The business has completely changed over the past two years. This change has been driven by the Covid-19 pandemic which has forced companies to accept that their employees work from home. In doing so, working conditions have also changed, and so have the employees.
This new paradigm is one of many factors that explain the great resignation, which refers to the large number of people who have left their jobs.
One trend that has also been revealed is that the boundaries between work and private life are becoming increasingly porous, especially as employees work more and more at home even with the return to the office decided by some companies. Many companies choose either a hybrid working mode – days in the office, days remotely – while others have embraced remote work as a principle.
It is the disappearance of this boundary between private life and professional life that worries Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft (MSFT) – Get a Microsoft report. He just issued a warning that sounds like a warning bulletin against the prolongation of working hours caused by working at home.
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end 9 to 5
Nadella believes that employee well-being suffers the most. He is particularly concerned about the situation of white-collar employees who are often managers or team leaders.
The CEO knows what he’s talking about because Microsoft is one of the companies that has developed one of the new communication tools that has become essential in the new work organization. This com tool is Teams messaging app.
“We think about productivity in terms of collaboration and output metrics, but well-being is one of the most important parts of productivity,” he said recently at the Wharton Conference on the Future of Work. According to Bloomberg.
“We know what stress does to workers. We need to learn soft skills, good old-fashioned management practices, so that people’s well-being is taken care of. I can set this expectation, whereby our employees can receive an email from the CEO on the weekend and not feel compelled to respond,” He said.
Microsoft recently studied the impact of remote work on collaboration in an effort to improve Teams. the study Offers That employees are often productive at two times of the workday: before lunch and after lunch.
Go to follow
But a third moment of intense activity has emerged since the pandemic: White-collar workers are also productive at night.
A Microsoft study noted the “rise of the triple peak day.” “After work, do you… go back to work? For some, there’s a new pattern replacing 9 to 5.”
Image source: TheStreet.
Always on the mental
Findings from Microsoft and its researchers suggest that the nine-to-five workday is fading out in an era of telecommuting, hybrid work, and more flexible working hours. This pattern was first spotted early in the pandemic, when Microsoft Teams conversations increased more outside the regular workday than any other time segment, especially between 6pm and 8pm, the research said.
“Having your kids at home, not having breaks to eat or exercise, we see one way to cope is to take a break, have dinner, and then take some time in the evening to get things done,” said Marie Zerwinsky, Director of Research, Human Understanding. and Empathy, in Microsoft Research.
“Parents who look after their children in the afternoon make up for that time by working in the evening. Others improve the newfound flexibility of working from anywhere by changing their hours. And some just need an extra breathing room at night, away from the sounds and business calls, To really focus,” Czerwinski continued.
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Any way I’ve broken it down, the boundaries between working hours and everything else have gotten thinner over the past year and a half. The average Teams user now sends 42% more conversations per person after hours, according to Microsoft’s Work Trends Index results.
When Czerwinski and her team studied the activities of some Microsoft employees this summer, they noticed that about 30% of them had an evening work hike, as measured by keyboard usage. Timing and amplitude vary from person to person, but it was less intense than the two peaks of labor earlier in the day.
Similarly, teams that work across different time zones often schedule meetings during unconventional hours to accommodate primary collaborators, the researchers note.
The research advised: “The key to relieving the ‘always on’ mindset is to get managers to work with teams to clear standards. It is also essential to check with people who may feel they need to work around the clock to keep up.” Different workers have different needs and challenges, many of which are not seen. Empathy and communication are essential.”
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