Last week Dave spoke at Future Of Web Apps (FOWA) in London on data. If you don’t already know, he has spent the last month tracking our every move here at Storm, from the number of cups of tea we drink to when we take breaks and even what we think of the buskers outside!
Dave found some entertaining insights into our business – who would have guessed that those of us who have an early cup of coffee end up being less productive?
We’re also a fairly happy bunch, based on the data we input over the month. We tracked the individual perceived mood and perceived productivity of each member of the team, and overall we came out pretty well.
There were some entertaining outcomes – as the buskers outside deteriorate, so does our mood – until they get so bad that it’s either funny or we stick our headphones on, and suddenly we get a lot happier again!
While the results have been quite funny, there is also a serious outcome of this monitoring. As Dave shared with his audience at FOWA, having data is useless if you can’t interpret it and use it to improve a situation.
At Storm we’ve been lucky, we’ve just moved offices so we’ve been able to make some really simple changes that will have an impact on productivity. We’ve created social spaces, so our team can get away from their desks at lunchtime, we’ve got a better heating system so we can boost the temperature of rooms in the morning (we found warmer days were more productive) and we have even got music in each room now to cancel out the buskers!
We have also installed an intelligent phone system so that no one has to answer too many calls in a short space of time, and we have 11am standup meetings to get the teams’ day into sync.
The feedback from Dave’s talk at FOWA was great, and those of our team who went to the conference had a really good time. It almost made having our loo breaks monitored worthwhile!
