A Workforce in Reaction Mode: Observations from a Recent Webinar

Being truly productive—and not just busy—is a constant battle at work. During a recent COE webinar with productivity coach Jenna Piché, our OpEx community showed up in the chat ready to get real about how their time is spent and what’s standing in the way of better outcomes and cultures. 

Jenna described how productivity challenges are rarely individual problems and instead require systemic and team-level solutions. As attendees reacted to the session, the chat quickly filled with candid reflections. One attendee even described it as “group therapy.”  

Attendees from across industries, roles, and career levels surfaced a strikingly consistent set of experiences: constant interruptions, unclear priorities, overwhelming workloads, and communication habits that make focused work feel like an insurmountable challenge.   

The select messages included below are real, anonymous, and worth pausing to reflect on. Together, these chat messages provide a rich anecdotal snapshot of what organizations in our COE member community are going through.  

Here’s what we heard: 

1. Managers are struggling. 

“I support my team most of the day and can’t get my stuff done.”

“I start my day on the floor to help during busy hours with the intent to step away for my work, but then I end up being needed more and more.”

“I spend most of the time supporting my team. I can't spend time on what I need to do.”

Managers are not okay. Several attendees shared that most of their time is spent supporting their teams, leaving little time to focus on their own priorities. Others shared how their organizations haven’t “recalibrated” from pandemic-era pressures to be “always on” that worsened boundaries between work and home. 

As much as managers want to help their teams thrive, they are looking for more sustainable structures and boundaries. 

2. Interruptions are a significant problem. 

“I don't complete the priorities I had listed at the beginning of the week due to repeated interruptions.”

“It's difficult to stay on task and reach a feeling of completion and personal accomplishment.”

“Interruptions affect me more than I realized.”

If we want more focused work, we need to do something about interruptions. When attendees were asked to assess how they spend their time at work, many concluded that interruptions are the primary reason why they aren’t accomplishing their tasks and feeling productive. 

One attendee lamented about “quick questions” that are never quick. Others cited a constant barrage of nonessential notifications from Slack, Teams, and other channels as a major source of distraction. The acknowledgement of these patterns is important. To protect our focus time more intentionally, we need to identify the sources of interruptions within our systems and design strategies around them. 

3. We need to rethink priorities and accountability. 

“I have too many priorities to be able to focus.”

“My company is classic for starting initiatives that fall apart.  Every day is just putting out one dumpster fire after the next.”

“We have too many priorities or fires to make anything a priority.”

If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. Nobody wants to be on a team where everything is reactive all the time. One attendee mentioned how challenging it is when a failure to escalate issues appropriately leads to avoidable consequences. Others discussed how disheartening it is to have leaders who fail to make timely decisions or insist everything is equally important. 

These insights also highlight broader systems challenges. Prioritization and accountability are team practices that require clarity, consistency, and reinforcement. Without them, attendees were quick to point out the inevitability of burnout.  

4. Meetings and communication practices are a big source of friction. 

“We have meetings about meetings and meetings that could have been an email.”

“We need to talk about abolishing email.”

“People don’t come prepared for meetings. Meetings are a waste of time if there are no clear objectives and we end with no resolution or action items.” 

Nobody wants meetings about meetings. Other team habits attendees were quick to say they loathe? Excessive update reporting, meeting invites with no stated purpose, unnecessary meeting frequencies, last-minute meetings, meetings without the right audience, failure to respond to emails, failure to answer the phone, and manually tracking updates in way too many places. 

Attendees didn’t hold back on how they really feel about common meeting and email practices. Organizations and team leaders should take note: these habits go beyond annoyance and seriously impact productivity and culture. 

5. The COE community is full of great ideas and inspiration. 

“Schedule your emails! Delay send so that you don’t disrupt someone outside of work hours.”

“I worked with a team that created a 'compassion agreement’—a team charter dealing with what personal space means, what good communication looks like, and what professionalism looks like.”

“I'm going to start setting a clear top three priorities with my team each week.” 

We heard loud and clear that many teams are operating in a constant state of reaction, but it was just as apparent in the chat that our COE community is deeply committed to problem solving and continuous improvement. As much as it was a safe space to vent frustrations, it was also a collaborative space to share ideas and inspiration for how teams can better protect their time and operate with greater alignment.

If there’s anything to take away from this webinar session, it’s that there is opportunity for teams to move from reacting to work to designing it more deliberately. Even small changes—clearer priorities, better boundaries, and more intentional communication—can make a meaningful difference in how we work together. 

Missed the webinar with Jenna Piché? A recording of the session is available in COE’s members-only Digital Content Archive. Don’t have an account yet? Create an account. 

Not a member? Reach out to Annie Platten at platten.6@osu.edu to discuss the benefits of membership for your organization.  

Want to connect with Jenna? Visit jennapiche.com to learn more and get in touch.