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In Case You Haven't Heard…
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
mental health weekly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1556-7583
pISSN - 1058-1103
DOI - 10.1002/mhw.32534
Subject(s) - productivity , general partnership , burnout , microsoft office , safe haven , microsoft excel , business , applied psychology , computer science , psychology , marketing , world wide web , economics , finance , macroeconomics , international economics , clinical psychology , operating system
Microsoft embedded Teams with a series of “wellness” tools to address the mental health crisis, and it is pitching the product to employers as a means of boosting worker productivity. “Personal wellbeing experiences,” announced at the Microsoft Ignite conference last month, will arrive on Teams early next year, Business Insider reported Sept. 24. The “experiences” include “emotional check‐ins” that prompt users to select an emoji expressing how they felt about the workday, a “virtual commute” intended to give people time to reflect before and after workdays, and guided meditation sessions through a partnership with Headspace. Microsoft suggests that it is important for employers to track and encourage these behaviors if they want to squeeze the most productivity out of employees without causing burnout. For instance, Microsoft cited a study showing that reflections typically performed during commutes can increase productivity by 15%, and another that found that four sessions on the Headspace app could reduce burnout by 14%. With the Teams update, the data from the emotional check‐in tools will be used as an input to gauge employees' capacity for productivity, integrated within Microsoft's Workplace Analytics productivity tracking platform.