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Focused and productive developers aren't just happier — they're good for business. Uplevel helps engineering leaders increase value delivered by maximizing the time their teams spend on meaningful value creation work.
“The impact of deep work on productivity is well researched, but everything is more interesting with correlated data.”
How Accolade observed an "almost exact correlation" between deep work surfaced by Uplevel and employee engagement reported in developer surveys:
See how much time your devs actually have to focus on the right things (and how much they get pulled away into meetings and ad hoc chats)
Surface and support developers who are consistently working long hours so you can retain top talent
Create organizational alignment across your business by defining what good looks like
We protect developers by not revealing individual metrics that could be used for stack ranking or other performance management functions
Both qualitative and quantitative data has value to engineering organizations and their leaders. Qualitative data provides contextual insights that might help explain quantitative metrics, and quantitative data removes the potential bias and fallibility that comes with relying only on memory or sentiment.
The truth is that neither qualitative nor quantitative data is enough on its own, and they’re also not enough together. Measurement alone does not create organizational change.
We believe the best way forward is a blended approach of quantitative and qualitative data, and of measurement and action. This is why we offer the Uplevel System. The system combines our platform with the Uplevel Method, a deep holistic assessment and change management process. The Uplevel Method is designed to help uncover the root causes of inefficiency and guide teams through organizational change.
Deep work (which we define as a period of two or more hours of uninterrupted focus) is not a touchy-feely HR metric but a leading indicator of engineering efficiency.
Low deep work from meetings and interruptions can be a symptom of too much WIP, which can cause low velocity and quality. When developers get caught up in meetings and short work blocks all day, we find they often need to catch up on the day’s pull requests and Slack messages in the evening or weekend to unblock their teammates. This creates a higher risk of burnout and correlates with lower developer sentiment. Over time, it can lead to bottlenecks and quality issues as PRs might be merged without review or comment.
We encourage customers to aim for a target of ~4 hours of deep work time per day as this is the level at which we start to see improvements in lagging indicators like bug rate and cycle time.
We measure Deep Work by looking at the distribution of time spent across a developer’s day. Deep Work is defined as blocks of two hours or longer with nothing on the calendar (or meetings with no attendees that appear to be blocking time for work). Interruptions, such as responding to incoming messages on Slack or Teams during Deep Work time, will reset the clock.
The rest of the time is divided into meetings, interruptions, and fragments (short blocks of meeting-free time typically used for conversations and surface-level tasks).
More information about how Uplevel helps leaders sustain team performance: