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Best practices for focused work

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Important

This article is for the legacy Workplace Analytics app and does not reflect functionality available on the updated Viva Insights platform. Access current documentation for Viva Insights advanced insights here: advanced insights documentation.

Having scheduled, uninterrupted time to focus on deep work provides employees an opportunity to master difficult tasks and produce results at an elite level, in terms of quality and speed.

Why it matters

The Stop the meeting madness article explains what 182 senior managers in a range of industries said about meetings when surveyed:

  • "65 percent said meetings keep them from completing their own work."
  • "71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient."
  • "64 percent said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking."
  • "62 percent said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together."

How to establish a meeting-free day each week explains the "goal is uninterrupted focus" time to work "on projects that require focus and high-level thinking, such as writing, strategic thinking, analysis, coding, designing, or a project with a lot of complexity."

Best practices

  • Ask your team to use the MyAnalytics Focus plan to automatically book focus time, protect this time by silencing chats, and track weekly progress.
  • Create a new team norm to not send chats to team members who have scheduled focus time and use the Do not disturb status in Microsoft Teams.
  • Take an employee survey to gather data and impressions about the organization's meeting frequency and its impact on how much work is or isn't getting done during the day.
  • Come together as a team to share everyone's feedback. It's important to process all contributions and analysis from all team members to begin the process of change.
  • Agree on a collective, personal goal based on the survey feedback. For example, declare "meeting free" periods to free up time on everyone's calendar. This increases individual focus time and productivity and reduces the spillover into personal time.
  • Assess and discuss progress around meeting habits and its impact on focus. Small, tangible wins provide something for people to celebrate, and small losses provide opportunities for learning and correction.
  • Regularly and openly check in with employees. Frustration, resentment and even hopelessness are signals that people are falling back into bad patterns. Changing protocols and behaviors takes time, and sustaining momentum requires consistent attention.

Change strategies

Establish a 'no meeting' period

Select a day, cadence, or time period that your team can block to focus on work, then send out a recurring calendar invite to reserve that time. Ways to do this:

  • Choose the day of the week that is most convenient, such as Friday.
  • Decide how often the time block will occur, such as every two weeks.
  • Determine how long the duration should be, such as four hours.
  • Send a recurring calendar invite to your team to block the time.

Cancel recurring meetings

Each quarter, reassess the need for recurring meetings that take up the most time. Try cancelling one or two, you can always add them back if they're missed. See How to finally kill the useless, recurring meeting for more about this.

Try out a focus plan

Encourage employees to use a Focus plan to automatically block focus time on their calendars to ensure that they have enough time to get work done.