Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, seems concerned about the welfare of office workers. He believes that working days are getting longer and longer and even extending late into the night.
To illustrate his point, he quotes a study carried out by Microsoft on its employees to improve its Teams collaborative program. It consisted in monitoring the activity of the keyboard. For most employees, peak activity takes place between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m., then between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m. But the study revealed the existence of a third peak, which is between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., as shown in the graph below.
The most worrying thing is that this peak appears in 30% of the employees concerned by the study, which is a significant proportion. The study also shows that the working day has increased by an average of 46 minutes since the start of the pandemic and that activity outside traditional working hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) has increased by 28%.
The cause of this behavior is above all the increase in teleworking, caused by the Covid crisis. The boundaries between life at work and life outside of work then become increasingly blurred. For Satya Nadella, well-being is one of the most important factors of productivity:
“We know what stress does to workers. We need to learn the soft skills, the good old-fashioned management practices, so that people look after their well-being. »
Nadella says Microsoft has recruited more than 50,000 people during the pandemic, but tech workers are increasingly asking to be able to choose where and when they want to work. But more freedom in working hours can also harm the health of employees, who then do not know how to stop.
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And when the Microsoft CEO is asked if he tries to refrain from sending emails on weekends, he replies: “I learn every day. »
Source : Bloomberg