Teki Repalda

Thoughts, Toolkits, Teachings.

Category: Workplace

  • Relentless Simplicity

    Relentless Simplicity

    AGILE IS DEAD. WE KILLED AGILE.

    Today, i have aged significantly. Some days can do that to you. Why? It’s when leaders, new or old, introduce complications to sprints. I’m not sure when we started moving away from true Agile. People tell me that Agile is dead. And i tell them because we killed it. We pummeled it with rigid standardization, complications and for introducing bad Scrum routines and events. When we did that, we effectively departed from the manifesto. And started this whole enshittification of every tech and process we laid our hands on.

    What used to be our elegant ability to ship new things became an ISO slog. Document. No loose ends. Dot every i. Cross every t. We started to create Kanban boards that resembled these papers pinned to a fridge. Next thing you know, your fridge is a vertical filing cabinet. We conflated clarity and awareness for overzealous information load. As if we can all memorize multiple customer stories. As if training is a newfound magic potion. Voila, you are trained and perfect. Bestowed with all knowledge. I unleash you to the wild.

    Image Credits: Thinking How & Kerismaker

    But all of that is devoid of natural flow. Teams who insist on exhausting all scenarios before launch isn’t being risk-aware. It’s fear masking as prudence. Leaders introduce “scope creeps” prematurely. This then becomes a misguided exercise in control rather than delivery. Often i see this as leaders projecting their own fears onto the project. They say they represent customers or agents. But when you actually ask customers and agents, those fears are misrepresented.

    PROCESS = PERFECTION IS A HEART ATTACK WAITING TO HAPPEN

    Here in the Philippines, we’ve caught this ride-or-die obsession with process perfection. “Teki, but what if this happens…? What if that happens?” It’s not because you’re wanting to dodge questions, but entertaining each and every inane one is an exercise in insanity. Go, touch grass people.

    Like the past few months i have seen team leaders and analysts go down rabbit holes. Of their own creation. They created the monster in the first place. It would have been better if every monster was like Mike Wazowski or Sulley. But it’s like scaring Boo with Chuckie and his bride. Let’s say we go the path of full blown information. The same people asking for wholesale cognitive loading are the same people who will say they are overwhelmed. See? We create our own monsters.

    Boo! Can you explain your new process?

    There’s this obsession of “i need to know everything before we move forward”. Meetings have now become like “Pokemon gotta catch them all” cards. They want to simulate all scenarios which misses the whole MVP entirely. Or there’s that one or two team leaders who crater the entire project with complaints masquerading as questions . Not that we’re banning questions. But we need to stop being paralyzed with scenarios that aren’t going to cover your top 20%. We fail also to Pareto these problems at the onset now. Especially if you are only preparing for a soft launch. Even if the very specific, yet trivial answer you’re looking for doesn’t exist yet. Why? Because it’s in the far far (very far) later pile of your “Now, Next, Later” project pipeline. Priorities, be damned.

    Instead of asking “what’s missing”, the better question to ask is “what’s ESSENTIAL for us to move forward?”

    LEARN FROM FOURIER, NOT THE FUHRER.

    When i was in college in the mid 90’s, i was fascinated with our Physics optics class. The professor showed us how clarity is created by adding more pixels to a picture. Yet the greater takeaway from that is that you don’t need total fidelity to the original image to understand what the picture is about.

    Even if some pixels are missing, Fourier Transform “fills” the gap. Instead of analyzing all the raw pixel data in an image, we analyze the underlying frequency components. So even if you don’t capture every detail, you can still reconstruct a usable, recognizable version of the original signal by keeping only the most dominant frequencies.

    Image Credit: Irfan Adisukma

    This is what compression is all about. Take audio. You don’t need lossless music all the time. Perhaps that’s for discerning audiophiles with the ability to store them big music formats. Even with lossy compression, you can still enjoy the sound and a smaller file size. It ain’t heavy to carry. Plus you have more space to store more songs (especially if you’re the kind who still owns an iPod or, like me, a Sony Walkman.)

    HOW WE LEARN TO FILL GAPS IS A WONDERFUL SKILL

    It’s the same thing in learning and training. You don’t need to have all the information to understand something.

    Read this: ”f u dnt gt dis by nw, u shd gt ur eyes chckd.”

    See how your brain filled that gap?

    Our team members are going to be the same. They will fill that gap, even if it’s a bit substandard at first. Because you’d rather they learn adaptability than spoon-feeding them all the answers. The value also here is that we don’t have to teach people what the answers are. You teach them to find the answers for themselves.

    Our projects are the same. Feedback that comes naturally lends itself to better flow. One of the rules in life that i had learned the hard way: if you have to force anything by cramming, you are destroying flow, if not your peace of mind.

    DON’T EAT THE ELEPHANT WHOLE

    Sprint projects are not just there for speed. They are there for simplicity. But simplicity doesn’t mean splendid all knowing clarity. Simplicity means focusing only on what is essential now. That the scope is narrow enough for you to complete. The definition of done.

    Somebody told me this in the past: You can’t eat the elephant whole. (Although i wonder if they taste good.). You need a manageable chunk that you can chew on. Enjoy the meal and go from there.

    Life is kind of like that too. Sometimes you need to enjoy an apertif or an appetizer before you gorge on a grand meal. I’ve seen people with bad GERD. Great projects are like elegant food. Too much and it’s cloying. Too often and it’s a medical condition.

    So resist the temptation to gorge and let’s stop exacting needless information. It doesn’t make anyone smart. It makes us woefully dull.

    An attempt at not being Bruce The Shark and his posse.
  • Imprisoned in Modern Panopticons

    Imprisoned in Modern Panopticons

    Marg’s call center horror stories made me angry. And it still does.

    The time she wasn’t allowed a proper bio-break after 2 hours of holding her bladder. The time she was asked to work the day after her father’s funeral. The time she was reprimanded not for solving the customer’s issue, but for the way she failed to announce the second hold time.

    Marg said, years later. “I wasn’t allowed to grieve.” The BPO company she was working for back then had no space for her father’s death. No WFM algorithm to calculate the weight of her loss.

    Marg and i have both worked for the BPO industry for nearly 30 years in various capacities. It saddens us that the problems we had when we started are still the same problems. They’re like ghosts refusing to fade.

    Go to the BPO subreddits. Team Leaders questioning certified medical certificates from doctors. Or leaders ranting in private group chats about metrics and taking it out on agents. The sheer leader flex of lording it over. Just because they can.

    Why has it comes to this?

    Blame it on Panopticons

    I know. Are you also hearing the Transformers song in your head? (Milli Vanilli too. Ha. It shows my age.)

    Maybe we should all fault Bentham, a philosopher known for his moral utilitarianism. He coined the phrase “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”.  My translation: He’s an All Lives Matter kind of guy.

    Jeremy Bentham also designed a structure called the Panopticon. It was a circular prison design, a building with a central watchtower, where prisoners mustn’t know when they were being watched. The idea? If you knew you could be observed at any moment, you’d behave as if you always are. Prisoners, then, learned to internalize the gaze. They become their own wardens.

    Image Credits: original illustration by Muhammed Edi Sutanto

    In Bentham’s view, he genuinely thought it was a humane way to reform inmates by making them constantly visible and thus accountable. But was it? 

    Michel Foucault warned us of the excesses of social control. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison, he argued that the Panopticon wasn’t just about prisons. It became a model for modern invisible power for schools, factories, hospitals, offices. It can be found anywhere where we are shaped to self-monitor, self-correct and self-discipline. He saw it as a model to normalize being docile and follow rules without resistance.

    Fast forward to where we are now. Open office plans. Floor managers watching from raised command centers. KPIs that reward visible activity more than real problem-solving. What we leaders may call transparency, some recognize as surveillance. We live in a panoptic society.

    The Illusion of Motivation

    There’s another behavioral model that plays into this. The Hawthorne Effect comes from studies done in the 1920s at a Western Electric factory. Researchers found that workers improved their performance when they knew they were being observed. But not because of the changes to their environment. It was only because someone was paying attention.

    It’s a powerful reminder: people respond to being seen. But it’s also fragile. The performance boost fades. The effect is short-lived. Empirical studies confirm that the Hawthorne Effect wasn’t really effective and there were no evidence of long-term gains.

    It also needs to be said. That people also respond negatively when they are too seen, when there’s too much surveillance and not enough autonomy. Being seen can be empowering. But doing it too much is stifling.

    If not X, then Y: Either/Or Mechanisms Don’t Work

    Do you see this X, not Y (or not X, then Y) pattern in writing for most AI junk these days. Apparently, the AI learned it from us. This kind of thinking also persists in management theories.

    • Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory said job satisfaction comes from intrinsic motivators (like purpose or achievement), while dissatisfaction comes from extrinsic factors (like bad policies or pay). Fixing the latter doesn’t guarantee joy. But harnessing intrinsic motivation is a management cop out. Blame it on the person, not on the system. It reeks of “it’s a will issue” thinkers in the BPO. (Shots fired. Be warned.)
    • Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y presented two opposing views of workers: Theory X managers assume people are lazy and need control. Theory Y managers assume people are self-motivated and seek responsibility.

    Most workplaces, in actual practice, still lean toward Theory X, even if they pay lip service to Theory Y. This dissonance comes from a lack of trust. And many leaders (too many) operate on what they call “cautious optimism”. Really? That’s just mistrust dressed up pretty.

    Take for example, remote work versus return to office mandates. They all want us back in offices because of a lack of trust that we won’t collaborate better. They mistrust us not to use our time productively. We can’t be trusted with our own autonomy. It’s like a child being told: “You can’t have nice things.”

    So we will meet you halfway. Companies will then go hybrid. We enjoy X and you enjoy Y. Happy? But it still doesn’t solve the issue of unwarranted surveillance and virtual prisons.

    Unless you really want that separate. Think Severance. Your outie enjoys balloons, according to Miss Casey.

    Stop With the Resilience Crap. Change the System.

    What if the issue isn’t that people need to be more resilient, but that the systems themselves need to change?

    In contact centers, I’ve always been bothered by the layout: leaders sitting above teams, WFM teams controlling the rhythm from an ivory tower. What if we brought them down to the floor, embedded within the teams? What if they modeled behaviors instead of issuing directives? What if we just stay out of the way?

    What if we designed performance dashboards that ask questions instead of demanding answers?

    What if KPIs weren’t about call handling time or hold script compliance, but about whether the customer felt understood? (And geez, i don’t mean CSAT. CSAT is not a measure of customer experience, folks! It’s just a snapshot survey.) Whether the agent felt safe enough to ask for help?

    Beyond Metrics: Toward Systems That Care

    A few months ago i was thinking about Zeno’s Paradox. Breaking down tasks into smaller and smaller increments can make us feel like we’re moving but it’s without progress. It’s the same with non-value-adding KPIs. We measure so much, we forget what matters.

    Marg’s experience is not unique. It’s a symptom of a system built to squeeze the most productivity out of you. It’s so post-industrial, it’s heartless. But here’s the thing: systems are designed. And what is designed can be reimagined.

    Culture change is hard. But it has to start somewhere. Leaders must become the first movers. We must take the first step into uncertainty and model trust, humility, and presence. We must sit with our teams as equals. We must create environments where performance grows from purpose, despite pressure. (Because not all pressure is bad.)

    I’m not advocating that all measurements in the workplace be abolished. But rigid Taylorism has no place anywhere now. As leaders, we should:

    • Question our KPIs
    • Flatten our hierarchies
    • Build learning-centered systems
    • Make room for grief, bio-breaks, and basic dignity
    • Replace surveillance with relationship

    Marg and I walk through rain after coffee. She tells me about a customer who thanked her for listening, really listening, during a difficult call. “That’s not in any metric,” she says. “But it was the only thing that mattered to me that day.”

  • Honor Your Rhythm. Ride Your Own Wave.

    Honor Your Rhythm. Ride Your Own Wave.

    Everywhere and Anywhere is a Wave.

    Waves are everywhere. They’re primordial things in our universe. Radio waves. All the sounds we hear are waves. All types of electromagnetic waves. Then, we have ocean waves. Our dog Bailey, her fur has waves. When she pees, it makes small ripples in the veranda especially when she fails to use the pee tray. To the ants, her pee probably looks like dirty tsunamis.

    This is why you’d know I didn’t write this with ChatGPT. (Or any GPT for that matter). AI still doesn’t know how to create memes. Not yet, anyway.

    Events in our lives come in waves. Weekdays we’re up and about. Weekends we rest.

    Yet why aren’t we honoring our own biological waves? No rest for the wicked, they say. If so, wickedness are contact centers.

    But Wait. What’s a Wave? Hello?

    Let’s first define a few things.

    A wave is a repeating movement that transfers energy from one place to another.

    A wavelength is the distance from one wave to the next.

    I would also argue that Goku’s Kamehameha isn’t really a wave in the pure physical sense. It’s an energy beam. Then again, that’s anime. All things can happen in anime.

    The Revenge of the Body Snatchers Clocks.

    Now our body clock comes in waves of waking and sleeping. And even smaller cycles of productivity and relaxation. We have two main types of biological rhythms. The circadian cycle and the ultradian cycles.

    Circadian rhythm is like your master body clock. It’s concerned with the 24-hour cycle of your body. Ultradian cycles are smaller in length. They’re little wavelengths making up of 110 to 120 minutes a cycle.

    I’ve borrowed an image from Pilar Gerasimo’s book The Healthy Deviant.1 For those of us who like Pomodoro timers, this illustrates the ebbs and flows of a typical work day.

    That one of the reasons, we become productive is not by working long hours but by incorporating rest and recovery in between focused work.

    The W in WFM Doesn’t Stand for Well-Being.

    BPOs are quite notorious for having the unhealthiest of workers.2 It’s because we haven’t truly honored the natural tendency of the body to relax and rest. We tend to think of rest as an after-office thing we do. But WFM (workforce management) leaders don’t account for ultradian rhythms in how we schedule shifts, breaks and allocate for training. Schedulers tend to assume that we’re always at peak performance.

    I wish the W in WFM stood for “wave” or “wellbeing”. WaveForce Management has a good ring to it, yeah? Whacka mole is really what’s happening these days. (Sorry, i’m in the midst of backlogs.)

    Image Credit: Original Illustration by Sinando

    This means solve rates per hour goals remain the same per agent all throughout the shift. Even if we distribute customer contact arrival patterns, we don’t seem to afford the same “energy” pattern for agents. We only calculate staffing per hour needed against that arrival.

    Prolonged bouts of intense productivity take a toll on us. There’s also an emotional labor that goes with customer service where you have to act positive when dealing with complaints.

    No amount of self-motivation and discipline takes burnout away.

    Contact centers also give away so many vanity rewards: nap rooms, well-stocked pantries, wellness programs and even engagement initiatives that make you feel good. Their effectiveness, in truth, are short-lived. They don’t compound.

    On the other hand, WFM scheduling models, which are at the heart of productive burnout, remain unchanged. And in the Philippines, BPO leaders don’t question it as much, much less know why and how these models are ripe for change.

    Erlang C versus Common Sense: No Winners.

    Erlang C calculators are the backbone of contact center workforce management. It determines how many to staff and where to schedule agents efficiently. All that to ensure we reply to customers within a specified threshold. The goal is to also minimize something we call “shrinkage” or non-productive time. Billable utilization fuels this. If you’re not productive within the shift, that work can’t be invoiced to clients (if that’s the type of contract your account uses.)

    The problem with Erlang C as a model is that it assumes that all productive time is constant per hour. It accounts for occupancy or utilization of agents only because its goal is efficiency, not wellness. It also ducks the notion of patience. In the Erlang C formula, it doesn’t consider customer abandonments. It assumes that people will stay on the line.

    I won’t bore you with the Erlang C calculation. Only know that it’s been with us for over 105 years. It remains unchanged and has yet to be dislodged as a standard.

    FACTORERLANG C (MODEL) ULTRADIAN CYCLE (BIOLOGY)
    GoalForecasts workload with optimal staffingMaintain cognitive energy and acuity
    BreaksConsidered as cost in a per hour or activity billingConsidered investment in recovery
    Focus SpanImplied as “infinite focus” until next scheduled breakWorks in 90 minute cycles and requires a 20-30 minute break in between
    Customer ImpactFaster customer response times and AHT. Prolonged occupancy and concurrency leads to rework and errorsIntentional responses that reduces ticket reopens. Better CSAT when done well.
    Employee ImpactHigh occupancy of more than 80% leads to burnout, if not prolonged mental stress.Ensures space for learning and allows “mini-resets” to recover energy. Healthier employees are more engaged.
    OverallEfficient but not sustainableEffective but not necessarily efficient

    We still live in a post-industrial age where knowledge work is still both done by humans and assisted by machines (and now AI). Erlang C (or even the earlier Erlangs) promotes the interest of the business model, not a biological one. And we keep failing Maslow again and again.

    My Top 3 Solutions. Yes, I Have Hope.

    We need to have better strategies that blend both human effectiveness and WFM efficiency. To do this, I suggest 3 simple things to start.

    Better Break Rule Patterns

    • Don’t just schedule lunch and two 15-minute breaks
    • Implement a rising tickets per hour towards peak and a descending tickets per hour towards break.
    • Match ultradian rhythms and better schedule blocks for individual agents and not just wholesale team schedules
    • Plan around shrinkage in mind. Don’t reduce it. Optimize.


    Invest in Humans More

    • Don’t use AI as a customer ticket deflection strategy (this is AI slop anyway).
    • Enable AI to help BPO agents when productivity is expected to wane. Or when there is not enough staffing.
    • Better yet, hire more. The cost of building an LLM is still higher than hiring a trained human agent.
    • Economies are made better with human workforce than a jobless one.

    Have HR own the WFM Function

    • The problem with all of this is HR isn’t technical enough to compute WFM needs and tools, when WFM should really be an HR function, not an operations deliverable.
    • Let an automated app do payroll and administrative work
    • WFM should be treated within the realm of benefits and organizational development.
    • Train for well-rounded HR leaders.

    I’d concede that there are still so many things we have to do to balance human care with productivity. And that moving away from a problematic Erlang C requires a whole new paradigm in productive planning. In the absence of a standard, we need to be courageous to create one ourselves. If we truly care about employee well-being and welfare, we’d put this into action now.

    Also customers need to exert a little patience. As humans, it just always pays to be kinder. If we get to be replaced by AI one day, it will be utterly humorous to see people shouting at an AI agent. If we do that, we’re guaranteeing T-800. Ah. Wasted energies all around.

    Footnotes

    1. Pilar Gerasimo’s website: https://healthydeviant.com ↩︎
    2. Candelario CMC, Fullante MKA, Pan WKM, Gregorio ER Jr. Integrative Review of Workplace Health Promotion in the Business Process Outsourcing Industry: Focus on the Philippines. Public Health Pract (Oxf). 2024 Feb 19;7:100476. doi: 10.1016/j.puhip.2024.100476. PMID: 38463217; PMCID: PMC10920955. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10920955/ ↩︎