Mental Wellness with Microsoft Teams
This post originally appeared as a LinkedIn article.
How can new ways of working improve our mental wellness? As we see more and more companies embracing chat-based collaboration like we see in Microsoft Teams, what is the potential impact on my work day, my ability to focus, and by extension the efficiency of the entire team? Can we achieve more in less time, freeing up bandwidth not just to do more work stuff, but perhaps to connect to my family or local community?
How can we address the “busy-ness” that stresses us out and saps our energy? There’s a meme claiming that the Chinese word for “busy” translates to “heart attack.” Below are the characters for “mang”…
A little more research shows the correct translation of “xin + wang” is “Heart” and a linguistic mechanism for “Stop”… So you can see where the meme came from. While it’s not literally “heart attack,” it’s still an effective message: the ancient Chinese understood that simply being “busy” was not necessarily healthy, and is not the same thing as being “productive.” We want to be productive, not just busy.
My colleague, Angela Bos, blogged some great tips for increasing mental wellness by better managing your schedule and notifications. I’d like to build upon those with some tips that are mostly specific to Microsoft Teams and how it fits into your day and makes it better.
I’ve also blogged some tips previously for Taming Teams. These applied mostly to those of you that have already made the leap into the app. Hopefully, what follows will convince you to make the leap in the first place because of its power to improve your focus, productivity, and wellness.
Focus by moving email traffic
I continue to hear people asking Microsoft to concentrate all your communication into one app (usually, Outlook). Believe me, you don’t want this. If it’s not happening already, you’ll soon be managing not just reply-all emails that read “take me off this mailing list,” but also ones that read “LOL.” Email has its place, but it was never designed to be a collaborative space. For example, do you know why it’s called an “inbox?” Because it was designed to replace those wooden trays on our desks.
So, use email for direct messages to a targeted number of known people, where few replies will be needed. If you need more than 3 replies, this is a discussion that should be taken elsewhere.
Use a forum tool like Yammer for open communities where you don’t know who’s best to contribute to a question or build on an idea, or to get broader feedback from the whole company.
Use a chat environment like Teams to work in real time with a known group of people on a project or program with set boundaries.
My personal approach is to have the native app for these three modes of communication open all the time. I switch between them as needed for the task at hand, but most of the time, I’m getting stuff done in Teams.
Only show Teams and channels in the app where you’re actively participating. Hide or leave the rest. When using Teams, you can focus on one workstream — all the conversations and tools you need for that hour or that morning can exist in the one channel. You’re not distracted by new emails popping into your inbox while you’re replying to colleagues. You’re in the zone.
Whichever mode I’m in (mail, forum, or chat), there will be tasks that I need to track. I have a fourth app, Microsoft To-Do, pinned to the left side of my screen where I can capture and prioritize those tasks. This means that I decide if a task in a team, community, or external email takes priority. Tasks don’t take a higher priority just because it came from the latest email to arrive.
This 4-app approach helps me control the inevitable flood of information that creates a lot of our stress at work. With Teams and Yammer, I can channel it appropriately. Pun intended.
Work wherever’s best for you today
Anyone that’s used any online meeting tool will understand that the days of having to be in the office to have a meeting are over. Have a dentist appointment mid-morning? You can still catch your 9am daily standup meeting online! Beyond the basics of an online call, there are some features that you may not have connected with mental wellness:
- Turn on your video. Not only are we wired to trust human faces over voices on a phone, but it also increases the focus of everyone on the call, improving the meeting’s efficiency.
- Another good reason to lose the bashfulness is inclusivity. There are 8 million people in the UK who are deaf or hard of hearing. Turning on video, or even better, the AI-driven real-time captions, means these colleagues can read text or lips.
- Got a messy home office? No problem — turn on your custom background, and you can appear like you’re on the beach or at the office, reducing your embarrassment and distractions for others… unless you count a sandy beach as a distraction.
- Record those meetings to be inclusive of those that can’t make the meeting, which may be you next time! Teams records the meeting, with searchable transcripts, and stores it in Microsoft Stream. No more FOMO.
Unplug for evenings and weekends
Just as periods of both exercise and rest are important for physical health, our mental health depends on our getting the breaks and sleep we need to recharge daily. As you start to adopt Teams for most of your work, you may be anxious about getting “pinged” from even more apps than you had before.
Take control by using the quiet hours function, available in the Teams mobile app in the Notifications settings. Proactively block Teams notifications during the hours and days you choose.
Unplug for a holiday
It can be tempting to avoid longer holidays because you have such a pile of work to come back to. While new tools won’t magically do all of that work for you, working in more open tools like Teams or Yammer makes it easy for others to answer questions in your absence, and keeps your email from piling up. I was recently out for several extended stretches, and it only took an hour to get back up to speed by following the following methods:
- Create an Outlook rule that puts mail from my management chain in one folder, and another rule that sends everything else to a “holiday” folder… which I do NOT check when I get back unless I have to.
- Set a clear autoreply message with suggested alternatives to just sending an email that won’t be read. Here’s an example I use for internal contacts:
“I’m on leave until 30 October. I’m not checking email and won’t review email received while I’m out. I suggest you either post your question to our team’s Yammer group (and @mention Matt Kitson) or schedule your email to arrive on my return.”
- Set your Teams status message, and @mention someone that can help while you’re out. See the dialog below for how that looks.
On your return, you have three apps to check, but they should be relatively clean:
- Teams: check chat messages first, then use the /mentions command to see who called you out specifically, then hit the channels with !! Icons, which means “Important” messages were posted there.
- Outlook: Check your inbox, which should now have about 3 important messages from your management.
- Yammer: Check your Yammer inbox, scan for mentions of you, and consider marking all the rest as read.
Done! What good does it do to de-stress on a holiday if you come back to 583 unread messages in an inbox and feel right back where you were two weeks ago? Change the way your team works, and see if you notice a lift to your personal and team wellness.
