Separated by skill sets and often geographies, a company’s different departments can find it hard to work cohesively towards common goals. People in sales, for example, may not understand the reality of working in engineering; teams might have misaligned priorities, or may even see each other as obstacles rather than enablers. But effective cross-departmental collaboration is vital for a productive organization.
To Grant Aarons, there is one unassailable rule for making that happen: “You need to think about the integration of your teams from day one,” he says. The CEO of FabricNano, a London-based startup which develops sustainable, bio-based industrial catalysts used in the traditionally fossil-fuel mass manufacture of materials such as plastics, has an acute appreciation of that need. Companies such as his encompass a broad range of disciplines, from business development to scientific research. Teams are divided not only by different domain expertise, but also by physical barriers: You can’t have a lab in an open-plan office.
Operating at the sharp end of that challenge has taught him valuable lessons about the best ways to get a whole business working in unison. These include fostering internal networks through social events; clearly communicating the company’s mission and the expectation of collaboration; and getting the whole business to celebrate the achievements of individual teams. It also helps, he says, to design workspaces so different teams will inevitably mingle. FabricNano’s office, for example, has a dining room with a single large table for staff to eat their lunch.
But his most important advice? Create a common language.
On a high level, this is about prescribing a technology “grammar”. Teams should use agreed tools—the fewer the better—for communicating with each other, and also have a clear framework for how those interactions should take place. Every time FabricNano onboards a new client, it creates a dedicated Slack channel that is visible to all teams. Key information about the client and its project is imported into that channel, and all conversations about the client, including lab results, iterations, and final outputs, also take place there.
The common language principle also operates at a more granular level. In addition to outlawing obscure jargon, FabricNano has devised a language of emojis to speed up communications. “You can add an emoji to any Slack message,” says Aarons. “We’ve got specific emojis that scientists can use to trigger bots within Slack and beyond, which alert members of our data team to open a new client project code to store costs and proprietary data, for instance. And then another emoji is clicked, meaning that the project code has been generated, and so on. That way you can have multiple team members going in and just saying: ‘Yes, I've done that. Yes, I've done that’, very efficiently, and it all triggers other actions automatically.”
Sometimes, another form of language comes into play: Drawing. The company often has complex discussions over digital tools but, in certain circumstances, for conversations where there is a meaningful gap in expertise between parties, Aarons recommends bridging it by meeting in-person and using a physical whiteboard. “Then you can talk with visual analogies,” he says. The value of this was brought home to him by a performance coach who has advised his company. “He explained that there's an axis of communication,” says Aarons. “If you're having a phone call with someone, that’s pretty low on the axis. If you're having an email, it’s higher. If you’re having an in-person conversation it’s slightly higher still. But the highest form of communication between two people is using language, in-person with visuals. I feel that that's what a whiteboard does for us.”
2. Engineer collaboration through a common language
Meetings are a bane of corporate life, and they’re growing in frequency. Office workers generally spend more than 85 percent of their time attending them. Blame hybrid working, or the increasing ease of setting them up, but the downsides for productivity are clear. In a Slack survey of 18,000 desk workers globally, 42.5 percent stated that meetings could be eliminated with no consequences.
Of course, canceling meetings is one thing; avoiding them creeping back in is another.
Shopify asked managers to take a two-week cooling off period before they re-created any, but realized it would also need an ongoing strategy. One pillar of this was the introduction of a calendar extension called the “meeting cost calculator”. It displays the effective cost of any meeting, calculated from the average salary for each attendee’s role. “It makes you think before you actually invite guests: Who really needs to be in this meeting?” says Evans.
This went in parallel with a focused communications campaign. The company regularly talks to staff about meeting culture, encouraging them to continue keeping Wednesdays clear, and trying to remove the stigma around leaving a meeting early—or declining it altogether. “You can just hit ‘no’,” says Evans, “and there's no questions asked.”
The effects have been material. Meeting time is down 40 percent and 18 percent more projects were completed in 2023.
But what about when meetings are unavoidable—how best to limit their downsides? Evans says it’s important to see them as a forum for making decisions rather than simply giving people information. “And after that, it’s the obvious but so often missed: Just making sure everything runs smoothly and on time.”
When Shopify staff turned up to work on January 2 last year, they were greeted with an email informing them that a “chaos monkey” had been unleashed. A term from the software development world, a chaos monkey is an act of controlled disruption to test system resilience. In this instance, though, it wasn’t an application that had been targeted, it was staff calendars. And the company wasn’t holding back.
All recurring meetings of three or more people had been deleted and Wednesdays were mandated as meeting-free. In one swoop, 12,000 events disappeared—the equivalent of 36 years’ worth of time.
“I showed up to work in the new year, looked at my calendar, and I was like: What's happening here?” recalls Deann Evans, Shopify’s managing director of EMEA. “But actually it was really freeing. It was amazing to just have that time cleared, and be able to think about: What really needs to be a meeting?”
of office workers time are spent among meetings
85
1. Ditch unnecessary meetings
Productivity theater has become a thriving artform. Spurred by fears over job security, the ascent of hustle culture and emerging forms of employee micro-monitoring, performative work has exploded in recent years. A report shows that 83 percent of full-time staff regularly prioritize tasks that let them demonstrate how hard-working they are: Diverting time and energy to responding immediately to emails, say, or attending unnecessary meetings. Such tactics might increase a person’s visibility, but they don’t help the organization achieve its goals.
Combine that with economic pressures that bear down on real productivity, such as a lack of investment in education and training, and it’s no wonder business leaders are worried.
Concerned about workforce productivity? Strange as it may sound, your people may be better off working less.
There has been much coverage of the performance-enhancing benefits of a four-day workweek, but some firms are finding success with an alternative approach: a six-hour day. Studies have shown that the traditional eight-hour day has fat to trim—idle conversations, delegatable admin—and that productivity naturally tails off after about six hours anyway.
But reducing hours worked isn’t just about clawing back wasted time. It forces staff to be more intentional about how they use their six hours, motivating them to be more efficient and prioritize thoughtfully. This can actually improve overall productivity.
The Finnish video game developer Fingersoft began experimenting with a six-hour work day in 2021. It worked so well, last year they made it a permanent option. Employees have the choice of whether to work six hours or eight, and they can switch between schedules as they see fit—they might do a month of shorter days, for instance, before switching back. Fingersoft chief executive Jaakko Kylmäoja says that this flexibility exists to accommodate times when people simply have too much to do—perhaps ahead of a game’s launch—and the reality that certain roles require extended availability. To keep things equitable, those on shorter hours are paid 90 percent of their salary. “At any one time, about 30 percent of people are on shorter hours,” says Kylmäoja. “More than half of our people have tried it.”
3. Trial a six-hour workday
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Christina Janzer, SVP of research and analytics and head of the Workforce Lab, Slack
"What we see in our surveys is that for 70 percent of executives, productivity is their number one concern right now"
Politicians, too, are concerned. The UK consistently lags behind in productivity, coming in fourth out of the G7 countries.
Janzer says that a good start to improving productivity is creating a culture where people don’t feel they have to work performatively. But after that, the most intuitive fix—encouraging teams to put in longer hours—is unlikely to help. “If people feel pressured or delegated to work after hours, that can lead to 20 percent lower productivity scores,” she says, referencing the Slack Workforce Lab’s recent survey of more than 10,000 workers.
The answer will have to come from elsewhere. Over the past year, generative AI has dominated the conversation around improving workplace productivity. Large language models make it possible to instantaneously draft documents, for example, or marshall internal knowledge to complete tasks faster. And the impact of AI-driven tools has plenty of scope to grow. “Only one in five desk workers are actually reporting that they're using AI tools at work,” says Janzer. “But it does start to paint a picture of what the future could look like. We see there’s a lot of excitement for AI to start solving problems. And the top three ones that we hear from desk workers are providing meeting notes and recaps, providing writing assistance, and providing automation for workflows.”
But if the productivity potential of AI is clear and already well-documented, we were curious: What else are smart and fast growing companies doing to lift their output right now, and what can we learn from them? Here are five strategies you can trial…
Jaakko Kylmäoja, chief executive of Fingersoft
"At any one time, about 30 percent of people are on shorter hours"
Kylmäoja has found that individual workers either get the same amount done in six hours or are able to do more. “Some people feel that they are now more focused on just completing tasks because they are not spending time, for example, at the coffee machine.”
But there are also second-order effects that explain why this policy is effective. The company introduced it after Kylmäoja became concerned about employee wellbeing. “I had worked in a couple of different game companies and found that a lot of people had experienced some mental exhaustion, especially if they had been successful in the industry,” he says. “That could lead to anxiety that they weren’t performing to their usual standards. If that goes on for a long time, it will end up in depression.” He believes his staff take fewer sick days than they would otherwise have done.
What’s more, less-stressed employees who have a good work-life balance and feel trusted by their employer tend to perform better. Data shows that a trusting culture can make people 50 percent more productive. The six-hour policy has also been a boon for recruitment, attracting higher quality applicants to apply for roles. In the longer term, says Kylmäoja, that too may also enhance the firm’s output.
So what advice would he give to other business leaders weighing up the idea? He says a ruthless focus on completing tasks can come at the cost of team bonding, so it’s important to host social events that compensate for that. “The other thing is: Study your own company, and what your own particular situation is,” he says. “In some industries, a six-hour day may not work. And if you do go for it, try to not make it something that everybody ‘has to do’. Instead, provide it as a tool that people can use if they would like to.”
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stated that meetings could be eliminated with no consequences
42.5
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4. Automate interactions across your tool set
In the cloud age, it’s easy for a company’s apps to proliferate. But having to switch between multiple platforms is time consuming—and if you have forgotten a login or don’t use a tool regularly, it can take even longer, particularly if the software is highly technical.
When Oana Jinga cofounded London-based Dexory in 2015, she saw the need to confront this head-on. The company builds robots that scan warehouses to generate real-time insights for inventory management. “We develop and deploy hardware, we also build all the software, and we also connect all that to the customer,” says Jinga. “So it’s a very, very complex business with about seven or eight teams that are, in essence, seven or eight different companies.”
Dexory’s answer? Integrating tools and automating processes between them.
On one level, this is enabled by APIs. The company’s head of software, Matt MacLeod, has coded multiple integrations to connect up the company’s digital plumbing and automate sequences of actions behind the scenes. It is centered around Slack which functions as the primary interface for everything the company does digitally. A particularly important use-case is interacting with the fleet of warehouse robots. By talking to a custom Slackbot, users can monitor robots, query their data and ask them to execute tasks. Automated notifications come back the other way to keep users updated.
This has twin benefits. The first is it reduces complex operations to a single command. “That makes it really accessible to members of the team who might not otherwise actually find it that easy,” says MacLeod. The second benefit is that since all these robot interactions occur within public Slack channels, everything is visible to everyone, and that helps prevent problems. “I can't tell you the number of times someone's been about to do something with a robot, and by virtue of them doing it in a public environment, someone has been able to spy it and go, ‘Oh, hang on, don’t do that yet!’” says MacLeod. “It’s a significant productivity enhancement.”
Snowbird is a ski resort high in the Rocky Mountains. It is also the cradle of a revolution. Here in 2001, a short drive from Salt Lake City, a group of engineers met to re-think the way software is made.
They had grown frustrated at the traditional linear approach—plan extensively, write code, pass from team to team, test, ship—because it didn’t reflect the reality of the work. For one, it’s a creative endeavor. In the course of making software, engineers may have new ideas, but a linear model doesn’t easily accommodate pivots. What’s more, the linear approach can allow problems to go undetected until the end of the process. Solving them at a late stage can be catastrophically disruptive.
Fundamentally, the well-trodden path didn’t seem to be the fastest one, and it didn’t always lead to the ideal destination.
The engineers in Utah invented a new approach that was all about creativity, flexibility and speed. They called it Agile. On the one hand, Agile is a set of principles enshrined in the Agile Manifesto and further expanded upon with the 12 Principles (“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery”, for example); on the other it is a set of methodologies. A major one is “scrum”, which emphasizes short “sprints” of work to achieve specific deliverables through iterative development cycles and regular team stand-ups. Today, Agile culture permeates Silicon Valley—and increasingly it’s moving beyond. Non-software companies such as manufacturers, even supermarkets, are adopting Agile and seeing results.
“We use Agile methodologies for our whole company,” says Natalia Martos, CEO of Legal Army, a Spanish law firm focused on technology clients. “It’s completely different to how a traditional law firm operates.”
5. Go Agile, even if you’re not in software
The rise of no-code “process automation” tools, alongside a trend towards software offering plug-and-play integrations with third parties, has enabled MacLeod to take this set-up well beyond fleet management. If a user wants to generate a ticket for technical support, say, or search for a file on a shared drive, they can do this from Slack, too. “It just removes a whole bunch of manual steps from your processes,” says MacLeod. “I think this is key for lots of business—just 30 minutes of work with setting up an automated process could eliminate hours of wasted time.” One example for Dexory is an automated Slack message that everyone in the company receives at 9am on Monday morning, detailing what every robot is going to do that week and key information about who needs to be involved in those tasks. “There’s nobody that would ever have time to do that manually.”
Jinga says this philosophy has been vital to the business’ success, but she has one note of caution for others considering this path. “You have to be mindful that all these messages that everyone is notified about don’t become just ‘noise’,” she says. “Make sure that if a notification comes in, there's a good reason for it and only the right people see it. We put a lot of effort into that.”
Matt MacLeod, head of software, Dexory
"I can't tell you the number of times someone's been about to do something with a robot, and by virtue of them doing it in a public environment, someone has been able to spy it and go, ‘Oh, hang on, don’t do that yet!' It’s a significant productivity enhancement.”
Martos knows this first hand, having worked for legacy players in the past. “I detected a lot of problems and inefficiencies, because they work according to the ‘billable hours’ system.” This system of charging by the hour, she says, incentivizes slow-moving linear processes. But when Martos completed a program on exponential technologies at California’s Singularity University in 2016, her eyes were opened to how software companies have reinvented ways of working. She set up Legal Army to disrupt the billable hours model—80 percent of its clients pay a monthly retainer—and make that workload manageable through adopting Silicon Valley’s methodologies. The company uses scrums and sprints to produce specific deliverables to agreed timeframes; they use “kanban boards”—another Agile staple—to visually track workflows, statuses, and team responsibilities.
The results speak for themselves. “We estimate our productivity is 30 percent more than if we weren’t using Agile,” she says. “Our turnover is increasing, and working efficiently creates happiness for the employees.” That’s why she believes Agile is only going to grow among non-software organizations. “Many times, people at other companies have asked us to give a lecture on Agile methodologies or hold some classes about it,” she says. “I really don’t see what kind of industry couldn't adopt it.”
Natalia Martos, CEO of Legal Army
“We estimate our productivity is 30% more than if we weren’t using Agile”
