Best practices for team's wellbeing
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. Employee burnout accounts for 20 to 50 percent of a company's annual employee turnover costs.
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 Protect time to learn about your after-hours work habits and to encourage you to recharge and disconnect.
- Utilize Inline suggestions in Outlook to automatically delay email delivery to align with coworkers' configured working hours.
- Use Teams Together mode for a shared background on video meetings. It cuts down on video meeting fatigue by making them feel more like in-person.
- Alternate the time of global meetings to become more inclusive and minimize after-hours collaboration.
- Block time at the beginning and end of your day to simulate "commute time" to wrap days up and down.
- Take breaks during the day for meditation or brisk walks outside.
- Schedule meetings for 25 or 50 minutes instead of 30 or 60 minutes to allow for transition time between meetings.
Change strategies
Start a wellbeing plan
Enroll your team in a Viva Insights wellbeing teamwork plan. Plan participants will receive a weekly digest, inline 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
Schedule send of after-hours email
Utilize Inline suggestions in Outlook to schedule email delivery to your team when you send emails after hours or over the weekend.
Create norm of scheduling focus time
People often feel overloaded because tasks take more time than expected. Focus time is a block of time without meetings to get work done or decompress at the end of the day. Ways to support it:
- Send team communications about the importance of focus time.
- Use a personal focus plan to schedule focus time in your calendar, and then decline meetings and ignore email during that time.
- Share anecdotes around when people have successes by utilizing their focus time.