In the past few weeks, Microsoft has published some very exciting evaluation on the calendar and mail activities of employees.  Listed is also the proportion of access during and outside of working hours, on local and on mobile devices. With its new tool, Microsoft provides corporate customers using Office 365, new analytical capabilities for burnout prevention. “Efficiency enhancement” is the name of the game and definitely hits a nerve. Considering the use of mobile devices allows for almost constant accessibility, this approach does not only apply to advocates.

The latest studies from the WHO show that this issue is a controversial one: Burnout is causing global economic losses of 330 billion US dollars per year. panagenda set the pace here years ago, putting employee protection in the foreground.

With iDNA for Mail, panagenda already developed a solution  in 2014 that includes analyzes with the Microsoft advertised content. In the same year, our customer Evonik published the article “E-Mail brake after work shows nationwide effect” (German) a report referring to their first experiences with iDNA. This highlights our priorities very well, namely the protection of workers as well as the prevention of burnout.

An excerpt from Arne Bergmann’s White Paper “Human Resources and Compliance” from the year 2015 is also offers very exciting context:

Human Resources and Compliance

Finding the most suitable talents to work for the enterprise is not an easy task. Ensuring their retention is even more challenging. Fluctuation is the biggest enemy of any Human Resource team as it may mean that the organization has failed to provide appropriate working conditions. Not only salary and career opportunities are important factors to ensure employee retention. Others include corporate and personal success, workload, business processes, the workplace, work-life-balance and, last but definitely not least, whether the employees feel safe, are understood and taken care of. panagenda BI solutions provide HR teams with insights about different IT enabled workstyles, communication and collaboration habits of employees of different departments, age and gender groups.

Especially the last paragraph shows that the analysis of the communication patterns of the employees, creates a lot of potential for considerably improving the communication structure and thus the workplace. Fact-based insights are essential to ensure appropriate decisions and measures as corporate communication is very sensitive and directly influences many processes.

Experienced insight into data of this kind and quality has resulted in a clear competitive advantage for our customers. Insights into mail behavior however, is only a part of the big picture. As such we have created further analysis solutions with iDNA, ApplicationInsights and ConnectionsExpert to strengthen this advantage further into the future.

This brings us back to enhancements for your employees. Insights into the use of social business solutions such as Connections – from adoption rate to size and weighting of communities – allow targeted improvements to daily processes. Awareness of increasing e-mail behavior and how to combat it, will give you important insights in protecting your employees. This provides early information on the capacity of individual departments. Keeping used applications up-to-date is indispensable. This ensures that you have the best possible conditions for an efficient workplace, preventing unnecessary delays and significantly reducing the potential for negative stress.

All these points as well as the effort to reduce infrastructure and maintenance costs are the cornerstones of our analysis solutions. As technical as this content is, one must not forget that it’s the individual person at the center of it all. The goal is to optimize the work environment and to adapt it to the needs of the employees. Not the other way around!

Read more on the topic: Interview with Teresa Messemer, Corporate Human Resources at Evonik