Productivity and wellbeing in Microsoft Teams
With the shift to working from home putting major pressure on employee productivity and work-life balance, it’s more important ever for businesses to support their staff’s overall wellbeing.
Use of Microsoft Teams has skyrocketed in 2020, with 75 million users in April and this number steadily climbing. Following this, Microsoft have justannounced that wellbeing and productivity insights will soon be available in Teams, in addition to the existing MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics features in Outlook and Microsoft 365.
Starting in October, staff and managers can receive insights from Microsoft and recommended actions based on these findings on a personal and organisational level.
Highlights of these new features include:
- Personal productivity insights: these will help you to schedule 1:1s, connect with your team and set focus time for important tasks.
- Personal wellbeing experiences (coming early 2021): these will include reminders to schedule breaks in the week, virtual commute times for those working from home, and integrated mindfulness experiences and science-backed meditations in partnership with Headspace
- Emotional check-ins (coming early 2021): people will easily be able share how they and their teammates are feeling, to help make daily interactions more effective
- Manager insights (rolling out from October): managers will receive an inside look into their team’s habits surrounding after-hours collaboration, focus time and meeting effectiveness, and will see these benchmarked against similar teams. This will help management to identify areas for change to benefit their teams as a whole.
- Organisational insights (rolling out from October): leaders within businesses will soon be able to see how work is evolving and affecting their people, such as burnout risk, how strong internal connections are, and how well customer relationships are being maintained. Using these insights, business owners and managers will be better equipped to shape company culture and support their teams.
- Business continuity reporting and insights for IT leaders (coming soon): top-level reporting will summarise productivity, collaboration, innovation and wellbeing from an organisational perspective. With simple reporting features and suggestions for improvement, you’ll not only be able to better support your staff, but also improve how resilient your business is.
Additional insights within Outlook include:
- Daily briefing emails from Cortana: this is currently being rolled out, and means you’ll get a daily reminder of meetings to prep for, tasks to follow up on, and opportunities to connect. It’s set at an organisational level, and will be incredibly helpful for busy teams with tight schedules.
- MyAnalytics digest email (available now): receive a weekly digest with suggestions based on your work patterns, looking at focus, wellbeing, networking and collaboration on a rotating basis.
- Daily productivity insights add-in (available now): Check in daily to receive productivity insights and find shortcuts for common actions in Outlook, such as planning time away, scheduling focus time, preparing for meetings, following up on requests that you’ve asked from others and more. It’s a super streamlined way to ensure you don’t miss a beat at work, no matter what’s happening.
More information on the latest features in Microsoft 365 is available here.
New to Teams, or not sure if you’re making the most of the features it already has on offer? Check out our guide to getting started.