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all healthcare workers can complete their roles without the need to search for different websites, use different and outdated applications or load resources and tools which only work on a PC.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.

Over the last year, the average duration of mental health related absences were three times longer than that of COVID-related absences in the NHS between 1st June 2020 and 1st June 2021. This, teamed with the enormous pressure placed on healthcare organisations recently has placed a newfound importance on personal health and wellbeing. Additionally, frontline teams and their integrated care communities need high quality communication and work practices.

The demand for workplace empowerment tools has existed long before our new hybrid working world. Frontline healthcare workers spend the most time working outside of their working hours compared to their colleagues. According to the 2020 NHS staff survey, 55.2 percent of all NHS employees work additional unpaid hours every week. Due to the demanding nature of frontline jobs, higher employee turnover and the feeling of being disconnected from the community of the organisation is common. This places paramount importance on being able to manage wellbeing at an individual level through readily available tools in order to stimulate a supportive frontline worker community.

Improve productivity and wellbeing

For organisations tackling the increased levels of stress and anxiety of their workforce, leaders are starting to consider the different technologies that can support mental health and wellbeing.

Insights can help empower healthcare employees take control over their own wellbeing. And with Viva Insights, employees can manage the way they work with recommendations visible only to them. For example, a frontline employee on the ward that might want to send praise to a specialist nurse for the incredible way they have been treating a patient. Or colleagues who are part of a multi-disciplinary team might want to make everyone aware of the positive impact a team member has had on their development.

The ability to send praise in the Viva Insights dashboard can help to create and boost team morale. In addition, this can help everyone to feel more connected, being part of a team where their efforts are recognised and praised. As a result, employee retention is improved.

Getting caught in daily administrative tasks, especially if you are a clinician that regularly faces unexpected circumstances during a shift, can leave little time for wellbeing management which eventually could lead to burnout. Clinicians and everyone across the organisation can start taking control of their wellbeing by setting up reminders in the Viva Insights app to finish their shift by reflecting on how they’re feeling. Over time, they can start analysing their reflections, and begin to understand the driving factors behind their emotions. By focussing on their feelings over time, they can discover ways to reduce burnout.

Meditation breaks can not only help people feel energised but can also improve their ability to focus and engage, leading to better patient outcomes. With the integration of Headspace meditation into Teams through Insights, employees can now tap into moments of relaxation before a patient appointment or a team meeting, making sure they feel ready to tackle any problem that may arise – all from a computer or smartphone.

Through the stay connected tab in the Insights app, healthcare workers can easily discover any pending tasks or people they need to connect with, all based on data from the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Leveraging actionable insights in the context of the day-to-day work can help the workforce to concentrate on things that matter. For example, ward staff can easily complete their admin tasks and focus more on delivering the best treatment for patients.

Take Control of Your Wellbeing

Microsoft Viva brings together scattered organisational resources into the central hub of collaboration that is Microsoft Teams, ensuring healthcare workers can manage their wellbeing and utilise their organisational resources so they can deliver the highest standard of patient care while staying in the flow of everyday work. Insights is the first aspect of Microsoft Viva we will be covering in this blogging series. Make sure to send this document to a human resources colleague, a wellbeing lead or a clinician you know who wants to modernise their wellbeing management.

Keep an eye on our Modern Tools tag on our blog, as we continue our series into how organisations can use these tools to support powerful employee experiences.

Find out more

Introduction to Viva Insights

NHS England » Making the most of the skills in our teams

NHS The Promise

Remote Employees Are Working Longer Than Before

3 ways to support frontline workers in a hybrid world

About the author

Edward is currently a Modern Work Specialist working with healthcare organisations across the UK, helping on their journey towards digital transformation. Focusing 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 improve frontline employee wellbeing in healthcare appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The current state of employee experience tech

For employees, this can be especially bewildering. They have to navigate far too many apps and platforms during a normal working day. To leaders, it can be a challenge to manage and deliver the value that such technologies promise. It’s all got a bit too much. One company I came across had several hundred technology solutions. This caused confusion with the employees and the company. This delivers fragmentation at the expense of focus – one of the notable problems Microsoft attempts to solve.

I’ve often said that there are only a handful of companies around the world that could ever build an integrated employee experience platform. Microsoft is one of them. In just one day, Microsoft 365 users take part in more than 30 billion collaboration minutes. This is very helpful when creating a platform that flows with the daily rhythms of work. So, I was intrigued to learn more about Microsoft Viva and its capabilities.

Connecting employee experiences

The promised land for employee experience technology is a platform that helps people to effortlessly connect to the things that help them to be successful in life and work. That’s the bottom-line. Indeed, it’s the only line that matters when thinking about productivity, performance, and wellbeing. If the technology in a business is not directly helping people to deliver their best work and live their best life, then we do really need to question buying decisions.

Focussed and decisive companies are the one’s that win in the market  – it’s the same with the employee experience. I talk about this in my book, Employee Experience. At the heart of the holistic employee experience (HEX), is the Truth – a company’s purpose, mission, and values. Technology platforms are there to enable and reinforce this Truth for each unique brand every day and in every way. If a company’s technology is clunky, cumbersome, or a chore to use, this will not contribute to a positive experience in work. In fact, quite the opposite will happen, and it will seriously hinder progress.

That’s why the scale and scope of the connectivity across the Microsoft ecosystem is as exciting as it is powerful. The full power of Microsoft 365 is behind Viva, which brings together a variety of mission critical elements including communications, knowledge, learning, resources and insights. The initial start point for the platform includes Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Topics.

A joined up employee experience platform

Historically, there’s no doubt that employee experience technology within companies has not been joined up in any meaningful way. Microsoft Viva offers an answer to this. It will be interesting to see how it develops to add even more value across the holistic employee experience in the future. The platform itself is feature rich and covers many important aspects of organisational life.

• Viva Connections: Empowers people to communicate, access curated and branded content, and access a personalised feed of relevant information.
• Viva Insights: Access privacy-protected analytics, data, and insights that support wellbeing and allow people to focus on the things that matter most to them.
• Viva Learning: A powerhouse for experiences that educate, train, and develop people. The combination of LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, and an organisation’s own content is potent. Additionally, the integration of other leading learning providers makes this is a rich and diverse learning environment.
• Viva Topics: An AI-powered organisational wiki that gives relevant company information to people fast.

Personalised the employee experience

Building on the strong foundations of Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365, this new platform feels like a natural step to take. It creates a more seamless integration between both Microsoft and third-party technology. The big emphasis here is a much more personalised approach. Microsoft Viva can enable people to curate and connect to experiences that make a difference to their work at any given moment.

What this means for the future of work

The last year has created gaps between people and companies. Collectively, we need to keep pushing boundaries around what is possible in the digital space. However, keep in mind that humans drive technology. Organisations that have strengthened relationships with their people during this challenging period have fully embraced and supported the human experience in all that they do.

If we’re talking about an employee experience platform, companies need to think more holistically about the quality of the experiences people have within and beyond work. Leveraging human-centered and experience-driven technology is always a wise move that has the potential to make a powerful impact on the experience of work. Microsoft Viva offers a glimpse of the future that we’re all now co-creating. I’ll be watching its development with a keen eye like everyone else who has an interest in helping people thrive at work.

Find out more

Discover Microsoft Viva

Build a people-powered workplace

Learn more about Ben

About the author

The post Unite your people with the right employee experience platform appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.