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Best practices for wellbeing

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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.

More than 40 percent of creative ideas occur during breaks or when allowing your mind to wander. When employees regularly work after-hours, they can burn out. Employee burnout is a major cause of turnover, accounting for 20 to 50 percent of total attrition.

Why it matters

Based on research presented in the Why unplugging from work is more work than we think and Help your team achieve work-life balance — even when you can't articles, employees need to unplug:

  • "New research and our growing understanding about human behavior tell us two things for certain: that unplugging is more necessary than ever, and that true unplugging is not a single action but a social agreement — a culture shift that employees and companies must create together."
  • "[87] percent of HR leaders cited improved retention as a critical or high priority over the next five years, but 20 percent said they had too many competing priorities to focus on fixing the problem this year."
  • "According to the recent study of 1,400 workers, nearly half of respondents said that thinking about work outside of work hours regularly has a negative impact on their work-life balance."

Best practices

  • Use data about after-hours activity and encourage them to disconnect.
  • Use Inline suggestions in Outlook to automatically delay email delivery to align with coworkers' configured working hours.
  • Alternate the time of global meetings to become more inclusive and minimize after-hours collaboration.
  • Remind employees that the organization's success is based on a marathon, not a sprint.
  • Encourage team to take turns taking time off. This reinforces trust, collaboration, efficiency which can lead to better work satisfaction.
  • Practice setting and keeping boundaries. Boundaries can result in better overall team outcomes.

Change strategies

Start a wellbeing plan

Enroll your team in a Wellbeing teamwork plan. Plan participants will receive email digests, in-line suggestions, and actionable insights.

Define and share working hours

Add your working hours to your Outlook email signature and encourage your team to do the same to help manage the expectations of others. The following is an email signature example:

Cora Thomas
Program Manager
Redmond, Washington
My working hours are 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM PT

Create norm of scheduling "slack-time"

People often feel overloaded because tasks take more time than we expect. "Slack-time" is a block of time without meetings to accommodate unplanned tasks, to get work done, or decompress at the end of the day. Ways to do this:

  • Send out communication regarding the importance of slack- or focus-time.
  • Encourage people to block their calendars and actually decline meetings or email sent during that time.
  • Share anecdotes around when people have successes by utilizing their slack-time.

Viva Insights best practices