You added the engineers. The throughput did not follow. Here is what we found in the calendar.

Engineering Leadership
May 2026

You added the engineers. The throughput did not follow. Here is what we found in the calendar.

You have been hiring. The market for licensed PEs is tighter than it has been in a decade, and every hire came at a premium. You modeled the capacity lift those hires would deliver. A year in, throughput looks the same. Your COO cannot give you a clean answer, and your board will ask again at the next quarterly.

We ran the same diagnostic inside our own firm last quarter.

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The Diagnostic

One of my engineers at MES could not push his projects through. Sharp, licensed, fully loaded on every tool. Deadlines slipping, reports half-finished. We mapped two weeks of his hours.

Roughly 85 percent of his day was reactive: Teams pings, Outlook pings, text messages, client emails outside any scheduled window, all carrying the implicit expectation of immediate response.

Put a dollar figure on that. You pay senior PEs $150,000 to $215,000 a year, each one responsible for $2 million or more in project revenue. At 85 percent reactive, $130,000 to $180,000 of that salary per engineer is going to interrupt-handling, not engineering.

Across twenty senior PEs, that is roughly $3 million a year in premium labor doing work a coordinator should handle, and the $2 million projects they oversee never get four clean hours of their judgment.

He was running two or three monitors, the setup every engineer insists on. Our industry has been trained to think more screens equal more output. You can only look at one thing at a time. A second monitor running Teams and Outlook while he tried to finish a report was not capacity. It guaranteed every ping pulled him off the work that mattered.

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This Is Not An MES Problem

Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index, built on trillions of Microsoft 365 signals, found employees are interrupted every two minutes during core hours and receive 153 Teams messages and 117 emails daily.

On weekends, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint usage overtakes Teams as employees finally carve out uninterrupted focus time.

That is the signature of a workforce that has given up on real engineering between Monday and Friday.

85%

Of PE's day spent reactive

2 min

Average time between interruptions

270

Daily messages (153 Teams + 117 email)

$3M

Annual cost across 20 senior PEs

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What Changed

Here is what the before and after look like when you map it.

Figure 1  |  Before: A Senior Engineer's Day Under Constant Interruption

Watch the interruptions flow constantly from four sources (email, Teams, calls, client requests) bombarding the engineer in the center. Civil 3D plans and calculations rarely make it to the wastewater treatment plant design. This is what 85% reactive looks like in real time.

The visual makes it unmistakable. Interruptions flow from four sources, constantly bombarding the engineer in the center. Design work rarely gets through to the wastewater plant. The engineer is accessible to everyone, all day, every day. The result: zero sustained focus blocks, projects that never finish, and weekend work to catch up.

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The Restructured Day

Figure 2  |  After: The Same Engineer with Protected Blocks

The same interruptions still arrive, but now they queue in a holding zone during the morning block. The engineer is protected by scheduled unavailability. Civil 3D plans, calculations, hydraulic models, site drawings, and reports flow freely to the wastewater treatment plant design. Afternoons handle all batched communications efficiently in a single window.

When we rebuilt that engineer's day around two blocks, his project throughput roughly doubled in two weeks. No new hires. No new platform. We took the 80 percent of his day that was reactive and stacked it into a single afternoon window.

No New Hires

$0

Additional headcount cost

No New Platform

$0

Software or tool spend

Two Weeks

2x

Project throughput increase

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Why This Works

Have you ever trained your engineers on how to operate around these tools, and why it would benefit them and the firm? For most firms the honest answer is no. You rolled out the communication stack and assumed everyone would figure out the rest.

The morning is where that gap shows up. Every senior engineer logs in to a chaotic mess: overnight emails, Teams messages from EITs who had questions yesterday, a client email marked urgent. He opens all of it because nobody taught him not to, and by 9:30 he has handled thirty things and produced nothing.

The quiet truth: almost none of it was urgent. Because no one defined urgent at your firm, everything gets treated as though it is.

The fix is structural. Morning is production: design, calculations, plan reviews, reports, proposals. Afternoon is everything else. The phone system routes calls to a scheduled window. A scheduling assistant enforces the calendar. Clients respect the rules because deliverables show up faster than anything they have seen before.

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Before The Next Requisition

Pull the calendars of five senior engineers and map protected focus time to reactive time. If it is 20 percent production and 80 percent reactive, the throughput problem is not solved by the next hire.

It is solved by redesigning the day and training people on how to operate inside it.

If you want to talk through how we structure the day at MES and the scheduling system we built around it, reach out directly.
contact an engineer

Michael Groselle, P.E.

CEO / Founder, Modern Engineering Solutions