Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has warned that employees’ well-being could be affected by late-night emails as the boundary between work and personal life continues to get blurry amid the pandemic. As reported by Bloomberg, Nadella was speaking at the Wharton Future of Work Conference earlier this week, where he touched up on stressful work culture. He added that managers need to ensure clear norms for workers “so that they’re not pressured to answer emails late at night". Microsoft has also been studying how remote work impacts collaboration to improve its Microsoft Teams platform. The platform aims to offer much more than just video conferencing solutions – at least to its enterprise customers.
As reported by the publication, Nadella, at the conference said, “We know what stress does to workers. We need to learn the soft skills, good old-fashioned management practices, so people have their well-being taken care of. I can set that expectation, that our people can get an email from the CEO on the weekend and not feel that they have to respond".
He cited a Microsoft study and said that a third of white-collar workers have a “third peak" of productivity late in the evening, based on keyboard activity. Earlier, productivity spiked before or after lunch, but now there’s the third peak in the late evening as workers are working at odd hours that may have a great impact on their mental well-being.
When asked whether the Microsoft CEO avoids sending emails on weekends, Nadella added that he’s “learning every day". He also highlighted that employees, especially in the tech sector, want to have flexibility over the location. The report pointed toward an ongoing survey of knowledge workers – software programmers, data analysts and the like – from Future Forum, a research consortium backed by Slack that notes that three out of four people want the ability to choose where they work. Interestingly, 95 percent of workers want the flexibility to set their own schedules.
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The report also cited insights from a Harris Poll commissioned by online therapy provider Talkspace. It notes that two of three employees consider leaving work as their employer has not focused on addressing employee mental health.
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