Data from our 2022 Work Trend Index Annual Report confirm the shift. We found that 53 percent of employees were more likely to prioritise health and well-being over work than before the pandemic. In addition, nearly half of respondents (47 percent) were more likely to put family and personal life over work than they were pre-pandemic.

Figure 1. Employee work attitudes post- vs. pre-pandemic. (Source: Microsoft, Work Trend Annual Report, 2022.)

At Microsoft, we believe technology can be a powerful ally in the journey towards better employee well-being. As such we wanted to take the opportunity to raise awareness of mental health issues and promote good practice both in and beyond the workplace.

To help you reclaim the right balance we’ve pulled together eight practical Microsoft 365-based tips to help employees and managers reshape today’s fast-paced work experience in the name of better mental health. 

1. Nurture community and connection at work

Research shows that, in a hybrid world, it’s even more important to forge meaningful networks and relationships at work. Employees who have thriving relationships with team members report better well-being than those without (76% vs. 57%).

To help you reconnect and find belonging at work, Microsoft Viva Engage – an add-on in Outlook – enables you to share work and experience with colleagues. Join digital communities and conversations, find answers to questions, and inspire others with your stories. You can also connect via the announcements, to-dos and check-ins on your personalised Viva Connections dashboard.

2. Book focus time each week

If meetings are dominating your days or weeks, it can be stressful to keep on top of incoming emails, messages and resulting actions. It’s also hard to focus on challenging work when you only have small chunks of time between meetings.

Blocking out time every day or week to focus without interruption can help. The Wellbeing tab in Microsoft Viva insights contains a section called “Take action to improve your wellbeing”, in which you can create a daily focus plan.

To help you stay in control and also step away from work, other available well-being features include:

• Make time for messages
• Schedule emails for later
• Take a break or two
• Make time for lunch

To help you concentrate, your status in Microsoft Teams will auto-switch to Focus during booked focus time. You’ll only get notifications for messages that are urgent or from contacts with priority access.

3. Schedule times to manage email

Most office workers check their email regularly throughout the day. But it’s a battle to get work done if you spend most of your time responding to tactical requests from other people.

Try limiting when you check emails to two or three slots per day. Disabling email notifications will help reduce the temptation. This can easily be done in Microsoft Outlook – go to the File tab, select Options, select Mail, and in the Message arrival section, uncheck Play a sound, Show an envelope icon in the taskbar and Display a Desktop Alert:

4. Stay on top of your to-do lists

A helpful way to get something off your mind is to write it down. But how many to-do lists do you have? Perhaps a grocery list on the back of an envelope, a list of things to do in notes or a phone app, maybe some tasks in Outlook?

You might also have flagged emails to get back to, not to mention a task someone has assigned you in Planner.

You can organise this avalanche with an app like Microsoft To Do. It’s free and syncs across Windows 10 and 11, iPhone, Android and the web. It’s also integrated with Outlook.com, making it easier to manage all your tasks in one place.

Planner tasks assigned to you also appear in To Do under the Assigned to you list:

5. Set limits to your working day

Outside the typical pre-pandemic 9am-5pm work spikes, a third productivity peak sometimes occurs – especially through after-hours emails. While working remotely can make this habit more tempting, it’s crucial to set boundaries to your working day and give yourself a break.

To do so, select the Wellbeing tab in Viva Insights and use the “Disconnect with quiet time” card, which allows you to set your quiet time.

As a manager or leader, you can also use Viva insights to help ensure your team properly disconnects after work. View their total weekly after-hours collaboration time and, if needed, recommend changes.

Taking a well-earned holiday? Set your Out of Office and stop syncing Outlook on your phone to remove temptation. You might even want to remove work apps from your phone to avoid peeking at emails.

6. Be aware of your after-hours impact on others

This follows from the previous point. While minimising after-work hours is an ideal, we recognise that work schedules must flex for many reasons. Some people are night-owls; others may choose to work late to prepare for a busy day ahead.

Whatever the case, we need to be aware of the impact our habits may have on others. For example, after-hours working in a hybrid setting can cause remote colleagues to feel under pressure to always be available online.

To help avoid this, Viva Insights can show you the after-hours impact you impose on co-workers. Its coaching tools can also help you build smarter habits.

If you must work late, minimise any unwanted impact by saving emails to your Drafts folder until business hours, or schedule the delivery of your email using Options > Delay Delivery:

7. Work the way that works for you

A key strength of technology is its potential to support inclusiveness, empowering everyone to access tools the way that suits them best. Microsoft 365 apps come with built-in accessibility features for a more comfortable experience at work. For example, Microsoft Teams supports inclusive collaboration in hybrid meetings with captions and live transcripts, which can help people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

To enable a personal and human touch in virtual meetings, Teams also incorporates live React controls (at the top of the meeting view).

8. Pay attention to the present moment

Mindfulness is about being aware of your body, mind and feelings in the moment. Practising it can improve your sense of well-being and how you approach challenges.

In Viva Insights, you’ll find guided meditations and focus music, including content from Headspace. Take a break to support your mental health.

Seizing the opportunity

We hope our commitment to well-being has a positive ripple effect in today’s workplace. However, while technology can help promote a healthier work-life integration, only we ourselves – workers and leaders together – can deliver it.

Find out more

• Work Trend Index Annual Report (2022)
• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Viva
• Microsoft Teams

About the author

David manages Microsoft UK’s Employee Experience business, overseeing a suite of solutions designed to enhance employee engagement and boost business performance.

The post 8 ways Microsoft 365 solutions can empower employees to prioritise well-being appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

This year’s theme for Earth Day is ‘Invest in Our Planet’ and focuses on engaging governments, institutions, businesses, and citizens to do their part. With this in mind, sustainability in 2023 has become as much the responsibility of each employee as it is the wider organisation’s.   

But how do you make sustainability everyone’s job?

Sustainability might not be the core focus of every role but there is an activist in us all. At Microsoft we believe there are ways to unlock this in employees and empower them to engage with sustainability in a way that is authentic and relevant to their role.

For the past 20 years, I have spent a lot of time in the ‘S’ of ESG. Alongside communications and storytelling, I now have the privilege of focusing on the ‘E’ of ESG. I’d like to share four ways we at Microsoft have found effective in helping make sustainability everyone’s job.

#1 Vision and mission

Does your vision and mission clearly align with sustainability? If employees know that their work ties in with the mission of the company, they can feel empowered in making sustainability their business too. Businesses have an opportunity and a responsibility in sustainability so look at your company’s mission and if you need to influence work with the CEO to weave in sustainability goals.

“At Microsoft, we have a strong purpose-led mission: ‘Empower every person on the planet to achieve more.”

Victoria Oakes, Chief of Staff for Sustainability, Microsoft

#2 Collaboration is Queen

To make sustainability everyone’s role, break down silos to make it easier for everyone to work together and foster a community that will collaborate for the greater good. At Microsoft, three things helped us to tackle this.

First, we created a sustainability board where we picked people in each area of the business to represent their teams in sustainability. This forum created a safe space to collaborate, share blockers, challenges, ideas and innovation, and disseminate information. Scaling the work and sharing knowledge is also critical, so having a board has really helped us to develop ‘champs’ in the business who share their insights via their board team lead.

Secondly, we created a dedicated channel on Teams that connects the wider business and gives us a place to share opportunities, wins, training and ideas. We often do social events centred around volunteering, which is not only a good way to give back but also a way to form closer connections with the extended team.

Lastly, having an approachable and credible Chief Sustainability Officer is critical to help galvanise people who want to become part of something that isn’t always their core remit

#3 Demystify sustainability

At Microsoft we have a Sustainability In Action badge that helps us to train the company in all things sustainability, from our own goals and pledges to our narrative, tools and products. We also have regular training and learning sessions with our core team present, so people know who to approach for different kinds of help, support and insight.

Another way to help educate and train people on sustainability is by leveraging world events to tell your story. Earth Day and COP, for example, are great opportunities to educate people when they’re most engaged. We also recently published the Microsoft report on Closing the Sustainability Skills Gap, to help businesses grasp the importance of sustainable transformation. It’s also imperative to remember the importance of social impact. Creating social value and purpose whilst doing business gives companies the opportunity to give back authentically. Companies that can do more should do more, and those that invest will go further. Here at Microsoft, we’re proud of our social impact programs both locally and globally.

#4 Reward and recognise

When people feel valued and recognised their wellbeing is improved as well as their company engagement, it’s also a great way to build community and drive momentum. We always use our dedicated Teams channel to recognise those who complete training, make progress or sign deals. In fact, we’ve recently launched our Sustainability Star of the Quarter Award, which recognises those who make an impact in this space across the business.

Stay committed to your sustainability goals

To wrap up, I want to stress the importance of bringing energy, experience and passion when galvanising cross-discipline teams throughout the business. Walk the walk, stay driven, and commit to building a programme that breaks down silos and promotes collaboration. Invest in sustainable strategies to help you achieve net zero. Look for ways to recognise and reward sustainability efforts, and ultimately try to tie in sustainability and ESG with your company’s core mission and vision.

Not only will it help you make progress towards your sustainability goals, but it’ll inspire a lot of people along the way.

About the author

For the past 20 years Victoria has spent much of her time in communications and the purpose world. Currently holding the position as the Chief of Staff for Sustainability at Microsoft, Victoria leads program management, employee engagement, strategy and thought leadership for the sustainability business. Victoria cares deeply about ESG and how companies can balance business and purpose. She believes companies that can do more should do more and that these purpose levers can drive positive growth and innovation. Victoria also holds a trustee position with African Development Choices, is a judge for the Purpose Awards and won a National Social Impact Award and Platinum Club Award for the innovation she drove in raising awareness of inclusivity.

Find out more

Microsoft Sustainability – products for a Sustainable Future

Closing the Sustainability Skills Gap: Helping businesses move from pledges to progress

The post Putting sustainability into the heart of everyone’s job: 4 ways to take action appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In the current economic environment, banks and other financial services firms recognise the need to embrace digital transformation to get maximum value from their technology investments and do more with less. Leveraging technology also helps businesses to navigate emerging risks while driving sustainable and responsible business outcomes internally and with their customers. But how are they approaching these challenges? Last week I attended Sibos 2022 in Amsterdam, where business leaders, policy makers and technologists came together for deep dive debates and big picture outlooks on the future of the corporate banking market, including lending, trade and treasury solutions, and the related capital markets instruments. The energy and excitement on the pace of innovation was clear and I saw many themes that resonate with where we aim to lead the market in our Microsoft UK Financial Services business.  

Geopolitical tensions, the economic environment, evolving cyber threats, the race to Net Zero, the competitive landscape and ongoing reimagination of business models, modernising policy and regulation, and the continuous innovation of what is possible with people, process and digital technology are driving rapid change in the industry. When managed correctly, this change can unlock new opportunity. 

The industry is leading in many areas of technology, product and operating-model innovation, but a responsible business purpose and sustainable societal outcomes are now firmly embedded as objectives that banks are expected to deliver. “We should not seek innovation for innovation’s sake,” noted HM Queen Máxima of the Netherlands in the opening plenary. “With each new technology, we must always ask ‘What problems are we trying to solve?’” At the same time, we need to ensure any innovation is done securely and collaboratively while being additive to interoperability of data and platforms. The IMF predicts technological fragmentation can cut a country’s GDP by five percent; the benefit of collaborative industry approaches and ecosystem business models is clear. 

Through all the customer, partner, and colleague conversations at Sibos 2022, and while contributing and learning as much as we could about new ideas and technologies, the Microsoft UK Financial Services team took away four main action points: 

1.      Transform securely  

One of the key things that was highlighted by industry leaders was the importance of getting cyber security basics right to enable secure transformation. “The human firewall is the first line of defence,” said Nicolas Trimbour, Head of Fraud Prevention and Chief Data Officer for Cash Management at BNP Paribas. It’s important to educate employees and customers to recognise phishing, scams and ransomware attempts especially while the attach surface grows with increased digitisation and growing ecosystem business models. 

AI/ML solutions can work at high performance across large amounts of data to spot fraud or suspicious activity in transactions and endpoints. An industry-specific cloud solution that uses a completely private data model, while offering full data portability can help organisations as they shift from on-premise to hybrid or cloud-native architectures. At the same time, organisations can benefit from built-in security and compliance offerings that infuse healthy cyber hygiene. 

Our security experts have pulled together resources, training and more to help your teams empower and educate your employees and customers to be cyber aware. This is the right time to focus on this with October being Cyber Security Month. Check out our Cyber Security Awareness Month resources. 

2.      Build a talent and collaboration model that supports your digital ambitions   

Banks need access to the right engineering and digital skills at scale to drive industry digitisation and innovation. This is not just about attracting the talent, but re-skilling and up-skilling current resources and creating an empathetic, flexible culture. I’ve often heard it said that the number one headwind on many banks’ ability to execute on their digital transformation strategies is access to the right talent and skills. “We need to make sure we invest in our people and support them in their growth,” says Erika Irish Brown, Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer and Global Head of Talent at Citi.  

At Microsoft, we’re helping financial services institutions give their employees the digital skills they need. Whether that’s showing how decentralised teams can work collaboratively while working remotely, using tools to securely automate processes and workflows, or empowering pro dev, citizen dev and fusion dev teams to develop new apps, processes and reporting to make their work simpler in their domains. With 53 percent of employees more likely to prioritise health and wellbeing over work, leaders must take an empathetic approach to building a hybrid workplace. A culture that embraces flexibility and prioritises wellbeing will build a thriving organisation and drive long-term sustainable growth. This webinar with my colleague Craig Wellman goes into the importance of planning, leadership and culture in transforming financial services. 

3.      Align your ESG objectives to your business value 

The banking industry has a societal obligation to direct funding, capital, investment and lending to businesses in the real economy that will move the needle positively on ESG measures and on carbon reduction. And not only do customers, stakeholders, investors, regulators and governments expect it, but it’s also good for business. “$97 trillion needs to be invested to get to net zero. That’s a massive opportunity. It’s the most strategic and important thing we can do as an industry,” says Marisa Drew, CSO at Standard Chartered. 

The best way to start building effective ESG strategies is to tie it into your business value. Some institutions are already including their sustainability results in their financial statements. However, the industry faces challenges. A lack of global standard around climate reporting, mixed with slow manual processes and siloed data can affect how quickly you can build an effective strategy. “We don’t have perfect data, but we have actionable data,” says Gill Lofts, Global Financial Services Sustainable Finance Leader at EY. 

A unified and resilient cloud infrastructure like Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability can help you gain visibility across your data, drive efficiency, track and minimise your environmental impact and create sustainable value chains. We also need to drive more cross-industry collaboration.

“This is a planet-scale problem that needs planet-scale innovation and collaboration,” says Bill Borden, Corporate Vice President of Worldwide Financial Services at Microsoft.

When we made our sustainability commitment in 2020, we also decided to share our learnings, results and practices, and increase our focus on supporting our customers drive their own ESG agendas. 

4.      Lead on innovation that can open new sources of value  

Recent innovations are increasingly moving from POC to production adoption across digital assets such as Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). 

While AI has been leveraged in organisations for a long time to reduce risk and streamline operations, organisations need to take a novel approach to AI to create new avenues of growth. “People don’t think of AI as a way to get to a new digital business,” says Sameena Shah Managing Director, AI Research Executive, and Chief Transformation Officer for Client Onboarding at JP Morgan Chase. “You need to bring people with a business mindset together with people with AI knowledge.” These groups, known as fusion teams, can help organisations deploy solutions up to two and a half times faster than siloed teams. 

“Cash as a form of payment has been declining, but cash in circulation is growing. We have also seen over the past 10 years the rise of digital assets, including cryptocurrencies and CBDCs,” says Marion Laboure, Senior Economist at Deutsche Bank. 

One thing digitisation can do is help with financial inclusion. The 1.7 billion people who don’t have access to financial services can potentially use CBDC to start using financial services without a bank account. 

NFTs are currently used to tie ownership to a digital asset. However, as they evolve, it could allow the construction of the end asset to be more sophisticated. “That’s when it becomes more interesting to us in Finance. We can look at a new type of securitised asset, a new type of yield profile that may or may not be totally uncorrelated with traditional markets and assets,” said John Egan, CEO of L’Atelier at BNP Paribas. In fact, the US Securities and Exchange Commission are already looking into NFTs as a security. With no intermediaries, Decentralised Finance (DeFi) is less complex and more agile than the traditional central counterparty model. However, it is probably riskier. Experts suggest a hybrid model for DeFi, with the right regulatory guiderails to manage AML, fraud, conduct risk, and cybercrime. 

“Web3 and blockchain technologies are unique because they create a different, efficient way of executing processes. They can be best served to decrease complexity, increase security and transparency,” says Willayna Banner, Microsoft’s Head of Web3/Blockchain in Financial Services. Learn how organisations are using blockchain to transform functions such as trade finance and commercial specialty insurance. 

Collaborating for industry growth and responsible innovation 

As we shared these thoughts and ideas on the future of banking at Sibos 2022, a recurring theme was industry collaboration across the widest perimeter of stakeholders. To drive growth while being resilient, secure and compliant in our changing industry, our key priorities must be removing friction, increasing interoperability and improving the service experience for our customers, empowering our teams, and driving inclusive, sustainable innovation. 

Find out more 

Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services 

Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service Webinar for Financial Services: The changing role of the Digital Contact Centre

Rethinking the Customer Experience | Microsoft

About the author 

Niall is responsible for defining and leading Microsoft’s strategy for Financial Services in the UK. His focus is on helping Microsoft’s customers’ address industry-wide challenges, adapt to new regulatory frameworks and achieve business transformation through the adoption of Microsoft technology and partner solutions. He works to deliver on the cost, growth, risk and regulatory agenda front-to-back through the enterprise. 

Niall has experience in consulting, partner ecosystems, and large programme delivery in Financial Services. Niall has focused on operating model transformation and technology solutions for business challenges in Banking and Capital Markets, often in the regulatory change context. He has worked mostly with international banking groups and has lived in Hong Kong and London. 

The post The future of banking: How to stay innovative, collaborative and secure appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

We know from the latest IPCC report on climate change that we have a very narrow window of time to ensure we achieve our global goal of operating within a 1.5-degree climate rise. The impact of not doing so will have devastating consequences for global temperatures, drought impacting food security, and flooding and sea level rises putting lives at risk and destroying precious ecosystems. 

We need to achieve our aim of becoming a global net-zero economy and prevent the worst effects of climate change – before it’s too late. As a business community we can, and must, work together to stay on track with our sustainability goals, even in the face of considerable market instability.

Transforming net-zero commitment into strategy

Last year, world leaders left COP26 having made a series of commitments that we pledged to translate into corporate and employee action – and, crucially, deliver on. Yet our own research shows us that half of all UK organisations won’t hit the 2050 net zero target. Additionally, there’s a number of disruptive global events ranging from the war in Ukraine, to fuel, food, and cost of living crises, and, of course, the ongoing recovery from COVID-19 that have challenged overall progress. As a result, there is very real concern that progress may stall even further.

However, despite the significant challenges we face, there have been green shoots of progress, with a variety of organisations already implementing successful sustainable strategies – but we must keep going.

Microsoft’s sustainability journey

At Microsoft, we too are on this same journey, with lots still to learn. Like others, over the last year we have reported both successes and challenges, but we continue to innovate and apply learnings quickly to our business and our industry. 

We’re two years into our 10-year plan to be carbon negative by 2030 and by 2050 to remove more carbon from the environment than we have emitted since 1975. We’re also striving to be water positive, zero waste and to protect and restore more land than we use.

So, how has our strategy evolved and what learnings can we share?

• We set the tone from the top. Sustainability is part of our brand commitment, fully supported by the leadership team and sits at the core of our business. We are a company that pursues profit by solving the problems of people and the planet. ​And that means making sustainability part of everyone’s role, no matter what that role is.

• We set ambitions based on science. The best available science indicates that every organisation needs to do even more in far less time than we previously thought. That means we need to set goals that align with the science, and we need to be more ambitious.

• We hold everyone accountable for progress and put a governance structure in place to track progress in real time. Governance and accountability are essential here. At Microsoft, we hold our business groups accountable for their carbon emissions. We set measurements and scorecards for each business group’s sustainability commitments across the company and review progress twice a year.

• We report on everything, not just progress. When things go well, we share it alongside guides to help other organisations achieve similar results. And if things go less well, we share that too, so we can all learn and grow together. Our most recent report was published in March, with several important lessons worth reading.

While these are all great steps forward, we’re just a small fraction of total global emissions. So beyond delivering on our own commitments, we must help reduce the remaining 99.97 percent.

The net zero opportunity

In the UK, 60 per cent of FTSE 100 companies are committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

From our own research, we know that 64 percent of UK business leaders say cutting their carbon footprint is part of their organisation’s environmental sustainability strategy. However, the same research revealed that:

The top challenge faced by leaders wanting to move from a position of ambition, to one of action, was the lack of an organisational sustainability strategy.

Most organisations are using offline spreadsheets to organise their data across a myriad of siloed sources. That’s why I’m excited for the general availability of the Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability which helps address these problems. 

Unify your data to drive sustainability and operations

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability helps unify your data and record, report and reduce your organisation’s environmental impact through a common data model, automated data connections and actionable insights. This improves visibility across your value chain, which can account for up to 90 percent of the average organisation’s resource footprint.

By bringing together first-party and third-party capabilities, it can help build a more sustainable IT infrastructure. Solutions like Microsoft Sustainability Manager can help you monitor and manage your environmental sustainability journey end to end, or the Emissions Impact Dashboard application provides transparency into emissions produced from your use of Microsoft cloud services.

And through our work with partners using advanced analytics, machine learning, and virtual models in the cloud, we’re also helping your organisation reduce the environmental impact of operations and create sustainable value chains.

Together with our partners, we’re providing the foundational intelligence and data management capabilities you need to face complex capital allocation decisions with agility and confidence, while weighing ESG commitments, growth, and shareholder value criteria.

Combine culture and technology for a successful strategy

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability creates a common carbon language and broad technology ecosystem needed to support your sustainability strategy. It can also help you develop better data assets and use better digital tools to drive digital modernisation.

But it’s not just the solutions that will help you reach your sustainability goals. It’s also a culture of transparency and accountability. As leaders, we have a role to play in creating the right type of environment. We must follow through with action to trigger the changes we need to see in the world. 

No matter where you are in your journey, the right culture and the right tools will help all of us go further and faster when it comes to sustainability. 

Find out more

Microsoft Cloud for Sustainability

Accelerate sustainability progress and business growth

Resources to empower your development team

Sustainable software engineering learning path

About the author

Musidora joined the Microsoft UK Senior Leadership Team in February 2022 as Chief Sustainability Officer. She is accountable for driving sustainability outcomes for our customers, partners and internally. Prior to that, Musidora spent three years at Salesforce setting up and leading the Energy and Utilities Go to Market. She has extensive experience of the technology industry across hardware, consulting and software sales, over the past twenty years.  

She featured on Computer Weekly’s list of most influential women in technology in 2021, was named one of the top 100 female future leaders in 2020 by INvolve and Yahoo Finance UK, and was included in Kindness & Leadership’s Rising Star list for 2020. 

Musidora is passionate about D&I and particularly in supporting more women in the STEM industries. She is an active coach, mentor and sponsor both inside and outside of the industry.  

The post How to turn your sustainability ambition into action appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Frontline workers have suffered ongoing disruption throughout the pandemic which has led to considerable exhaustion and burn out. Increased working hours and pressure means they are also likely to experience a feeling of disconnection from their organisation and their team. As a result, organisations need to support healthcare staff wellbeing. Based on the Work Trend Index Special Report, one of the main focuses organisations should have when it comes to building an inclusive team culture is ensuring frontline workers have the digital tools to stay connected to core organisational messages and resources.

Improving connections to organisational knowledge

Technology like Microsoft Viva Connections can play an important role in shaping the organisational culture to include frontline workers. Viva Connections brings together relevant news, conversations and resources from around your organisation into one place within Teams. It provides both a desktop and mobile experience. Viva Connections is built on the current Microsoft 365 ecosystem within your organisation. It’s powered by SharePoint to help inform, engage, and empower the hybrid workforce. The Viva Connections experience is fully customisable to your organisation’s requirements. Living in Teams, this allows all employees to access information no matter what device they are using and where they are. As a result, all healthcare workers can complete their roles without the need to search for different websites, use different and outdated applications or load resources and tools which only work on a PC.

An improved and updated intranet brought into the flow of daily work in Microsoft Teams provides a simple way for health organisations to deliver all relevant news to frontline workers. It can also create a safe and collaborative space for healthcare teams. This can support organisations in their efforts of keeping employees engaged which can result in higher levels of retention.

Every day, new healthcare regulations are put in place by governments. Often, healthcare workers struggle to find the latest government regulation or guidance and may struggle to pro-actively locate this information. With Viva connections, organisational leaders know they can deliver this content in a uniform experience to all employees, regardless of role.

Delivering connections to new employees

Viva Connections can be particularly useful for new healthcare workers. When joining an organisation it is often difficult to embrace and understand the organisation’s culture and mission. Especially remotely when on the frontline and not in an office setting. Viva Connections provides a virtual resource portal for a new healthcare worker. It supports onboarding through a customisable dashboard which can be personalised to different employee roles. The dashboard delivers a tailored view of these resources through adaptive cards. These can be targeted directly to frontline workers and their own needs. Popular use cases can include weblinks to view pay and benefits, submit holiday requests, view and manage shifts or access time sheets. All these are opened within the Teams browser on a mobile device.

Through the dashboard experience, Viva Connections also provides an extensible platform, where 3^rd party integration such as ServiceNow, LifeWorks or Talentsoft can be plugged directly through adaptive cards. This means that employees can access and complete even more tasks directly from the Connections app. As a result, healthcare workers can save large amounts of time. This is because they no longer need to search the organisations intranet for scattered resources.

Take control of your organisation’s internal communication strategy

In a hybrid working world where healthcare workers are likely to be more disconnected than ever from their organisations, both information workers working from home and workers using mobile devices on the frontline have benefitted from using Microsoft Teams. Now, in this evolution of Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections can ensure healthcare workers stay in touch with their organisation’s latest news, legal requirements and their organisation’s mission and purpose.

To learn more about Viva Connections please connect with Edward Adamson and Ioana Marinescu on LinkedIn. Or, contact your Microsoft account team and we can organise a Viva Connections envisioning session.

Find out more

Get started with Microsoft Viva Connections

Work Trend Index Special Report

3 ways technology can help rebuild your frontline workforce

What’s a Simple Definition of Employee Engagement?

Viva Connections mobile and new partner integrations are now generally available

About the authors

Edward is currently a Modern Work Specialist working with healthcare organisations across the UK, helping on their journey towards digital transformation. Focussing on hybrid working, frontline technologies and wellbeing and productivity management, connect with Edward on LinkedIn to follow content relating to healthcare and Microsoft 365 optimisation.

Ioana works with healthcare organisations across the UK to improve their journey towards digital transformation using Microsoft 365 technologies. She helps healthcare organisations utilise Microsoft Teams to connect multi-disciplinary communities across the organisation, bring wellbeing and productivity management into the flow of everyday work and surface knowledge and learning across the organisation.

The post How to keep frontline healthcare workers connected with digital technology appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

When we talk about app innovation, we’re talking about exploring new ways to become more agile as organisations. I work with a lot of customers in the financial services industry and they all have one thing in common: they want to be more agile.

However being ‘more agile’ means different things to different financial service businesses depending on their starting point. Let’s break down the goal of app innovation into three horizons.

Modernising legacy systems to unlock and drive value

The first horizon is to have app innovation support legacy modernisation. “How can the cloud better optimise and enable the stuff we already run?” The focus is on efficiency: making things easier to manage, less onerous to upgrade, more sustainable. At the other end of the scale, the third horizon is all about the net new. How can app innovation empower us to bring new or better products to market? Or radically transform the way we bring products to market, expand our offerings to new markets, or bring new services online?

The shades of grey in between is the second horizon. The focus here is on things like transformation automation, or even simply moving applications ‘up the stack’. This means moving from manually managing Virtual Machines to leveraging Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings that can help streamline operations. Because innovation doesn’t have to be radical. Sometimes the most effective innovations are the incremental gains where we pay down some of the technical debt we’re carrying, slowly creating more agility, power, and momentum, ultimately allowing our teams to do more with less.

Here I want to unpack a few of these themes and shine a light on the great potential that app innovation in particular offers financial services organisations.

The value of business process automation

Technical debt is an analogy I often use to explain the challenge many financial services organisations face. Just like financial debt, the bigger the amount of technical debt you carry, the more interest you have to pay on it just to stand still.

But if I can pay down some of my technical debt, I can reinvest that interest in accelerating part of my organisation’s momentum in the right direction. For financial services organisations, this second horizon transformation can be extremely powerful.

Say you’re running an application that requires hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) to function. Somebody’s patching those VMs, manually making sure that the middleware on them is up and running. They ensure the connectivity, disaster recovery, the backup plans are all in place. Additionally, they build and maintain the data and applications that deliver business value and run them on those VMs.

If you can move some of that to a platform or service offering that manages that for you such as Azure, you can automate that process and reduce the manual labour. This is what we refer to as ‘moving up the stack’. Patching and updating becomes something you do with configuration. It may seem obvious to developers and development leads, but often the infrastructure status quo hampers the ability to see that bigger picture and build the business case for the move to PaaS. So it’s all about efficiency in the total cost to operate. How do you automate more of what you do, so you can move customers up the stack, free the teams that build these systems to spend less time manually overcoming hurdles and spend more time delivering business value?

Embrace an agile developer culture

A scenario that happens a lot in financial services is developer teams want to experiment with a new service. But they often spend more time filling out paperwork to request the infrastructure they need than it would actually take to do the development. However, by automating the secure creation and management of those environments, we can build agile dev teams.

Within policy controlled environments, we can create sandboxes where within minutes developers can experiment to see if the idea has legs and they want to scale, or if it’s not what they thought it was. Scale fast or fail fast, as they say.

Having the ability to be agile, to experiment, to test and learn, to play with new services quickly in an automated way, means you can genuinely innovate faster. And that is my goal: to unlock our customers’ ability to execute on their innovation and vision.

Develop a culture of innovation and change

When it comes to introducing new technologies, one of the pieces of the puzzle that is often overlooked is process. How do we create a culture of sharing best practise, encouraging reuse – a culture of inner sourcing? How do we encourage the collaboration environments in which developers can share the technology they build within their organisation? How do we promote reusability inside an organisation?

That’s where development collaboration platforms like GitHub become really powerful. It’s not just source control. It helps develop collaboration and empowers developers to reuse assets. You can do that by bringing the open-source approach into your own business and fostering that culture. It’s about saying: within my business, any business unit can take what I’ve built and reuse it or extend it or contribute back to it, but it’s not a public thing.

But a hurdle organisations need to overcome is feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of a cultural transformation. I often hear: “It’s such a big problem. I don’t know where to start. Huge cultural transformation. We’ll never get there.”

The key is to break the process down into bite sized chunks. Start with one key area of the business for one product, a set of workloads or a service line. Demonstrate the value of transformation in a smaller project. You’ll learn a load of lessons on the way about where the organisation is in its readiness to embrace that type of transformation. This may be politics, technology or real capabilities.

From there, you can grow. It typically takes a senior leader who believes in the project and wants to make it happen, as well as an engineering function that’s willing to embrace different ways of working and take onboard learnings from outside the business. But it also takes business units who want to be part of that process. If you’re a business unit and you want to just throw requirements over the fence and hope that somebody deals with them, that’s not going to work. That’s where the cultural change really needs to come together.

AI and innovation to drive customer expereinces

One of the main challenges facing the financial services industry at the moment is changing customer expectations. As consumers, we get instant gratification with the expectation for immediate delivery, instant access to data and service on-demand.  As a result, we have that same expectation of our business interactions. We assume that every business should operate the same way. However in reality, the systems and processes in financial services aren’t geared for that.

At the same time, there is a challenge from FinTech start-ups nipping at the heels of established industry players. They don’t have the same technical debt to carry and are more agile. As a result, they can come at the industry from a very different angle, building services that feel much more like our consumer interactions, are much more data-led, where the experience is the same regardless of interaction – online, via apps, or an intermediary.

Both of these factors create a compelling need to be able to become a differentiator. To move faster, to innovate, to release new products, to meet the customer’s expectation. In the modern world of finance, we need that transformation to flow front to back, from the button I press on my phone through to that being recorded in a ledger somewhere. For insurance companies, it’s more about how we can use data and AI algorithms to calculate risk. If I can automate that process rather than it requiring human intervention, I can write more policies, I can take on more risk as an insurer, or win more business as a broker because I can make the decision much quicker.

These are the business outcomes. And in order to achieve them, we must be comfortable with building modern applications, and doing that rapidly, taking them to market quickly. Just like a FinTech start-up would.

But doing that means being agile, which we can’t be if we’re carrying lots of technical debt. We can’t do that if we’ve got lots of legacy to deal with. That’s where Microsoft can support our financial service partners. To reduce their technical debt. To modernise their processes and infrastructures. To unlock a future of agility, experimentation, and innovation.

Find out more

Imagine digital innovation that delivers a seamless experience with real impact

Drive business performance by empowering developers to innovate

Discover how to scale DevOps practices throughout your organisation

Resources to empower your developer team

Using Azure Pipelines to increase creativity and reduce costs

Introduction to Azure DevOps

About the author

Matt heads up the Digital Transformation & App Innovation team within Microsoft UK’s Solutions business. He leads a team of innovation and development centred Specialists focused on helping customers understand, plan for, and adopt some of the most cutting-edge services in Microsoft’s arsenal – from GitHub for developer productivity, managed container offerings such as Azure Kubernetes Services, PaaS and serverless with Azure Functions and Logic Apps, Integration Services, Event Grid, and more, through to engaging wider stakeholder audiences in the development process through adoption of low-code development with Power Apps.  

Matt’s background is firmly in engineering for innovation. With a master’s in computing and over two decades of experience from hands on ecommerce, payment and billing systems development in the late ‘90s and early 2000’s, to leading a global consulting team designing and rolling out bespoke Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting products for FTSE 10 integrated energy companies, and on to launching an IoT Pet Tracking start-up, founding, building, and selling a Digital Transformation consultancy before joining Microsoft in 2018. 

Consistent to all of Matt’s endeavors is an understanding of what is possible, how it aligns to solving real world business challenges, and always starting with the “Why”.  

The post How to drive innovation and agility in financial services appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Osborne Clarke is an international legal practice with headquarters in London, and offices around the world. The Firm’s goal is to help clients succeed in tomorrow’s world. One of the ways it does that is to equip all its people with the right digital tools, right processes and empower them with the right skills to use those tools effectively.

To empower employees, they took a different approach to the typical linear style taken for digital modernisation.  “When you’re trying to fundamentally change the way people deliver work, its different,” explains Nathan Hayes, IT Director at Osborne Clarke. By directly engaging with people to solve business issues, Osborne Clarke was able to build internal champions. At the same time, they are improving processes and developing best practices to enable its people to work smarter.

Speed up digital modernisation and empower employees

Osborne Clarke had already started to modernise its business ahead of the UK’s shift to remote working in 2020. Employees were already familiar with Microsoft Teams. However, the shift in ways of working was a real driver for tech adoption because they had to use tools like Microsoft Teams to engage and work. “It’s about winning hearts and minds. People were already engaging with technology in ways they never had before,” says Nathan.

Standardising client experiences and ways of working

Osborne Clarke’s Matter Management Group has been a key part of building the processes behind its digital collaboration modernisation. For legal firms, the managing of a matter from conception to delivery needs to not only meet client expectations, but be transparent, compliant and secure to meet employee expectations too.

Osborne Clarke identified that all its people had a different way of working. This created challenges around the consistency of client experiences across the organisation. The Firm’s Matter Management Group set out to standardise the way they delivered legal services across the organisation, taking learnings from the broader business on how they could work more effectively.

“I have worked with the Matter Management Group and the skill set provided is valuable. There is training support on hand when needed and there is an understanding of how legal teams work which means there’s an appreciation of the comments/concerns we raise and the Group is able to explain the technology easily.”

Partner, Corporate, Osborne Clarke

Connecting business silos to aid transparency and reduce risk

Ensuring transparency over processes and documents is one of the most important factors for legal firms to consider. In a traditional firm, documents are paper-based or baked into business silos making transparency difficult to audit and manage.

When connecting business silos together, legal firms can gain visibility over document sharing, updates, and more. As a result of their modernisation, Osborne Clarke can track when a document is pulled out of the management system and shared with clients via email or on Microsoft Teams to manage risk, create visibility and improve client experiences.

Ensuring security and regulatory compliance

Like many industries, security is highly important for the legal sector. Legal firms need to ensure they not only meet the expectations of clients, regulators, and the business, but exceed them. Firms must ensure any technology meets risk and compliance requirements, while being able to take advantage of innovative solutions to transform client experiences.

“We went through a full due diligence exercise in terms of understanding where our audit trails were, what our discovery options were, and where we engage our risk and compliance team. We have to know that we’ve got an absolutely robust platform,” says Nathan.

By conducting a thorough audit of the platform and understanding their audit trails, Osborne Clarke was able to outline where there was a reliance on employees to meet their statutory and regulatory obligations and where they could leverage technology more effectively to save time.

Demonstrating tangible use cases to empower employees

The Matter Management Group worked with teams in the business directly to help solve challenges around working practices and demonstrate how Microsoft Teams can help resolve them. By showing the value of digital technology first-hand within the context of the real day-to-day challenges they were facing, there was a greater chance it would be used. As a result, that they would share their new found understanding more broadly with other colleagues.

“We had a London partner who was looking to improve profitability. We sat down with him and showed him the technologies that could help. He decided he wanted to try Planner and Teams. Then, he codified an entire matter within 24 hours. He sent it out to his team members, assigning tasks in planner. And that was the start of delivering benefits in terms of visibility and in terms of accuracy,” says Nathan.

“I have used Planner within Teams to create the M&A Playbook. The task list is flexible so can be amended for each deal. It can also be assigned to specific people, prioritised in terms of urgency and can set due dates which can be moved if necessary,” says a Partner at Osborne Clarke. “I have found Planner to be incredibly useful and have noticed that junior lawyers are more proactive as they can see the matter set out in tasks from start to finish.”

“Some things I’ve really liked about Planner – it’s very easy to set up and edit the tasks and buckets; It’s useful to be able to tailor what information appears on each task card. For example, on some that are time sensitive I will choose to include deadline details, or if we agree something with the other side which we may need to keep track of later, I can include a small note under the relevant task.”

Associate, Project Finance

Bringing employees along the journey

For Nathan’s team, the most important thing about digital modernisation is to make sure employees are part of the process. This is why the implementation was so successful. The Matter Management Group works directly within business teams to solve build solutions. This means they were not only able to demonstrate the benefit of digital technology on existing processes, but they were also able to equip employees with the right digital skills to work alongside the technology.

“Its great to see how Osborne Clarke have integrated Microsoft Teams in to the firms critical business processes to not only enhance their lawyers productivity but to engage with their clients in a more consistent and effective way. It demonstrates how technology can enable effective change in a secure way when people and processes are closely aligned.”

Karen Grumbt, Account Executive, Legal Sector, Microsoft UK

The future

Nathan believes Osborne Clarke’s journey is far from over. Looking forward, there are ways to automate workflows or paper-based processes. This will not only save time but reduce errors and empowers employees to spend more time with clients.

The secret of Osborne Clarke’s digital modernisation success is its people-first approach. Engaging directly with teams to build solutions that show immediate benefits creates advocates within the business. In addition, ensuring the processes are secure, compliant and transparent, builds not only strong digital proficiency, but creates a more open, collaborative culture.

Find out more

Learn more about Osborne Clarke

Embrace the new world of work eBook

5 ways the legal sector can innovate and empower employees in the future of work

Resources for your development team

Watch the on-demand sessions from Microsoft Build:

Extending the Microsoft Teams experience

Build solutions that span across Microsoft Teams, Viva Connections and SharePoint

About the author

Nathan is IT Director at Osborne Clarke. He has over fifteen years of experience in the strategic delivery of IT into numerous law firms including CMS Cameron McKenna and Bevan Brittan amongst others. Nathan is an active member of the Legal IT community and makes regular contributions at conferences and to a range of legal publications. Prior to moving into the legal sector, he enjoyed extensive experience in a similar capacity within the global distribution sector. When away from the office, Nathan can usually be found surfing whilst attached to a kite, and occasionally being dragged out to sea in a tangle of lines.

Karen is an experienced Account Executive focussed on the Legal Sector at Microsoft. With over five years’ experience working with global law firms, Karen works closely with customers to drive digital transformation and enable them to realise greater business benefit through Microsoft technology.

The post How law firms can securely empower employees and optimise processes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

In a recent webinar, held by The Institute of Engineering and Technology, we spoke to other industry leaders about the recent shift of digital technologies from ‘nice to have’ to essential. We discussed the re-emergence of IT as a business enabler. Additionally, we talked about how manufacturers can use it to build resilience.

Digital technology as an enabler of resilience

From what we’ve seen in our work in the sector, it’s not about implementing digital technology for the sake of it. It’s about ensuring the technology is aligned to business use cases and outcomes, both for today and for the future.

For manufacturers, data is an asset and they can leverage IoT or Industrial IoT, data analytics, AI and digital twins for resiliency. However, where the sector has been lacking is developing the right data strategy across the business, as well as standardising and sharing open data. Also, there needs to be more understanding of the business models that data and digital technology can enable.

The organisations who are successful in this take an agile approach to digital modernisation. They adapt quickly not just to the changing needs of the sector, but also to external circumstances and the expectations of an increasingly digital native workforce. To do this, we’ve seen many manufacturers approach digital modernisation through smaller projects instead of taking a wider waterfall approach. This can help build champions and leadership support, as they see the positive effects quicker.

Sustainable operations

Manufacturers need to continue to operate their assets as reliably and efficiently as possible. Additionally, as we head to a net zero future, manufacturers need to look at more sustainable ways to operate. This is where digital technology can help. Using a secure cloud platform, manufacturers can connect data across offices, factory floors, and more to create holistic views of their business.

Manufacturer Ricoh uses Azure Machine Learning and AI across all areas of its factory to manage costs, and access greater insights to optimise operations and reduce costs. Ricoh uses AI to adjust machines in real-time to respond to changing demand, and to predict maintenance. And by connecting this data to HR and financial systems, they can manage labour needs, track costs and more.

Create an agile supply chain

Data helps embed visibility and intelligence into supply chains. A connected supply chain will predict disruptions, enhance visibility, improve planning, and maximise asset productivity. This, in turn will reduce waste and can deliver data that will help build a sustainable circular supply chain.

Bel Fuse manufactures electronic circuits products globally. As part of a larger supply chain, they rely on small parts from suppliers before passing their components onto other manufacturers that create the finished products. Therefore, they need to ensure that they do not become a bottleneck in the process. By using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Bel Fuse now has a deeper, more precise view into its supply chain.

“Our system quickly shows us when parts haven’t arrived on time, and we can pivot to load our production with parts that are available,” says Stefan Naude, General Manager. “With Dynamics 365, we streamlined our planning and have flexibility to adapt to our vendors and adjust our inventory—all while remaining a reliable supplier.”

Personalise customer relationships

To be resilient you need to ensure you’re meeting your customers’ expectations in new ways. You need to engage with them throughout the relationship lifecycle. By connecting data silos, manufacturers can gain new insights into customer behaviours. They can also use AI and machine learning to predict, support, and improve customer relationships.

Malvern Panalytical designs, develops and commercialises analytical instruments for material analysis across a wide range of industries and applications. To help customers optimise their instruments, they built a digital solution that streamlines data capture – effectively offering them a ‘cloud-based control room’. Customers can use performance metrics to optimise assets. At the same time, Malvern Panalytical can use the data to understand how customers use their products. This allows them to offer better post-sales support and develop improved innovations.

Build the right culture for resilience

Whether on the plant floor, the office, or mobile, your people need to be empowered to drive resiliency. Investing in your existing talent and attracting the right talent is important. Not only does this help your organisation to take advantage of digital tech, but it is also key to building innovation and new business value.

Organisations need the right data and digital skills, plus a more agile culture to maximise impact. Manufacturers are clearly exploring these areas, but there is some way to go. Partnerships can support manufacturers here. At Microsoft, we have a range of learning resources available to help build technology competencies. The High Value Manufacturing Catapult is also working on data and digital skills programmes for the sector.

Use digital to innovate and build resilience

Finally, as manufacturers bounce back, using digital will be key to innovating and creating new business models and opportunities. For example, using technology to optimise and automate time-consuming manual tasks, giving employees more time to spend on value-adding work. At Phlexglobal, they use AI to automate the indexing and management of vaccine trial master files, improving time savings by 25-30 percent.

To be resilient, manufacturers also need to build partner ecosystems – not just within industry but across digital technology companies and other sectors. Open data and data sharing will help build resilience by driving new business models and innovations and creating more robust supply chains. We saw this in 2020, when British manufacturers united to build 20,000 ventilators in 12 weeks with the help of technology – something that would normally take 20 years.

For manufacturers, resiliency and digital modernisation go together. Embrace data and empower your workforce with the right skills to adopt an agile approach to implementation. Look for partnerships that support your goals and values to not only share expertise, but also innovate and drive new and current business models.

Find out more

Watch the webinar

The future of supply chains: Unlock sustainability through innovation

Build resilience today

About the authors

Rik leads Microsoft’s industry strategy across manufacturing, energy and resources in the UK. Responsibilities include working with the government and regulators, industry bodies, industry partners, and largest customers to ensure Microsoft enables sectoral needs. Rik sits on multiple industry boards for energy, manufacturing, research, digital twins and digital skills. His focus areas include the energy transition, sustainability, cyber security and digital technologies for operational environments.

Prior to Microsoft, Rik worked at Cisco for 13 years, with global lead roles in energy and resource industries, IoT and security, and digital transformation. He has been a member of multiple industry standards groups and consortia, is a published author, has written multiple industry white papers, and has spoken at conferences all over the world. He has an MBA in international leadership and is currently studying sustainability and green economies.

Lizzie works with a number of Manufacturing, Aerospace and Defence customers and partners in the UK, working closely with business leaders to help drive the use of digital technologies to achieve industry-focussed outcomes and unlock innovation. It is a pivotal time for both the Manufacturing and Aerospace industry to transform, with sustainability, factory of the future and connected supply chain being at the heart of many customer conversations, as well as the future of Manufacturing/work.

The post How digital tech can help manufacturers build resilience appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Let’s dissect this a little. Firstly, what is culture? It’s quite an ethereal term and one I have often struggled with. Someone once shared a simple definition that resonated with me: Culture is “what you do when your boss isn’t watching”. Culture is something ingrained into how you work and think, which is important. You can’t simply say you have a culture as an organisation. You must live and breathe the culture.

And what do we mean when we say data-driven? It’s not about collecting all data. In fact, lack of data isn’t a problem for most organisations! However, what they often struggle with is extracting value from that data. Therefore, what we are really talking about is decisions that are driven from data. Because we use the data to inform and justify our decisions, it needs to be good quality.

So, a data-driven culture is one where the organisational norm is that decision making is driven by data. How can leaders successfully build this culture? If we look at the journey to a data-driven culture, I think of four steps.

1. Create the right mindset for a data-driven culture

To me this is the most crucial step – leadership must be clear. I don’t just mean that leaders need to talk about using data. Leaders need to demonstrate how they place data at the heart of what the organisation is trying to achieve every day.

In order to thrive, leaders must be clear about what their organisation’s purpose and outcomes are. A great way to create accountability and direction is to tie those purposes and outcomes to measures of success.

At Microsoft, we use an approach called Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to organise and align our activities to transform. The focus on key results inspires a data-driven mindset across the organisation. It also provides a common data driven focus and language for everyone in the business – we all start to think about the measures that matter.

2. Find organisational and individual value in a data-driven culture

When looking at driving change I have to say that unfortunately we, as humans, can be a selfish bunch. Often, one of the biggest drivers of successful change is understanding what is in it for the individual. Within Microsoft we apply the PROSCI change methodology. At the heart of this is the ADKAR change model. There is the adage: organisations don’t change, people do. ADKAR is an acronym for five elements of change for individuals:

• Awareness of the need to change.
• Desire to participate and support the change.
• Knowledge on how to change.
• Ability to implement desired skills and behaviours.
• Reinforcement to sustain the change.

To embed the change within our people and therefore to drive change in the organisation, we really need to create the desire to change. If people are told the future is a data-driven culture they simply won’t buy into it and commit to it. Therefore, demonstrating change and demonstrating value from data fast is important. When people see that the change works and is more effective, they’ll want to change.

3. Build your and your employee’s skills

If we are working on changing our mindsets, we also need to prepare our people with the right skills and tools. Everyone needs basic data literacy skills and we all different levels of knowledge. Some people have inherent data literacy skills. Others may need support to be able to understand and assimilate data then interpret and analyse it. Then, once we have the basics in place, we need to progress to understand how we can use the tools at our disposal to answer the business question we have. However, we can’t just throw tools like Excel, Tableau and PowerBI at our people and expect them to be able to optimise and transform our organisations.

Leaders need to help their employees on their learning journey by democratising data access, building learning opportunities and give employees the time to take those opportunities. One way you can do this is to build re- and upskilling into employee KPIs. In our data journey we move from a data consumer to data analyst, citizen data scientist and beyond. Not everyone starts in the same place. Everyone’s learning path is different and the KPIs need to reflect that.

Microsoft provides access to great learning tools to support you and your employee’s individual journey. These include Microsoft Learn – the front door to all your training needs whether you are just starting out or an experienced professional, with role-based learning paths. You can also explore how to use AI in your organisation with the Microsoft AI Business School.

4. Empower employees with the right tools

So, now you’ve changed your mindset and the mindset of your organisation. You’ve seen the value of a data-driven organisation and are building relevant skills. But what tools do leaders need to get insights?

Firstly, organisations need quality, curated data that is easily accessible. Not everyone in the business is a data engineer who can find, cleanse and prepare data for analytics. You need an easy way for everyone in an organisation to find the business data that they need. It also needs to be presented in a manner that is easily understandable – using the language they understand. This is where a data marketplace or data catalogue is invaluable. At Microsoft we have Azure Purview, our unified data governance platform. This is a platform that automatically discovers data wherever it lives in your organisation. It can classify data and identify data lineage; but importantly it also presents a data catalogue of your data using business language. The data catalogue is a core element of a successful self-service strategy.

Using self-service data insights tools like PowerBI provides easy access to pre-prepared and certified datasets. This enables your people to be confident in the quality of the data source and empowers them to discover new insights from the data. It also allows the data owners can enable controls to ensure colleagues can only see the data they need to.

A continuous journey to a data-driven culture

These four steps will help you build a data-driven culture. I also want to remind you of the final step in ADKAR: Reinforcement! It’s critical that this is not seen as a one-off initiative. You need to work hard at reinforcing the change to build a successful data-driven culture. If people don’t use these new skills, mindset and tools, it is the case of use it or lose it. This can be tough – but creating a champion network focused on data is a wonderful way to organically drive and embed the culture.

Find out more

Build a data-driven organisation

Peer to peer interview: Unite your data strategy and culture

Create a data culture

About the author

James is a Digital Advisor in Microsoft Consulting Services. He is focussed on helping customers realise their business outcomes and purpose by enabling their digital transformation with advanced cloud technologies – with a particular focus on data, AI, automation and sustainability. Prior to joining Microsoft in 2014, James held several roles across financial services (HSBC, Schroders), public sector (Scottish Water) and consulting (PwC).

The post The role of leadership in a successful data-driven culture appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Despite rapid acceleration of digital modernisation, our recent research report – Unlocking the UK’s potential with digital skills – finds that 69 percent of leaders think they still have a skills gap within their organisation, despite 80 percent recognising that digital skills investment will be important to the country’s economic recovery. At the same time, employees are hungry to learn. 59 percent agree that developing digital skills will be important to their employability post-pandemic.

The challenge for many leaders now lies in how to create a culture in which employees are guided and empowered to learn the skills that they are eager to develop, and will be so important in the digital economy. To that end, I’ve penned a couple of thoughts and would love to hear your reflections in the comments below.

1.      Acknowledge the skills gap

Awareness is the first step to action. It’s certainly a positive that almost 70 percent of UK leaders recognise the gaps in their digital capability. Now is the time to turn awareness into action.

Identify the barriers your organisation is facing when it comes to skills investment. It is possible your challenges are like those experienced by other companies. 37 percent of leaders cite cost as their primary challenge, whilst 28 percent are united in feeling that their lack of strategy holds them back. I often find engaging with my counterparts beneficial, not least as we discover shared challenges and learnings. If you aren’t sure where to start, organisations such as FutureDotNow provide useful opportunities to listen and learn from like-minded leaders on how to bridge skills gaps.

Then, create an integrated, cross-functional digital team who are responsible for driving the effective use of digital skills and solutions throughout the organisation. Work with this team to evaluate your technology stack, identify skills gaps and assess your digital talent pool.

2.      Affirm your commitment

Actively champion the value of lifelong learning. Share resources for employees to develop in-demand skills. Also, provide space for everyone to learn throughout the working week. Over time, these steps will contribute to an inclusive learning culture that will empower learners and prepare your organisation for the digital economy.

At Microsoft, we host a quarterly learning day; an opportunity for employees to focus their time entirely on growth and development. Talks and training provide employees an opportunity to learn something new. We allocate space for employees to learn in the way that best suits them. Learning Day serves as an important and regular reminder to all the value of personal growth and skill development.

3.      Invest in the right skills

One of the biggest challenges can be knowing which skills to focus on. Of course, this varies in every company. But we uncovered a great place to start: data literacy. Our research found that data literacy skills have the greatest impact on business performance. It also provides employees with a useful capability to develop in a wide range of roles. To further support leaders in identifying the right skills to invest in, we split digital skills in to two categories:

• Consumptive skills such as using Microsoft 365 and adopting new technologies to allow people to use digital tools and systems.
• More technical productive skills such as coding, developing algorithms, computer science modelling the enable us to create those solutions.

Since others adopt what the creators develop, productive skills can have double the impact on organisational performance. Your initiatives should take this distinction into account and deliver the right balance of learning options. Microsoft Learn is a great place for employees to get started.

When you empower people with digital skills they become interpersonally stronger too, leading to greater critical thinking, collaboration and decision-making. Build on this by offering training that goes beyond technical capabilities to support workers in developing professional skills such as creativity, adaptability and collaboration.

4.      Nurture your Next Gen Workers

Our research shows that a creative new generation has joined the workforce with a strong blend of consumptive and productive skills. These Next Gen Workers make up 73 percent of the workforce today. Democratise consumptive skills by providing opportunities for employees to learn and engage with no code/low code technologies such as PowerApps. In turn, the potential benefits for organisations and society could be significant.

5.      Think differently about talent

To prepare for the new world of work, leaders should rethink their talent acquisition and development strategies by looking outside traditional talent pools to fill skills gaps. One such way could be to hire a digital apprentice into your organisation to support your goals and develop throughout the apprenticeship. I know first hand the value apprenticeships provide for both employer and employee. I would encourage anybody interested in hiring an apprentice to explore our new UK apprenticeship network.

Building skills in the new world of work

As we enter a hybrid world of work, conversations on skills and talent remain high on the agenda for leaders across the UK. The skills challenges within organisations are complex and unique, however these steps, alongside our our digital skills report, will provide you with actionable insights on how to unlock your organisation’s potential.

Recently, we’ve been discussing how to think differently about talent with industry leaders. It’s something that has been at the top of my mind as well. Therefore, in the next blog, we will dive a bit deeper on how to develop and attract diverse talent, with insights from leaders across the UK.

Find out more

Unlock the UK’s potential with digital skills

Learn how to harness the power of data

Develop your skills and own your story

Watch a panel of industry leaders discuss how to think differently about talent in an on-demand session from Microsoft Envision

About the author

Simon is passionate about unlocking the potential in every person and organisation and has been with Microsoft since 1999. In his role as UK Chief Learning Officer, Simon is responsible for leading the learning culture and skilling strategy in the UK and driving the execution for customers, partners, employees, and future generation skilling. Prior to this, Simon has held several senior positions at Microsoft, leading several businesses across the UK and EMEA.

The post 5 steps to help leaders close skills gaps in their organisation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.