A team health survey revealed a focus time problem. Diagnosing the root cause pointed to organizational conditions, not individual behavior.

The situation

On a 100-person distributed state unemployment modernization program, team health survey data revealed that only 48% of team members felt they could do focused, heads-down work without constant interruption, one of the lowest scores across any team in the organization.

My role

I sponsored the initiative, launching a focus time working group and working alongside a cross-disciplinary team of leads and ICs.

Approach

We surveyed 20 team members, segmented by role. What we found: leads rated their focus time 38% lower than ICs. We benchmarked against high-performing teams in the organization. We catalogued 58+ recurring meetings program-wide, tracking proposed changes and estimated hours reclaimed per sprint. We used AI tools to analyze calendars and identify patterns, including “Swiss cheese” scheduling where 15–30 minute gaps between meetings left no real space for heads-down work.

What emerged was a structural picture: meetings scheduled over blocked focus time, Slack treated as urgent by default, lead role expectations never clearly defined. No individual could fix this alone.

Actions taken

• Canceled or restructured meetings based on audit findings, for example, folding a recurring triage sync into an existing meeting, and reformatting a program-wide demo to async with live attendance limited to presenting teams
• Meeting and Slack norms published with facilitator scripts for real-time enforcement
• Recurring Slackbot reminders to sustain norms
• A Slack channel hygiene pass to reduce ambient noise

Outcomes

Favorable focus-time responses moved from 48% to 67%. Several team members cited the working group’s changes unprompted in qualitative feedback. The methodology was packaged as a reusable playbook and adopted by another team in the organization.