Delivering cloud solutions underpinned by employee well-being should be a non-negotiable for remote working productivity.

Workplace technology has a lot of pressure on it’s shoulders, but with features like insights and learning from Microsoft Viva, Konsolute believe the cloud is stepping up to the challenge. As Mental Health Awareness Week draws to a close, let’s look at how managers should be deploying virtual environments underpinned by wellbeing in 2021.

This week we’ve been unpacking what mental health awareness means in the context of Cloud Solutions. Overall it seems that technology in the corporate sector is being used to engage, protect and enhance mental wellbeing despite facing criticism in the past.

In the past year, work place communication tools such as Microsoft Teams have certainly faced backlash with employees crediting them for an ‘always on culture’ within their organisations. The 9-5 has been left in the past and now it’s possible to check emails, communicate with colleagues and essentially perform most tasks at any time of the day.

According to research, 86% of workers in the past year have found it hard to switch off outside of their normal working hours. On top of that, 70% of workers reported feeling frustrated at the incompetencies of their internal tech provision. The general feeling is, if technology is going to be heavily relied upon in the future, it should streamline processes and be fail safe.

The reality is, there are huge untapped opportunities for technology to benefit your workplace environment. Microsoft certainly got the ball rolling with Viva this year, insights, topics and learning all make for a far more engaged and holistic experience of the office but we believe that the deployment of tech for enhanced wellbeing is only just finding its feet. In the past year, the uptake of our consulting services and data capture products have proved to us that a maintaining the good mental health of your entire ecosystem is vital to the smooth running of business processes.

According to the Mental Health Foundation, 12.75% of all absences from work are attributed to mental health problems. These figures support the idea that currently, staff often feel overworked and isolated. Harder, longer hours and the ‘always on’ competitive culture result in stress, anxiety and burnout. This issue has certainly been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic where workplace community, human interaction and support have been replaced with a new digital model.