Cricket Australia using Microsoft Viva to tackle burnout

Cricket Australia has adopted Microsoft Viva Insights to help tackle employee burnout and improve the working experience for its staff.

The sporting body has adopted the platform to help address the stresses imposed on workers during the pandemic.

Cricket Australia teamed up with Microsoft partner Engage Squared in September 2021 to deploy the platform through its existing Microsoft Teams deployment.

Viva Insights enables organisations to identify employees who are feeling overworked and those working longer hours.

Cricket Australia Senior Client Services Manager Emma Cashen said the organisation’s quarterly employee engagement surveys found that the impacts of COVID-19, including border closures, match postponements or cancellations and headcount reductions, were taking a toll on staff.

“Quite often, people feel tired and overworked, and that the commute to and from the office that no longer exists had blurred the lines between their home life and their work life,” she said. “It was this tired workforce that was potentially going into a planning season and feeling under-resourced.”

Deploying Viva Insights helped the organisation learn that its senior managers and above were most at risk of burnout due to working longer hours.

“With this insight we can encourage them to take their own advice and take breaks where they can. What we learned is to lead by example, and when they’re taking leave or switching off to do that, it also empowers their staff to do the same. We’ve seen a big shift in them going offline and delegating somebody else to be acting in their role,” Cashen said.

Looking forward, Cricket Australia is planning to integrate its engagement survey results, which are currently run through Culture Amp, into Viva Insights, Cashen said. The organisation is also exploring deploying other modules as part of the Viva deployment, such as Viva Connections and Viva Learning.

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