Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella warns of the impact of emails

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella warned that employee well-being could suffer from an ever-expanding workday that often now creeps well into the night.

Nadella, whose company has studied how remote work impacts collaboration in an effort to improve its Teams software, cited Microsoft research showing that about a third of white-collar workers have a “third peak” of productivity late in the evening.

Productivity typically spikes before and after lunch, but this third peak illustrates how remote work has broken down already-blurred boundaries between our job and our home lives. Nadella, speaking Thursday at the Wharton Future of Work Conference, ...

“We think about productivity through collaboration and output metrics, but well-being is one of the most important pieces of productivity,” he said. “We know what stress does to workers. We need to learn soft skills, and good old-fashioned management..

Two out of 3 employees who consider leaving their job say their employer has not followed through on early pandemic promises to focus on employee mental health, according to a Harris Poll commissioned by online therapy provider Talkspace. 

In a new study of Microsoft employees, about 30% experienced “peaks” of work in the morning, afternoon, and, to a lesser extent, at around 10 pm.