is and suggest a solution.

We also focus on team members who work overtime. Now there are more such cases: in wartime, work became an assistant for many people, which distracts them from the current events. That’s why employees dive headlong into work, keeping themselves busy even on weekends.

A curious fact: if senior-level specialists manage to keep balance and increase their performance that way, junior specialists often get the opposite effect—they reach their peak and burn out.

So, it’s crucial for us to watch employees to help them avoid burnout. We’d also like to emphasize that stable performance at your level is more important, but under any circumstances.

Performance through the business coach’s eyes

Natalia Averina, business coach, facilitator, and expert practitioner in the sphere of personnel training and development. Specialization: personal efficiency, development of management skills, and communication and teamwork.

Talking about work productivity, we should realize that:

  • Productivity will not be the same as before the war. Now, every day is complicated by the fact that the brain is constantly scanning the environment: are there any threats here? And it doesn’t matter if you are in Ukraine or abroad: we all feel the impact that the stress of the war has on our bodies and brains.

  • It’s a marathon. Often people expect that everything will end at some point. Researchers analyzed how people experienced crisis periods and wars. So, those who give up are the first to leave the game. The next ones are those who draw certain horizons: to wait another week or two, to make it to autumn, and so on. If you have such flags you are targeting, give them up. It is a marathon. And you need to take care of your effectiveness not when that dream moment comes but now.

  • Everything we do for ourselves is our contribution to the development of Ukraine. There may be a sense of guilt: ‘Why should I think about myself and my productivity if people on the front line risk their lives and give everything?’. Remember that there are three fronts: military, information, and economic. Today we should think about ourselves to support ourselves and other people who will rebuild the economy after the victory.

Now I offer three simple techniques for restoring intellectual energy:

    1. Limitation. Before the war, I would suggest you a few applications to increase productivity. But now, I’m literally screaming about the necessity to free your space from unnecessary applications, contacts, and excess news. Our psyche is working for survival: we have to scan the endless flow of information! So, yes: we have to force ourselves to limit it. It will increase productivity now and in the future.

      The exercise I propose to practice is to limit reading news. It is best to track news in the morning and completely give it up after 16:00-18:00 because it disrupts the synthesis of the sleep-regulating hormone—melatonin. Also, don’t read news at the peak of your productivity: if you’re effective in the morning, don’t monitor news feeds at that time.

    2. Reflection, a retrospective of the day. It is in the IT industry that people know how to do retrospectives correctly. You know what questions to ask yourself to make the next product better. So, ask yourself every day: what have I done today?, what am I good at today?, what could be improved?, whom have I helped?, what will I do next? The answers to these questions bring to the surface a lot of positivity and benefits that we often underestimate.

    3. Meditations, affirmations, prayers. When we receive bad news, our brain focuses on it, and the imagination draws a whole movie of what happened. And even if we work, test, or write, the brain still processes the situation in the background. As a result, our performance suffers. If you see it’s happening to you, pause your thoughts and try to reprogram your brain, replacing the thoughts with meditations, affirmations, or prayers—depending on what you believe in.

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