Work Logging
A great way for your reports to give visibility into their day to day
Work logging is something I came across only recently and when it was contextualised for software engineering, it made total sense to me.
What is Work Logging?
In my 1:1 section, I go through all the benefits and reasoning behind having regular check-ins with your team as an engineering manager. Work logging easily facilitates the 1:1 by keeping a trail of all the notable contributions that they have brought to the team. This could be any of the following things:
A list of PRs merged
Contributions to the code review process
RFCs done and contributed to
On calls and incidents managed
Sprint tasks completed
Helping out team mates
Anything else that they may feel made an impact to the team
Why do it?
Does this scenario sound familiar? It's the end of the year and it's performance review time for the 2nd half of the year. You've set up the expectations that your manager has for you at the start of the 2nd half and if you perform well, it is highly likely you'll get promoted. It's come time to review how you did and you need to show your manager what a great job you've done to warrant that promotion. The only issue now is that you have to now recall all the impactful things you've done in the past 6 months. High chance is that you have a foggy memory of things that happened 6 months ago and your manager might not remember them either. Work logging can help here by:
Having a centralised place where all their impactful contributions are documented so that when it comes to performance review time, it's easy to summarise
Discussing these impactful achievements during the regular 1:1s so that their manager also has a view on them
Getting more immediate feedback on the impact of what they'vedone and by shortening the feedback loop to potentially weekly instead of every 6 months
Aside from performance reviews, work logging helps by:
Giving a nice round off to the day or week. Work logging could be done on a daily or weekly basis as a shut down routine which gives a mental separation between work and rest
Allows an engineer to get a view of their work load on a daily basis which in turn allows them to prioritise or even say no to work assigned to them
How to Work Log?
This can be set up as a personal document or a part of a 1:1 shared document with their manager, so long as it's digital and easily accessible.
Decide the interval of when you want to update your log. This could be daily, every other day or even weekly. Just make sure it's not too long as you want the memories to be fresh in your mind
Set aside 10-15 minutes to do logging. Adding a block in the calendar will help to cement this habit
It's better to over log at the beginning and scale down as time goes on. Everyone has their own levels of impact and they might not be sure what is impactful or not. The longer the engineer goes through this exercise, the better sense they will get of what they or their manager finds impactful
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