A dedicated coach for all BASF employees: Working more productively with Viva Personal Insights

The challenge: Collaborating successfully across 24 time zones

BASF has 91 locations worldwide, with 111,000 people collaborating across its different sites. “A team might comprise people working in Asia, the US, and Europe,” explains Oliver Beurer, Adoption and Change Manager at BASF. It takes a great deal of time and effort to coordinate efforts across different time zones. The use of digital collaboration tools can cause people’s screen time to skyrocket as they get trapped in marathon meetings. They often end up postponing their productive work time, causing work to pile up that they must then squeeze in between or after meetings. Then there’s the significant role played by digital debt, as described in Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index Report: the volume of emails, digital data, and chats that employees have to deal with has outpaced their ability to process it.

“In an increasingly digitized environment, employees must raise their game in terms of time management and their ability to prioritize,” Beurer says. In days packed with appointments, it’s easy to end up with less time to spend on productive work. Employees have to juggle meetings, tasks, and projects without losing track of any of them.

“This is why we wanted to provide our people with an intrinsically motivating solution that would help them optimize their working behavior in a data-driven way,” Beurer says. “The idea was to allow them to regain control of their diaries.” To turn this vision into reality, BASF rolled out Viva Personal Insights throughout the company.

The solution: A data-driven upswing in productivity through Viva Personal Insights

Once employees have activated Viva Personal Insights, they receive regular assessments of their habits relating to emails, meetings, calls, and chats. This forms the basis for personalized recommendations for increasing their productivity. “We gave our employees access to Viva Personal Insights as an intrinsically motivating way of helping them optimize their working behavior in a data-driven way. Some 25,000 users have already taken up this offer,” Beurer says.

This Microsoft solution focuses on three core areas: productivity and well-being, meeting effectiveness, and collaboration habits. When it comes to productivity, the emphasis is on time management, with personal insights identifying potential focus periods for uninterrupted work or quiet time. “Meeting effectiveness” mainly looks at meeting habits and offers tips for how to optimize them. Stefan Beck, SVP Digitalization of Workspace & Infrastructure and Managing Director at BASF Digital Solutions GmbH: “Viva Personal Insights provides our employees with the data they need to reflect on their own working behavior. The app helps them establish new habits. I now schedule my focus time well in advance—that’s how I ensure that I have time to be productive.”

Insights into collaboration and communication behavior reveal each person’s network within the company—in other words, which colleagues they work with most and which other contacts could also prove useful. What’s also impressive about Viva Personal Insights is how easy it is to integrate: the add-in for Outlook, for instance, lists all appointments for the coming five days and recommends blocking off 15 minutes to prepare for meetings, no matter what type of meeting has been scheduled. If all participants use this function, meetings are automatically shorter because everyone is already briefed when the meeting starts. In this way, the add-in helps each person organize appointments and their own diary—leading to a lasting shift in their personal work habits. In addition to efficient time management, Viva Personal Insights also promotes collaboration among employees.

Mikko Diestelhorst, Head of Catalysts Business Solutions at BASF, finds the visualization of his personal network in terms of colleagues and projects to be particularly useful. “I can see at a glance if I’m allocating my time to the right projects,” he says. “This means that I can quickly adjust my priorities and avoid marathon meetings by following the suggestions for how to better structure my diary.” As the manager of an international five-person team, Diestelhorst is also a fan of the Praise app in Microsoft Teams. “As a manager, the Praise app in Microsoft Teams is the most valuable as it allows me to tell my team members at all levels and locations how much I value their efforts,” he says. The information provided by Viva Personal Insights often kick-starts discussion about how to enhance collaboration within teams, provided that each member wants to share their personal data.

“Each employee can access only their own personal data. That’s how we ensure their privacy and offer them room for self-reflection—a process that is firmly anchored in BASF corporate culture,” Beurer says. “The added value lies mainly in being able to provide our employees with realistic recommendations for their long-term further development. Data-driven assessment of whether or not a given meeting is essential already makes for more planning flexibility,” Beurer explains. In this way, BASF is helping its employees regain control of how they use their work time.