You run capacity planning on infrastructure quarterly. You run it on people never.
Sloane Labs is the workforce capacity layer for large distributed software organisations. It reads recovery and cognitive load across regions, functions and follow the sun rotations, forecasts where delivery and support quality will degrade, and acts before the quarter closes on it.
At scale, load is not distributed by design. It concentrates, quietly, on the same twelve percent of the organisation.
Every enterprise of size has a small group carrying a disproportionate share of the escalations, the meetings across time zones and the out of hours coverage. Nobody planned it that way; it emerged. Without instrumentation it stays invisible until those people leave.
Distributed working introduces a structural cost that headcount planning ignores entirely. A team spanning three regions pays for it in fragmented calendars and calls outside every reasonable working window, and that cost is measurable in metadata already in your tenant.
Four places capacity turns into outcome
The time zone seam
Every cross region handover has a human paying for it in an early call or a late one.
The escalation path
The same senior names appear on every critical escalation.
The meeting layer
Calendar fragmentation is the single largest and most controllable throughput loss in enterprise organisations.
The critical few
Load concentration is a resilience problem, not a wellbeing one.
A quarter, read the way you read capacity
Regional cohort capacity across a quarter, with the forward projection that lets you rebalance coverage, unfragment a calendar or add a region before delivery and support quality degrade.
Select an operating state to redraw the forecast.
Handovers shared evenly across three regions. Recovery clears and capacity holds inside the tolerance band.
No intervention. The weekly brief confirms coverage is sustainable through the quarter.
What we read, and what each signal decides
A signal earns its place only if it changes an operational decision. Anything that does not is telemetry for its own sake.
What is actually running, not what is on a roadmap
Weekly leadership brief
A single page before the operating review. Cohort capacity, what changed, the two groups to watch, and one recommended action.
Cohort capacity by function and region
Engineering, support, customer success and sales reported as separate cohorts with trend lines. No cohort renders below five people.
Concentration and risk alerts
Surfaces load concentration as well as level, so the small group carrying a disproportionate share becomes visible before they resign.
Coverage simulation
Model a coverage pattern before you commit. Shift a handover, move a recurring call async or add a region and see the projected effect.
Individual agent, opt in only
People who opt in get their own coach: travel and sleep guidance, recovery targets, focus protection, grounded strictly in their own data. Nothing is visible to management.
Organisational health record
An aggregated, anonymised record for the board and for ESG or human capital reporting, showing how load was distributed and what changed it.
Reading human capacity only works if the boundary is unambiguous
Trust is the adoption constraint. These are commitments, written into the agreement, not preferences.
Never a productivity surveillance tool
No keystrokes, no output counts per person. Excluded from performance review, calibration and disciplinary process, contractually and in the data model.
Opt in, always
No one is enrolled by default. Participation is individual, explicit and revocable at any time, with data deleted on withdrawal.
Five person minimum cohort
Aggregate views suppress any group smaller than five. Leadership sees cohorts, never a named individual's physiology.
Metadata, never content
Calendar and messaging integrations read timing, density and participant counts. Titles, bodies and message content are masked at ingestion and never stored.
Separated from selection
Contractually and architecturally excluded from selection, appraisal and disciplinary processes. That separation is written into the agreement.
UK GDPR and DPIA ready
Lawful basis, retention schedule, data subject rights and a pre drafted DPIA template supplied for your DPO before the first device is connected.
Capacity planning runs quarterly on infrastructure and never on people.
An eight week pilot with a defined exit
We take a small number of design partners per sector. A partner shapes the roadmap directly, gets preferential terms, and keeps the right to walk away at week eight with no obligation.
Scope and governance
Agree cohorts, success measures and the data boundary. DPIA reviewed and signed. Integrations connected in a sandbox with a small internal group.
Baseline
Volunteers connect wearables and calendars. Individual baselines establish across a normal cycle and a peak one. No alerting yet, observation only.
Live briefing
Morning readiness briefs start reaching leadership. Forecast alerts switch on. Calibration against what the organisation already believes about its own load.
Readout and decision
Joint review of accuracy, adoption and the decisions the signal changed. Written readout, roadmap input, and a clear go or no go.
What we need from you
- One executive sponsor with authority over how work is scheduled
- Twenty to fifty volunteers across two or three cohorts
- Calendar and messaging integration approved by IT and the DPO
- Two review sessions across the eight weeks
What you get
- Full platform access for the pilot cohorts, configured to your operating calendar
- Direct roadmap influence on capability specific to your sector
- A written readout of accuracy, adoption and decisions changed
- Preferential terms and first refusal on the sector in your market
The questions we get asked first
Is this employee monitoring?
No, and it is architected so it cannot become that. No content, no keystrokes, no per person output. Individual physiology is never exposed to management and every leadership view is a cohort of five or more.
How does it fit our existing engagement survey?
Surveys are lagging, sampled and self reported. Sloane is continuous, objective and forward looking. Most organisations run both and use the survey to explain what the signal already showed.
Can it be deployed across multiple jurisdictions?
Yes. Regional data residency, per entity isolation and jurisdiction specific consent flows are supported, with a DPIA template supplied for each entity's DPO.
What does integration require from IT?
OAuth for calendar and messaging at tenant level, and individual device authorisation for wearables. No endpoint agents, no network changes, no document or repository access.
How do works councils typically respond?
Positively, where the boundary is real. Opt in participation, aggregate only reporting, contractual exclusion from performance process and full deletion on withdrawal are the terms that make consultation straightforward.
How do we know the signal is real?
Every score is deterministic and reproducible from versioned features, every forecast carries stated confidence, and the pilot readout compares prediction against what the organisation observed.
Run capacity planning on the workforce, not just the infrastructure
A thirty minute conversation covering the architecture, the data boundary and what an eight week pilot would look like across your regions.