Attention is your greatest resource: Learn how to protect it with Stack Overflow CPO Teresa Dietrich

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Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us. Kicking off our first session of the day, I'm excited to welcome Teresa Dietrich. She's Chief Product Officer at Stack Overflow and she's going to be talking about attention is your greatest resource. Learn how to protect it. Theresa, thanks so much for joining us.

Take it away. Thanks for having me. As she said, my name is Teresa Dietrich and I'm the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stack Overflow. I actually manage a team that spans nearly every time zone across the Americas and Europe that was already 80% remote before the pandemic hit. I've got over 20 years in the tech industry, starting at AOL back in the late 90s. And outside of tech, my biggest passions are travel and reading. Although these days I'm doing a lot more reading than I am travel. But I look forward to the day we can get back to it, as I'm sure many of you do. So what are we talking about today? We're talking about why your employees attention or focus is your greatest resource. The ways you unknowingly might be draining this resource and how you can protect it going forward. Ok, let's dig in. So what is the problem we are talking about here? Well, technology that keeps us connected has been around for over 20 years now. I like to think of IRC or AIM as some of the first ones and it's been growing more mature every day. And as any industry matures, it solves the easy problems, it creates efficiency and industry standard solutions improve that productivity for everyone. So that leaves the big hard problems to solve, the breakthroughs, the innovations that forge the next big opportunities for us all. Growing a mature space means tackling the hard problems that no one has been able to solve before. And solving hard problems needs real focus, sustained attention from your workers this time, and freedom to focus on your company's most valuable resource. Your technology experts and other knowledge workers need uninterrupted focus in order to ensure flow states and the mindset that they bring and their full suite of skills to bear on each issue. As described in the book the Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Try and Say that name fast. Being in this zone allows one to become fully engaged and focused on the task at hand. It leads to better results and greater happiness. But it can only happen when you have the opportunity to focus fully on whatever it is that lies before you. Maintaining focus in today's work environment is hard. I think we all know that communication is instant, thanks to email, chat, text, and social media. And not only that, responses are now expected instantly. And then we're also juggling multiple tasks simultaneously. Our focus is pulled in so many directions. Even if you don't live in an inbox zero world, I think we all can feel all of those issues that we just described. And I think the work from home that we're all going through has only made interruptions more because people feel the need to communicate more. So the business cost of not protecting focus is high. The cost of loss focus is very high. Researchers at UC Irvine observed office workers in their natural habitat and found that on average, they switched tasks or were interrupted every three minutes. Just think about that. Every three minutes. Gosh, I get stressed just thinking about that. On top of that, it could take another 20 minutes to get back to where they were. In fact, these interruptions could cost individuals up to six hours every day. Well, no wonder we're working such long hours. In 1950, William James first suggested that focus is like a spotlight. You only see and absorb the things you pay focus on. Sometimes you can pay a lot of attention to a single spot. Other times you have to expand or split your spotlight and pay a little attention to a large number of things. But generally, you have a limited amount of focus that you can turn your spotlight on. At any given time, those things that fall outside of your spotlight might become invisible to you, a phenomenon called unintentional blindness. When we have multiple demands on our focus, we try multitasking, right? We all multitask all day, every day, splitting our spotlight or shifting it rapidly to focus on multiple tasks that come our way. The truth is, we humans, we're bad at multitasking. And there's a mental cost to switching tasks, no matter how long we've been doing it or how good we think we are. And that cost can Translate up to 40% more time to complete each task. Small errors of inattention, slip in typos, miscues, forgotten details. Even trying to just do two things at once can mean you do one or both badly. The prevalence of immediate and constant access to coworkers means we're always multitasking. Even in fully remote environments, we've got a piece of our spotlight attuned to the places where our email and chat notifications display. If you're anything like me, it's always keeping an eye on Slack. It's, you know, keeping an eye on email and always being interrupt driven. We're anticipating our phones, vibrations or other alerts so much that there's now a phenomenon called phantom vibration syndrome that up to 90% of us may suffer from because we're always anticipating and even think we feel a vibration when we don't. Wow, that business cost sounds pretty high, right? Six hours a day. And so not only does it affect our productivity, but it impacts our employee well being as well. All these interruptions can lead to greater stress and anxiety depending on the task. Productivity may not suffer, but interruptions may cause us to work faster. And working faster leads to greater time pressure, stress, frustration, so that it ends up taking more effort to complete the same amount of work with interruptions in the mix. So you compound that to it may slow you down and now the stress may make you even slower. Great. In the longer term. And during regular interruptions, up to 85 per day can cause decreased job satisfaction and accelerated burnout. Stress and anxiety form a feedback loop. Both can cause attention problems like difficulty concentrating. Without the ability to focus on what you're working on, you may forget steps or not remember solutions or answers that you've already found. Anxiety has been linked to memory lapses. And if you're constantly forgetting the information you received from those chat messages that you interrupted people for, you may interrupt them over and over again to get turns out that those co workers you interrupt are usually the most tenured employees at a company. We've been there the longest. They've had the most historical knowledge about processes and tools. Right? They have that institutional knowledge and it turns out they suffer the greatest number of interruptions from their co workers. Okay, so we've talked about the problem, right? It impacts productivity and it also burns out your employee. So what can we do to fix it? Well, I think what you have to go back to the root of the problem. What's actually making us miserable about our current state is the constant interruptions that destroy our control. We feel out of control of our own day, our time and our focus. It's not under our command. Instead, it ends up being at the mercy of notification, over notification, over notification, multiple applications chiming out, blinking for our attention. Wrangling them under your control seems to be at the root of the solution. Our always on culture means that work contacts don't always stay within the bounds of the workplace, especially in remote or work from home situations. It becomes all too easy to answer emails and slack messages after hours. Freeing up your free time may seem like the bare minimum that you could hope for these days, but what about within the workday? An ideal working environment might be as simple as each employee guiding their focus where they feel they need to. Notifications become minimal, reduced to only those most important your current project suffers no context switching or dual task interference in flow the author talks about the optimal experience being where the individual has control over their moment to moment experience, bringing their consciousness into a state of order. But to get there, we need to wrestle control away from all those interruptions that create chaos in our consciousness. Those notifications that control our focus by flashing or creating noise. Is it possible that our ability to focus has been damaged from this quick fix notification culture that we live in? Do we need something as drastic as taking a month away from all possible contacts to reset to normal? Or can we regain the ability to control our focus and therefore our conscious experience through a gradual reshaping of environment? Well, as much as I think we'd all love a month away from all connectivity and communications, I don't think that's realistic. So let's focus on what we can do in the here and now to help wrestle this control back for ourselves and our employees. There are ways you can give your employees some time to recover some measure of control over their focus for the week. First, I'll cover the ways to guarantee teammates can get work done to drive business results. First, agree on universal do not disturb hours. So I think we've all probably in the past heard of or actually participated in no meeting days, no meeting mornings. Trying to give people some focused attention. But this goes beyond that. It's asking you to block out time that all teammates are not available and to share these with groups that team works with across the company to try and give them focus. I'm shutting off my slack notifications. I'm not looking at email. Secondly, encourage everyone to pick one major must do for themselves each week and share it with their teammates. Forcing folks to prioritize for just one thing is uncomfortable, but it keeps them focused, right? They can have that post it note. They can have something on there that says this is the thing I must absolutely get done and if something else comes along it allows them to go back to that and say if it's not a part of my must do for the week, I'm going to deprioritize this. Lastly, know the end goal. Teammates need to know the KPIs or business goals for the project they're working on. And if something distracts them, they can ask themselves, does this help us get to the goal? If not, then they can deprioritize it. Okay, now let's talk about what you as leaders can do to help us build clarity and psychological safety in your culture. So first, create clarity around roles, responsibilities and mission. Having everyone on the same page about who does what on a project helps to avoid the communication pitfalls and failed projects. Clarity helps to minimize constant questions or impromptu meetings to determine who's doing what, or having to build a one off process just to complete the project at hand. Ensuring there's little overlap in responsibilities is really important. Having a clear process and everyone knowing what the end goal is, then how does this goal ladder up to the larger organization? Having already set strategic initiatives is a must when you're trying to enforce clarity. It helps priorities set their own. It helps employees to set their own priorities and then arrange their focus appropriately. Next up, create, buy in and psychological safety. Everyone, and I mean everyone, wants autonomy in their role. They want to have control over how they work, the ability to speak up when they have new ideas or solutions to bring to the table. Ensuring employees feel trust and confidence to build the psychological safety they need to express new ideas, new ways of thinking and build relationships. They need to solve those complex problems. A safe environment in which employees can speak up with their ideas or solutions leads to more productive collaboration time, resulting in less one on one or ad hoc brainstorming sessions that can eat into one's day and work blocks, taking away their attention. It allows people to compose their thoughts and ideas without fear of interruption or immediate switches. It also creates opportunities for asynchronous collaboration. Research from Google showed that a well organized team that has collaborative individuals feel psychologically safe. It reduces the possibility of leaving the company, increases the likelihood of using diverse ideas, helps bring in more revenue, and allows the team to be twice as effective as others in the similar teams. Next, equip employees with just the right amount of information. It's always a balance, right? Too much and they're overwhelmed and they start having discussions that aren't actually relevant or important. Too little and they feel like they don't actually get the big picture and they can't make effective decisions. Employees can only take so much information and so much interruption. People need longer periods of uninterrupted time to do their best work. So several of the collaboration tools out There today help to try and get everyone up to date in an asynchronous world, but with the ability to focus on topics that are pertinent to their job. Okay, so let's recap. We know there's a real productivity cost to losing focus and there's a major impact to one's well being and stress level. You can protect your team's focus by 1 agreeing on Universal Do Not Disturb hours, 2 picking a must do each week and sharing that and three having everyone know what the end goal is. You can also implement company wide methodologies and approaches for improving focus and collaboration including clarity around roles and responsibilities 2 buy in and psychologically safe work environment and 3 providing the right amount of information. This is something I learned a lot through our research here as we think about how we build asynchronous tools at Stack Overflow and I was really happy to share this with you. I think some of the facts are a bit mind blowing about just I think we all know it takes away from our happiness and our productivity, but I think seeing, seeing some of the research is really eye opening. I'm happy to take any questions and if you have deeper questions or want more best practices, you can reach out to the email on the screen which is sasterstackoverflow.com. Okay, I'm going to take a couple questions because we have a couple minutes left. Can you talk more about why it's important to have clarity around roles and responsibilities? We're a small company and we all have to wear multiple hats to get things done. It feels like having defined roles and responsibilities would slow things down. You know, I think my advice would be if you are a small company, you may need to define roles not for the entire company, but within terms of a project. For example, you might decide within the project who's the decision maker. Maybe do a racy diagram for a project. Do something that helps people understand what their role is and what their expectations are. I think that's one of the most important thing about roles and responsibilities. It's something I talk about all the time, is about building context and setting and resetting expectations. And I think if you can find a way to do that, then you can maybe get around the fact of having these permanent roles in a smaller organization. Okay, we have another question. As an employee, not a leader, how can I speak to my boss about setting boundaries without feeling guilty? I think I would start with some of this research that we talked about and show them just what the impact is to your work. Right. Your Boss wants you to be successful, they want you to be happy and they want you to have impact. And if you can show them real research that shows what the impact is to your productivity and your well being, I think especially now in this remote work from home environment, I think they should be open to it and you know, start it as an experiment, propose it to be an experiment. Well, let's try this, right? What would you be comfortable trying? That's how I would approach it if I needed to approach my manager. What do you think are some of the best ways to encourage psychological safety? That's a good question. I think one is making a place that's okay to make mistakes that people voice mistakes that people voice, roadblocks that they run into. And I think it starts from setting an example. You can't just say, okay, we're going to create a psychologically safe space. Everybody go. I think you need to have a couple key people who are there and really want to do that and you can work together with them to be vulnerable, to share information, to ask stupid questions and make it a place in which learning and growth and vulnerability are. Okay, we've got time for one more question. Okay, let's see. In a remote working environment, what is a good way to share your must do of the week? That is a great question. One thing that I would consider doing is, is putting it on your as your slack status, maybe putting it there with your username or as a status there, maybe putting it in your email signature or maybe having a specific JIRA board in which everybody puts their card or trello board or something like that and puts their card up there. That's one way that I would start doing it. Well, thank you all so much for having me. I hope you, I hope you learned a lot and I hope maybe you take away one or two nuggets that you're going to experiment with your team.

Teresa, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you all.