Uplevel
Uplevel is a software company that provides a machine learning-based engineering effectiveness platform designed to assess employee performance and generate actionable insights.
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Always On is a feature of the Uplevel platform implemented to help reduce overtime and prevent burnout caused by remote work. This feature identifies always-on behaviors on messaging apps like Slack/Teams, JiraJira, and calendars, and creates an indexed score based on high-volume activity outside of standard work hours.
This resulted in a short-notice pivot to a complex task that engaged many cross-team dependencies involving data sciencedata science, service, presentation layer, and the customer success team. Following this sprint period, Always On alerted Uplevel's management to the highest activity scores, both in value and duration, since the feature had been introduced.
- Evaluating and managing the impact of disruptions and managing
The Uplevel platform aims to assist users inwith a variety of productivity solutions:
- Reducing context switching and minimizing distractions by learning the impact of meetings and messaging.
- Balancing teams' time between collaboration and individual work.
- Optimizing calendars to accommodate individual work and demanding problem-solving tasks.
- Informing managers which teams may be at risk for burnout.
- Evaluating and managing the impact of disruptions and managing them.
- Calculating estimated outcomes of engineering output.
- Balancing workloads by distributing tasks according to deadlines and managing team bandwidth.
This resulted in a short noticeshort-notice pivot to a complex task that engaged many cross-team dependencies involving data science, service, presentation layer, and the customer success team. Following this sprint period, Always On alerted Uplevel's management to the highest activity scores, both in value and duration, since the feature had been introduced.
To counteract the sprint's negative impact on the wellbeing of Uplevel employees, the company sent all of its employees on vacation and adjusted the upcoming roadmap schedule to ensure that a comfortable level of output would be required in the near future. In this way, the Always On score served as a tangible reference and potentially helped Uplevel to prevent burnout.
Avalara has approximately 3,000 employees (including nearly 1,000 engineers) working across 13thirteen international offices, resulting in non-standard working hours. Following a period of significant growth, the company sought tools to improve the management of its engineering department, and settled for Uplevel's engineering effectiveness platform.
Since implementation, Uplevel assists Avalara in quantifying and improving engineering effectiveness by providing front-line managers, and engineers with insights related to individual work, context switching, and burnout. Marilyn Bond, VP of Engineering Execution Excellence at Avalara, commented:
