BONUS EP: How can you boost your agency's productivity?

Do you ever get to the end of the working day and wonder, ‘What did I actually get done today?'

You’re certainly not alone. 

We’re interrupted about every 8 minutes. And it can take up to 20 minutes to get back to what we’re doing. Imagine the impact of that on an 8 hour day.

In a recent Agency Hackers webinar, Harv spoke about productivity – including the flow state, trends that have had a negative influence on our ability to focus, and strategies that have given him and his colleagues a big productivity boost.

We're resharing that content for you here in case you missed the webinar.

You'll learn Harv's advice including:

• Scheduling your day in advance, so you're not staring at your to-do list in despair.
• Using a combination of 'office hours' to reply to messages and DND to minimize distractions.
• Techniques to make your meetings more efficient, your team more focused, and encourage clear communication. (Including meetings that no one actually shows up to)!

View the presentation with visuals on Youtube.

Learn more about Agency Hackers.

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Operations Newsletter.

This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system.

Transcript

Harv Nagra: 0:32

Hey all, welcome to a special bonus episode of The Handbook. A couple of weeks ago, I presented a webinar with agency hackers on workplace productivity. I touched on the idea of the flow state, trends that have had a negative impact on our ability to focus, and strategies that have had a big productivity boosting impact on me and my colleagues, past and present. For those of you that weren't able to attend, I thought it might be nice to share that content here. There might be things that you hear today that inspire you to go away and think about issues impacting focus and productivity at your own workplace and implement some strategies of your own. By the way, if you want to see the presentation with visuals, which I was presenting at the webinar, we'll include a link to that in the episode notes. Lastly, if you joined the webinar the other week or if you're listening for the first time today, please share this episode with a friend or colleague and ask them to listen and share their thoughts with you. That's how we drive the conversation forward. I'll leave it there and let you listen to the presentation and I'll be back next week with our regular episode. Thanks very much Hi everyone, for those of you that don't know me, my name is Harv Nagra. Until a few months ago, I was the group operations director at a pan European design and marketing agency with headquarters here in London in the UK and offices in France and Switzerland. But I brought in Scoro, an agency work management platform at my past agency and loved the benefits it brought, my team loved it. And I loved it so much, actually, that I moved away from that in house Ops Director role and joined as Head of Brand Communications, but my head and my heart are still very firmly in Agency Ops. And some of you might know that I'm the host of The Handbook: The Agency Operations Podcast, which I'll tell you more about in a few minutes. But today, of course, we're here to talk about productivity and flow. So a lot of us probably have heard of this term, but what you might not know is that this is a concept that was put forward by a Hungarian American psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And he calls flow an optimal state of being. So, a state in where people are so immersed in an activity that nothing else matters, and his research showed that the longer, the more time people spent in flow throughout the week, whether that was in their personal lives, whether that was at work, the higher they rated their satisfaction with life. So that's a pretty powerful sentiment. So his flow diagram looks like this. So it's got two axes with skills across one and challenges on the other. And you know, your skills and challenges go from low to to high. So what he says is that when you don't have the right skills, but your challenges, your project, whatever you're working on is too difficult, you live in anxiety. Okay. And on the other hand, when you've got all the right skills, but the challenge isn't challenging enough, right? The projects that you're working on aren't challenging enough, you live in boredom. So flow occurs, when you're working on a challenging activity that requires skills. So in that state, like we've just said a moment ago, people become so involved and so immersed in what they're doing that it almost becomes spontaneous and automatic. Everything else fades away. So hopefully, like some of you answered, you get into flow multiple times a week, that definitely resonates and it gives us something to aspire to anyway, right? If our quality of life index is off the charts when we feel that way, that's a good thing to aim for. But what, the psychologist says is that, flow requires a complete focusing of your attention at the task at hand, it leaves no room in the mind for irrelevant information. And he says that any lapse in concentration breaks flow. So I'm looking at that Slack notification in the corner of the screen, and that kind of just goes to illustrate the point. So that leads us back to our topic, productivity and our ways of working. And I think there's been a couple of trends in the past couple of years that have had a massive impact on the way that we work, and sometimes a negative impact. So let's talk about a couple of them. The first one is remote working. Right? I think this has created at some point a sense of anxiety for those of us that work as project managers or even ops, where we're very deadline driven. A sense of anxiety about how much progress our colleagues might be making on shared projects when we can't see them. You used to be able to look over at somebody's screen and just feel confident that they're making progress and things are ticking along. We can't do that any longer. So it turned into this thing where we started relying on these communication tools to check in more frequently and make sure people are on track and things like that. The other negative consequence of this is it started to create an expectation on our parts that we're going to get an immediate response. And when you don't get that, your anxiety levels increase. You know, are they having a nap? Is someone doing their laundry? Or have they gone shopping? Things like that. It's kind of unreasonable, but that that ends up being the kind of situation we're in. Okay. That's quite related to the second trend, which is the number of platforms we use and the number of notifications we get from all of those is now off the charts. So the screen says we're interrupted every 10 minutes, but I think the updated stat is something like every seven to eight minutes you get interrupted and research tells us that when you're interrupted, it takes you about 20 minutes to get back on schedule on what you were supposed to be working on. So if you think about that, we at best, we've got eight hours in a workday and you're interrupted every seven or eight minutes and it takes you 20 minutes to get back on task. That sounds fairly horrific, I think you'd agree. So as Ops folks, we love talking about utilization and productivity, and I'm talking about this aspirational idea of flow here. But where do these distractions leave us? You know, where does it leave productivity and utilization and quality work? So in my case, I sometimes used to feel very dejected at the end of the day. You know, I think my colleagues saw me as someone that got a lot done, but what I ended up feeling like was that I was firefighting and helping people throughout the day. But the projects I wanted to make progress on, they would get shoveled into a smaller and smaller window at the end of the week, or out of hours. And again, the result was that I would leave at the end of any given day, feeling like I am not accomplishing anything and feeling bad about myself. So I don't know if that resonates with any of you, but that was certainly the case for me. So those were some of the challenges to our productivity, but you know, I'm going to talk about three kind of key things that I've learned over the years that I brought in at my past agency, that I've learned at my job in Scoro, that I've learned from peers in the agency ops space, that have had a pretty big impact on me. So the first thing, it might sound obvious, but planning your time. We spend a lot of time planning the schedule for the resources on our teams, the designers, the copywriters, the developers, things like that. So what you're looking at is basically a screenshot from one of the designers at my past agency and it was planned like this. So the designers and the developers knew exactly what they were going to work on on any given day. So it's great. You show up on Monday, you know, I'm going to do two hours on that, three hours on that, and four hours on that, right? That's fantastic. But what that doesn't help is people like us. You know, ops, finance, even project managers and account managers that don't have somebody telling us, unfortunately, what we need to work on and when. So the reality for me was I have this growing and growing to do list and I'd show up at work and feel completely overwhelmed about what I wanted to focus on, you know, the big, meaty, scary things I would procrastinate, and then I'd get distracted by incoming emails or Slack notifications. And that's where that whole cycle of firefighting would begin. Okay. So what I ended up starting to do and started encouraging our colleagues to do that didn't have their schedule planned for them was to plot in their time. So this is something I do now daily, as well. So at 5:15 every day, it's in my calendar to look at my to do list, my projects and my priorities and plan them for the next day. So I never show up on a workday and think like, what do I feel like working on? What should I be working on? I've decided that day before and put all my priorities in, all around client meetings or, internal meetings and even having windows to do a bit of admin or catch up on messages and things like that. So this works really well for people that are responsible for planning their own calendar, like a lot of us on this call, I think. but again, you might be thinking, well, I kind of already do that, but I still end up firefighting. And that was true for me as well. So that leads us to the second point, this idea of"office hours" and do not disturb. Okay, so office hours came up at my past agency because at one point we had a strategy director and she was one of one, the only strategy person in the agency. So she would get bombarded with requests from colleagues asking to help with pitch ideas, to help with estimating the strategy element in a quote, to answer their project questions and stuff like that. So she was just like, well, I can't spend all day answering questions and actually do the work for strategy on these paying client projects, right? So we decided to try"office hours" with her and it was kind of like a university lecturer has windows where students can go and check in and ask questions. So she had two slots one was before lunch and one before end of day where she had 30 minutes. You could send her questions throughout the day but unless you had a meeting, she wouldn't jump on a call or respond to you until that office hour window. Okay? So, so that ended up working really well, and then we started encouraging other people that felt the same way to do the same thing. The other idea is something that I was exposed to at Scoro. So, of course we all know that when we're hopping on a call like this, we put on do not disturb on our computers and so on. But at Scoro, what I was surprised to learn during onboarding week, it's basically a company policy, they don't police it, but they strongly encourage it: that you should have do not disturb on your personal device and your work computer at all times. So I was quite shocked by this and I was like, how does anybody get anything done if you're not answering people's questions and moving things along, right? It seemed shocking to me, but the point was that how often do you get a message from somebody that is like super urgent and it needs to be responded to now, right? That's that's the first thing and again, it goes back to that valuing your own time and your projects. If we get distracted every seven or eight minutes, you can just see without having something in place to cut that out, that's where that spiral of firefighting starts and your own stuff starts getting squeezed into smaller and smaller windows. So that was the first thing that it probably, whatever it is, probably doesn't need a response right now. The other thing was that you can make tweaks and exceptions in your settings, on your computer, on your phone, your Mac or Android, whatever, where you can make exemptions for certain apps. So my main exemption is for my calendar, so I see meetings and don't forget that I need to join something. And the other is, is kind of like, phone calls so that if someone's ringing me, I do know and basically my doorbell. So those are my exemptions. Nothing else gets through. Okay. The result of this is that you end up respecting your own time and focusing on what you're supposed to be focusing on. And like the office hours idea, you encourage yourself to have windows during which to check your[messages]. So that might be, you know, beginning of the day, right before lunch, after lunch, mid afternoon, and end of day, or you could have only smaller windows like my colleague that was the strategy director. You know, again, like I said, this is not policed, it's strongly encouraged, and most of my colleagues here do this, and I do it now as well. And, you know, if somebody does want to check their messages and emails more frequently, that's fine. But it's just, you're not constantly seeing these Outlook or Slack notifications pop up that you feel like, Oh my God, I need to look at this right now and see what it is. Okay. And a related bonus tip before I move on, in Slack, having a policy encouraging people to respond in threads is just so effective because probably not everyone in the channel cares about that question or comment that was made. So by encouraging the commenting or conversations to happen in those threads means that the person that asked gets the notifications and people that are interested in that question can go and read up on it, but everyone else in the company or in that channel isn't getting bombarded with extra information. So that's something I'd really encourage you to do if you're not already doing that. And my last kind of main theme was about fixing meetings. So at my agency, what we did was, we insisted that whoever put in a meeting, you would have to come in with an agenda. You couldn't just walk in and say, well, this is a loose theme. You had to have some bullet points in terms of what you wanted to get out of the meeting and what your plans were. Okay. So this meant we had something to focus on rather than going off script and thinking, okay, we didn't do anything we were meant to. And the next tip, is something that I saw again at Scoro when I joined. What they did here, and what I've seen here, is that meetings were cut down, rather than 30 or 60 minute defaults, the policy is, your meetings need to be 20 or 40 minutes. So instead of 30, 60, it's 20 or 40. The thing is, we get the same volume of conversations and ideas done, we just save ourselves 10 minutes and allows us to start focusing on the next thing we're supposed to be working on, rather than making sure we're there till the full 30 minutes. So that's really effective. A related challenge at my past agency, we started feeling like there was too many meetings. And I'm not talking about project related meetings. It was the cadence of management meetings we put in. We were a multi entity business with multiple business units, digital, strategy, creative and things like that. And we had Management meetings, which, it seems like a good idea and it is, but it did start feeling really heavy, especially for those of us in ops or, the MD and the finance director that would participate in a lot of these, it started feeling really heavy. So there's something I've discovered at Scoro that was, this idea of asynchronous meetings and surprisingly, the people that attend this are all the VPs and the heads of departments. So it's a very senior level meeting is what I'm trying to say, right? and what happens is it happens every Monday at 1 pm, but nobody actually shows up. So what you're supposed to do before Monday at 1 pm, everyone needs to log their meeting bullet point updates, their status updates on what they've been doing or what their teams have been doing and what you need other departments to know. So everyone logs their bullet points and then one o'clock, everyone knows that you can sign in and read the update. The entire company, all these senior level individuals sharing their status updates. So this, for me, was quite mind blowing. So what could be 10 or 20 people joining for a status update, for an hour, and you think about the time and the the financial implications of that... This was probably a 15 minute commitment from all these very senior level people. So I think that's really a quite a cool thing to experiment with. At Scoro, we also have a meeting free Wednesday. Okay. So external meetings are fine with your clients and stuff like that, but we strongly discourage our colleagues to book us on that day. So everyone knows when you're planning your week or planning your next day, Wednesday is a good day to put in those kind of heavy thinking strategy kind of blocks of time for yourself because you're not going to have internal meetings. So that's quite useful. And that doesn't mean I can't ping my colleague to say, Hey, I could borrow you for five minutes to get your opinion on something. Will you have five minutes later today? And that does happen, but the point is you don't pre book anyone on that Wednesday. So with all of this stuff, what works for me, what's worked in my past agency, what works at Scoro, and some of these tips that I've learned from other people in agency ops, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you, right? So you need to go away, sit down with a few key people in your teams, and think about ideas. What are the biggest blockers to productivity and what could you experiment with? It could be ideas like you've heard today or other people talking about. And then communicate that trial, that experiment to your agency, in your agency all hands. And of course, tell them why you're doing this. And you know, the, the key point here is we're giving everybody more time to focus. So it's quite unlikely you get objections to that because who wouldn't want less distractions. Okay, the other thing's, fairly straightforward, but documenting your working practices in your agency handbook so they're codified and everyone knows this is officially the way we do things. Um, including your working practices in your new starter onboarding. So making sure their first week schedule has a section where they do read about that and understand. And of course, practicing what you preach, you know, as operations leaders, as agency leaders, you have to demonstrate that you're adhering to this stuff too. So everyone knows that it's not just something we say, it's something we do. I've just got a couple more slides, but I just wanted to point out a couple of things that my agency, you know, I mentioned that I work for Scoro now and this platform supports agencies and better collaboration and work management. One of the things that designers at our agency, designers and developers, loved is that based on the planning we did for the schedule, it automatically completes their time sheets, so they don't have to do any manual time tracking. Basically what's in your plans is effectively your time sheet. You just need to tick to say that's done or make an adjustment if you worked, you were planned for three hours, but you ended up working three and a half, you would just tweak that to say 3.5. So that makes things really straightforward. For the rest of us, the PMs, the AMs, the ops people, finance people, you know, I talked about planning your own calendar, so if you're already doing that, you're halfway there. In Scoro, it syncs with your calendar, and you can tag your calendar entries to a project. So again, if you've planned out your full day of calendar entries, all you need to say is, it's this project and this deliverable, and boom, your timesheets are done as well, if your internal team tracks time, that's something I do. And finally, Scoro becomes a bit of your crystal ball for your agency when you use it to track time. Of course, if people are tracking their time, you can look back and see how much time the team is spending on internal versus external work, billable versus non billable work. But when you use it to resource your projects, you can look forward. You can look forward at your capacity, like in the screenshot there, and say that, you know, in two weeks, our team doesn't have enough work, so we obviously need to dial up our sales process, or maybe reduce some of our freelancers. Similarly, if it's completely overcapacity, then you know that you need to turn work down, you might need to negotiate later deadlines, or bring in freelance support. So it's super helpful in terms of planning your team's capacity. And, second to last slide, the benefits for my team of bringing all of these functions to one platform was the efficiency and the accuracy and the project and business visibility it gave us. I kind of see it as like an operating system for the agency, a single place to look for everything you need to see. And it plugs into your CRM platform, if you use one, your HR system like Bamboo HR and, and things like Xero or QuickBooks or Sage for your accounting, so your finance team, your bookkeepers will be happy as well. And the last thing I wanted to say is, I do host The Handbook: The Agency Operations Podcast. So, hopefully some of you are already listening to that, so thank you very much and please do share that with your colleagues and friends who might benefit from it. Some of the lovely faces you see there, a lot of them have been speakers at Agency Hackers events before, but they've all been guests on the podcast. And ops, as you all know, is so broad, right? It covers everything, you're a bit of HR, a bit of IT, a bit of process. So every episode we talk about a completely different theme and the challenges around that and, these experts, whether they're in house ops people or consultants, give us some ideas on how we can do things a bit better. So it's a lot of knowledge sharing. So please do subscribe. it's on Apple, Spotify, and you can find the link on Scoro's website. And of course I'm on LinkedIn as well. So if you ever want to pick my brain about anything, if you ever want to speak to me, drop me a note on LinkedIn. I'd love to chat with you. And I, I share a lot of the clips and learnings from the podcast on my LinkedIn as well. So that's somewhere you can keep up. And when I post stuff, sharing your thoughts of what you do with regards to that topic, I'd love to see some of that stuff. I will stop rambling there. Thank you very much for listening and I apologize for speaking so quickly.