4 Tips For Beating Burnout With Viva Insights

4 Tips For Beating Burnout With Viva Insights

Employee burnout is a term you’ve probably heard a lot more in recent times. Stress and feeling overwhelmed can become part of professional life. When this relentless work pressure becomes debilitating, it’s known as burnout.

- What is burnout? — What is Viva Insights? — How can it help managers prevent staff from burning out?

What is employee burnout?

A syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterised by three dimensions:

● feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;

● increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and

● reduced professional efficacy.

As well as affecting your own performance, it can have a detrimental impact on that of your team and your organisation. And that’s not to mention the health problems linked to burnout; depression, sleep disturbance and hypertension to name just a few. Valcour, Monique. “Beating Burnout”. Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business Review, November 2016. 4 Steps to Beating Burnout (hbr.org)

A new survey by Harvard Business Review found that more than 60% of respondents felt they were experiencing burnout often or very often.

One thing we’ve learned over the past year is that enables their productivity, engagement and innovation at work. Companies that prioritise employee experience are 25 per cent more profitable than their competition.

So how can we nurture employee wellbeing so they can bring their very best self to work?

Introducing Viva Insights

One element of Viva is Insights.

Viva Insights helps people and businesses thrive with data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations to improve productivity and There’s Personal Insights, which is only visible to an individual, and Manager and Leader Insights, which is an aggregated view and can help managers spot work patterns that could lead to burnout.

So let’s take a look at these in more detail.

How could Viva Insights help managers to prevent burnout in their employees?

Using data driven from Microsoft 365, Manager Insights provides research-backed tips and suggested actions to identify the main challenges they need to address with their teams to achieve balance and better working habits.

From a dashboard, Managers can see if their team members are regularly working after-hours or if they have too many meetings and not enough downtime.

Over time, the data becomes even richer giving managers the opportunity to create team action plans which they can track and assess against longer-term team goals.

This level of connectivity, visibility and care from managers goes a long way to reducing the ongoing stress that can lead to burnout.

How could Viva Insights help your people to be more in control of their work/life balance?

Although Personal Insights is down to the individual to use, managers can recommend their teams make the most of these features to help them bring their best self to work each day.

Each month, they’ll also receive an email from My Analytics which focuses on one of four areas — focus, wellbeing, network and . From this email, they can visit their personal dashboard to delve into the detail of how much time they’ve spent on the above areas.

In the Personal Insights app, they can use the tab to maintain strong relationships and collaborate with colleagues.

With one of the symptoms of burnout being distancing themselves from their work, staying connected with colleagues and receiving reminders to schedule 1:1s or upcoming meetings is so important.

Employees who feel connected, have a sense of purpose and having an impact on others can counter the .

In addition, the Protect Time experience makes it easy for users to schedule focus time so that they can work uninterrupted-before the day fills up with meetings. It helps to eliminate distractions so they can focus on your core priorities and remain productive.

These components are already available in public preview with the addition of some other personal wellbeing experiences coming soon. These include the virtual commute, to help people mindfully wrap up their workday, check-ins to help them pause and reflect on their day, and an integration with Headspace for meditation and mindfulness experiences. All of which help to break the cycle of ongoing work stress.

Would you like to learn more about how Viva Insights can support you and your team to be more in control of your work life balance? Changing Social can support you to make the most of your Microsoft investment including how Viva Insights can make a huge difference for your organisation. Contact us at to learn more.

Originally published at https://www.changingsocial.com on May 12, 2021.