In short: Focus time, fixed email rounds and quieter evenings are easier to keep up when the team backs them. All it takes is half a page with six fields: channels and response times, urgent, core and flexible hours, focus windows, meeting standards, emergency route. You negotiate it in about 45 minutes and test it for two weeks. The response times are starting values from practice, not a study result. That agreements work is my assumption, not proof. Microsoft 365 only makes the agreement visible.
Why individual tricks are often not enough in a team
Imagine a team of eight. Everyone has cut back their notifications and yet each person still takes one more look in the evening. At 17:40 Nora sends a question about the quote and at 21:00 she checks whether Jan has replied. Jan sees the question at 21:10 and answers straight away, because he thinks it is urgent. It was not. Nobody on the team knows whether a chat has to be answered within an hour or only by tomorrow. Often the problem is not the setting but the unspoken expectation.
One study points in this direction, with reservations: in Wijngaards, Pronk and Burger (2022, details in the post Processing Email Efficiently), emotional exhaustion fell straight after batched email reading was introduced, especially among people who did not perceive an expectation of immediate replies. After two weeks the effect had faded. My conclusion goes beyond the study: the expectation of how fast to reply seems to be the lever and it belongs in an agreement. Whether an agreement really lowers the perceived expectation, the study did not examine.
How common evening work is, the Work Trend Index 2025 shows: by 22:00, 29 per cent of active employees are back in their inbox and meetings after 20:00 rose by 16 per cent on the previous year. This is vendor data (telemetry up to February 2025, excluding EU and education customers) and Microsoft gives no breakdown by country: how strongly Switzerland is represented stays open. An agreement does not take anyone's availability away, it makes it predictable. Whoever knows the response time does not have to check in the evening just in case.
The agreement on half a page
Six fields, a sample text for each and one question the team answers. Copy the list into a shared document and you have the template.
- Channels and response times. «Urgent matters by phone, chat by end of day, channel posts and email within one working day.» Question: Which channel is for what and how quickly is it answered there?
- Urgent. «Urgent means a call, by phone or Teams. That is what we agree. Whoever calls states the deadline and what happens otherwise. Without a deadline and a consequence it is not urgent.» Question: What is truly urgent for us?
- Core and flexible hours. «Core hours 9:00 to 16:00, we are reachable then. Before and after, whoever wants to answers, but nobody has to.» Question: Who is reachable when, including part-time staff and shift work?
- Focus windows. «Tuesday and Thursday 9:00 to 11:00, shown in the calendar as busy and visible in the status. Only a call under field 2 may interrupt.» Question: When are the windows, how can people see them and who may break them?
- Meeting standards. «Every invitation states the goal. We start on time. Camera by purpose: on for building relationships, negotiation and client contact, otherwise optional. At the end someone says in one sentence who does what by when.» Question: What do we expect from every meeting?
- Emergency route and deputy. «In a real emergency: call the deputy, whose name and work number are on this page. Deputy cover applies in core hours.» Question: Who is reachable when something really cannot wait?
The camera purposes are my practical rule. Why I prefer an agreement to an obligation is covered in the post Looking Professional in Teams Meetings. If someone is to be reachable as a deputy outside core hours, that is no longer a voluntary reply: clear it with HR beforehand.
Response times: starting values, not study values
For the first field you need numbers. Here is a starting point:
| Channel | Guide value | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Call | straight away, if possible | Urgent matters with a deadline and a consequence |
| Chat | by end of day | Short questions and coordination in day-to-day work |
| Teams channel | within one working day | Substantive topics that affect several people |
| within one working day | Anything that needs text, attachments or a record |
These are starting values that I suggest, not study values and not a measurement. A response time is the latest acceptable reply, not the expected one. Microsoft, too, recommends in the Work Trend Index 2022 that teams agree expectations for the response time to emails and chats sent outside working hours (a vendor recommendation, not an impact study).
Adapt the values to your roles: customer service or IT operations need shorter response times than a team doing project work. In banks, compliance may specify which content may go through which channel. Clarify that before you fix field 1.
Team leaders go first. Whoever sends a message at 21:00 and expects the answer at 21:05 overrides the evening rule. Schedule the message so that it arrives in the morning. Reply yourself within the response time rather than straight away. Whoever replies faster than agreed resets the standard.
Negotiating it in 45 minutes
Here is how you lead the conversation as a team leader. You need a shared document with the six fields and the whole team. The agenda is a planning guide for teams of up to about eight people.
- 10 minutes: current state. Everyone writes down what they currently consider urgent and what they still respond to in the evening.
- 20 minutes: fill in the six fields. Use the sample texts as a starting point. That leaves three to four minutes per field.
- 10 minutes: exceptions and emergency route. Who has client appointments, shifts or on-call duty and what applies to them?
- 5 minutes: review date. Put the date four weeks ahead in the calendar straight away.
The learning game Focus over always-on makes a good warm-up. Then start a pilot for two weeks. At team level, not per person, record three things: how often someone phoned about something «urgent», how often the follow-up «Did you see my message?» came and how calm the days felt, rated briefly from 1 to 5. That is not a measurement, just a first impression and after two weeks a novelty effect cannot be ruled out. Look again after four weeks.
Making it visible in Teams, Outlook and Loop
The switches are only worth setting once you agree. Depending on the version, the entries are named slightly differently, so check them in your own client.
- Status, working hours and Outlook: Keep your status message and working hours up to date (in Teams or in the Outlook calendar settings, depending on the version). Enter focus windows as appointments with the status «Busy» and name the deputy in your out-of-office message.
- Notifications: According to the Microsoft roadmap (as of October 2026), Teams is currently rolling out presets per channel (all messages, only @mentions and replies, muted) and a pause for all notifications. In addition, Teams on the desktop pauses notifications when «Do not disturb» is active in Windows. Your own client shows which of these you already have. Check whether Teams calls still get through. If not, use the status «Busy» for focus windows or give a phone number for urgent matters. More on this in the post on the three-line note.
- Schedule send for evening messages: How that works in Teams is covered in the post Teams tip: schedule your messages to send later (from 2024, so the interface may have changed since). Outlook has the same principle for emails.
- Loop: Store the agreement as a Loop page in the workspace of your Teams channel (here is how, only in standard channels and if Loop is enabled for you). Without Loop, a document pinned in the channel does the job.
Viva Insights belongs only at the personal level: the quiet time feature is a personal setting (the post dates from 2023 and its menu entries have not been rechecked), never a means to look up in the team who was still active in the evening. Focus blocks and meeting standards are described in Reduce meeting overload.
Evidence and the Swiss framework
Evidence or not? Little. Wijngaards et al. is a single, non-randomised survey study, its effect was gone after two weeks and the findings on email rounds are mixed overall. The Work Trend Index figures are vendor data. I know the study from its summary, not from the full text. The agreement with its response times is a practical rule: I know of no controlled study on it. Whether a team agreement lasts longer than two weeks is open, which is why you check after four weeks.
There are legal rules on rest periods, on-call duty, working-time recording and trust-based working hours. Whether short replies in the evening fall under them or count as working time and how a deputy outside core hours is arranged, is for HR, compliance or the legal department to clarify before you put the agreement in writing. This is orientation, not legal advice.
The building blocks for this: the three-line note after interruptions, how you come across in Teams and the four decisions for your email. If you would rather not negotiate the agreement on your own, I can support you. I have been working with teams on Microsoft 365 for over ten years, including from 2022 to 2026 at a Swiss private bank. In a free intro call we can work out what this could look like for your team. The Corporate Culture Check is a good way to take stock and more on the topic is on the fewer meetings page.
