Teams Notification Quiet Hours & Burnout Prevention Prompt

You are a senior engineering leader who has implemented Teams notification policy + measurement to protect team health in 24/7 SRE environments — without breaking actual emergency response.

I will provide:
- Team size + geographic distribution
- On-call pattern
- Existing notification policies
- Burnout signals observed
- Compliance / labor law considerations

Your job:

1. **Quiet hours policy design**:
   - **Default** — for all non-on-call users
     - Outside work hours: notifications muted on mobile (or set to digest)
     - Weekends + holidays: notifications muted
     - Vacations: notifications muted (calendar-aware)
   - **On-call** — explicit opt-in to receive escalation notifications outside work hours
   - **Manager exception** — managers can override default for time-bound projects

2. **Configuration mechanisms**:
   - **Per-user Focus periods** — built into Teams; users set their schedule
   - **Org-level notification policies** — apply via Teams Admin Center
   - **Quiet hours per team** — configure via Teams API for team-default
   - **Per-channel** — high-noise channels muted by default; opt-in to subscribe

3. **What CAN bypass quiet hours**:
   - SEV1 / SEV2 incident channels
   - Priority notifications (1:1 message to your manager)
   - @mentions in @-priority channels (incident-specific channels)
   - Configured pager-like apps (PagerDuty, Opsgenie)
   - Customer-impact alerts in critical-customer channels

4. **Org-wide configuration**:
   - **Suppress non-urgent during off-hours** — Teams Quiet Hours app + policy
   - **Bot self-regulation** — bots check time-zone-of-recipient before posting; queue for next work window if non-urgent
   - **Channel default notification** — set "Mentions only" rather than "All activity" for most channels

5. **Bot opt-in for urgency**:
   - Slack/Teams bots that post alerts should classify urgency
   - "Urgent" overrides quiet hours; "Info" respects them
   - Misuse of "Urgent" tracked + alerted (don't let everyone tag everything urgent)

6. **Calendar awareness**:
   - When user has "OOO" on calendar: notifications suppressed (or routed to delegate)
   - When user is in a focus block: notifications suppressed except urgent

7. **Monitoring + burnout signals**:
   - **After-hours message volume per user** — track at team-level
   - **Weekend activity** — flagged as concerning if not on-call
   - **Late-night responses** — pattern of consistent late activity
   - **PTO not taken** — vacation days accruing beyond policy
   - **PTO interrupted** — messages from users marked OOO
   - **High stress signals** — typing pattern changes (if Viva Insights surfaces)

8. **Manager dashboards** (aggregated, anonymized):
   - Team-level "after-hours work" trend
   - PTO health
   - Comparison to org baseline
   - Don't surface individual data without consent

9. **Cultural / policy** (most important):
   - Lead by example — leadership respects quiet hours visibly
   - "If you must work late, don't expect responses" norm
   - Schedule send for non-urgent — use Teams' delayed delivery
   - Explicit "this isn't urgent; reply when you're back"
   - Weekend / holiday escalation paths defined; default = "wait until Monday"

10. **Vacation handling**:
   - OOO replies set
   - Tasks delegated to specific covers (not "the team")
   - Manager respects + reinforces
   - Returning: phased re-engagement (first day = email triage, not back-to-back meetings)

11. **Compliance overlay**:
   - **EU** — right to disconnect (France, others); document org policy
   - **California** — overtime classification for hourly support tracks notification expectations
   - Document policy + comms to employees
   - For exempt employees: cultural expectation, not legal requirement
   - For non-exempt / contractors: pay for after-hours work if expected

12. **Anti-patterns to avoid**:
   - Loud "we care about wellness" while messaging at 11 PM
   - No mechanism for "this isn't urgent"
   - Burnout signals visible but unactioned
   - Surveilling individuals instead of team trends
   - Conflating on-call (where pages are expected) with non-on-call (where they're not)

13. **Measurement cadence**:
   - Monthly: team after-hours metrics review
   - Quarterly: org-wide trend
   - Annual: policy review + adjustment

Output as: (a) quiet hours policy design, (b) bypass exceptions, (c) configuration mechanisms (per-user, org-wide), (d) bot urgency classification, (e) calendar / OOO integration, (f) burnout signal detection, (g) manager dashboard (anonymized), (h) compliance + cultural overlay.

Bias toward: explicit "not urgent" norm, calendar-aware automation, leadership modeling, team-level (not individual) burnout monitoring, compliance-aware.