{"id":316,"date":"2015-10-08T17:31:06","date_gmt":"2015-10-08T17:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-ca\/industry\/blog\/industry\/2015\/10\/08\/reaching-the-flow-state-with-collaboration\/"},"modified":"2018-09-20T20:04:51","modified_gmt":"2018-09-20T20:04:51","slug":"reaching-the-flow-state-with-collaboration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-ca\/industry\/blog\/manufacturing\/2015\/10\/08\/reaching-the-flow-state-with-collaboration\/","title":{"rendered":"Reaching the \u201cflow\u201d state with collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n
The state of ultimate performance, where every action, every decision, leads seamlessly, fluidly to the next \u2013 since the 1970\u2019s, this has a name: \u201cflow\u201d. It was the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who coined the term with his psychological study after literally going all over the world asking people about the times in their life when they felt their best and performed their best.<\/p>\n
With rising complexity in manufacturing, process dependencies, resource management and distributed teams, the idea of \u201cflow\u201d got a new dimension for collaboration. In today\u2019s mobile-first, cloud-first world, a fundamental step for \u201cfluid\u201d working environments has been achieved with Office 365. Now, Microsoft has completed the next crucial step with the release of Office 2016 to reinvent productivity and business process.<\/p>\n
With the universal presence of Microsoft Office 365 across devices and departments from R&D to production plants to finance and administration, the capabilities within Office 2016<\/a> for collaboration and business intelligence will improve the nature of work for each individual and the overall enterprise.<\/p>\n To realize the full potential of both individual and team productivity, Venture<\/a>, a global technology provider, recently evaluated Microsoft Office 2016. The objective was to improve collaborative processes from production to finance and retire third-party tools. With its contract manufacturing business, Venture\u2019s manufacturing employees rely heavily on the Office suite for planning, tracking and cross-departmental reporting. The same is true for the accounting, purchasing and IT teams. \u201cWith the coauthoring capabilities in Office 2016, our different teams will be able to generate and review documents far more quickly,\u201c said Peifeng Qiu, senior manager IT department from Venture. \u201cAnd by using the improved BI capabilities within Office 2016, our finance employees can create more informative reports.\u201d<\/p>\n As discussed in a Time article, the characteristics of ultimate performance are universal: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spoke with experts \u2013 surgeons, chess players \u2013 and moved to the everyone else: Italian farmers, Chicago assembly line workers\u2026 regardless of culture, class, gender, age or level of modernization, everyone he spoke to described the same experience of \u201cflow\u201d.<\/p>\n The secret behind the state of \u201cflow\u201d has occupied scientists from academia and industry. For us it is the idea of a seamless, interconnected company, empowering employees to work together in a continuum, beyond functional and organizational boundaries, leveraging people, processes and systems to deliver business results. And it is this idea that inspires global enterprises to step forward into cultural change and fosters the journey of digital transformation.<\/p>\n For example, 3M deployed Office 365 ProPlus to more than 60,000 employees and nearly 6,000 mobile devices just four months after announcing their Office 365 initiative to the company. 3M has a culture of creative collaboration \u2013 to quote Stephen Magnuson, manager of IT Infrastructure End User Services at 3M: The next great idea can come from anywhere in the company and our organization is most successful when ideas can flow easily, whether that\u2019s between our global R&D centers, or a salesperson sharing a customer process with others in the organization. Now, with Office 365, collaboration has a consistent and powerful environment, enabling 3M to replace all the disconnected standalone applications, which handicapped internal interaction as well as with customers, vendors and distributors. Furthermore, at 3M the devices now automatically perform Office updates from the cloud without IT involvement. IT can get out of the low-value business of delivering updates and focus on enabling users to get the most out of new features. And the fact that Office 365 ProPlus updates from both a functional and a security aspect was a big selling point for them.<\/p>\nEnhanced cross-departmental intelligence and collaboration<\/h2>\n
The experience of ultimate performance is universal<\/h2>\n
Stimulate an innovation culture from R&D to sales, to customer experience, and back<\/h2>\n
Overcome barriers to connect people, knowledge and data<\/h2>\n