Anyone who has been around the technology industry for a while is familiar with the concept of “dogfooding.” “Eat your own dog food” is a phrase that has been in use at Microsoft since the 1980s, and it is common vernacular in the industry to describe the process of a company using its own products and services before they’re available in the market to power internal operations. The idea behind the metaphor may have been inspired by a 70’s era TV commercial—“The dog food is so good, I serve it to my own dogs.” In other words, when Microsoft uses it internally, we learn from that experience and use our insights to improve the product or service so it’s good enough for your business too.

As Microsoft has become more sophisticated in the way we build, test, deploy, and improve our products, equating the usage of our own solutions to eating dog food has become outdated. It doesn’t speak to the sophistication with which we obsess over the employee experience to ensure that our products and services don’t just meet the needs of our own employees, they exceed them. And by applying our internal learnings to improve our solutions, we ensure that we exceed the expectations of your employees also.

The new term to describe that employee obsession is “Customer Zero,” and in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we take pride in being the first customer for a wide variety of Microsoft products and services, obsessing over our own employee experience to make every person on the planet more productive.

Being Customer Zero at Microsoft

As the team that “powers, protects, and transforms the employee experience at Microsoft,” we are responsible for driving Microsoft’s own digital transformation in a hybrid world.

I asked Vijaya Alaparthi, principal group program manager, what it means to be Customer Zero at Microsoft. “It means that I get to represent the user voice and needs at Microsoft as well as enterprise users at large to help shape our products and solutions.”

But how do you do that?

“Part of this is establishing a shared vision, strategy and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) with multiple product engineering partners to accomplish our ’north star,’” Alaparthi says. “It also means that we get to co-develop select capabilities that not only help Microsoft users but also get integrated into our products.”

Being Customer Zero means a deep partnership between our IT organization and our product engineering to envision the right experiences, co-develop innovative solutions, and both listen to and act on insights we gather from our employees. We work together to stay grounded in the way our employees use our products every day, so your employees can benefit from our insights.

There are four dimensions of our Customer Zero approach that shape our investments:

Customer Zero at Microsoft

We envision highly transformative experiences for our employees, obsessing over their experience to improve the experience for every Microsoft customer.

We build, evaluate, and drive adoption for those experiences.

We deploy, govern, operate and support highly secure, compliant, and manageable experiences.

We are the voice of Microsoft’s own digital transformation, to share our experience and inspire our customers and partners through our own journey.

Being Customer Zero for Microsoft means continuously working to improve the experience our employees have at work.

Envision

The key to succeeding as Customer Zero at Microsoft is to envision the right experiences in the first place, then to use our insights and knowledge to influence the direction and development of those experiences. We do that in multiple ways:

• We listen to our global employees to better understand their needs, then work with product engineering to co-envision the right user experiences.
• We anticipate and address product requirements that other large enterprise customers will have, based on our experience managing large tenants at Microsoft.
• We research user needs, analyze feedback, and leverage insights to influence product design and development. In this way, we are the champions of the employee experience at Microsoft.

Build, Evaluate and Drive Adoption

Before Microsoft customers and partners ever interact with new products and services, we evaluate those products on your behalf, often co-developing solutions driven by our insights as Customer Zero. Once developed, we drive adoption of those solutions through structured change management programs to help maximize employee usage and value, unlocking the value of our own digital transformation.

• As the team that manages and deploys enterprise-level systems at Microsoft, we use our expertise to ensure that administrative capabilities and user experiences are built and optimized to maximize employee productivity.
• We leverage those same insights to ensure our solutions are secure and compliant with global regulations.
• As a result of envisioning or even in response to insights driven by internal deployments, we partner with our product group counterparts to drive innovative experiences into our products based on our experience as Customer Zero.
• We evaluate those same solutions to ensure their adherence to security, privacy, and other compliance requirements globally.
• Once built, we engage in structured, locally relevant change management to drive usage and to maximize the value of our investments in digital transformation. As a byproduct of our landing and adoption activities, we bring user insights back to our product groups to further improve our solutions.

Deploy, Govern, Operate, and Support

A key function of our role as Customer Zero at Microsoft is to operate and govern the tenants that power Microsoft. Through our operational processes and learnings, we can ensure the stability, scalability, and compliance of our employee experiences at a global scale, improving the experience for all users. Here are a few of the things we do:

• Monitor service health and invest in measures to maintain high levels of service uptime, sharing insights with our product group peers based on our learnings.
• Leverage user feedback and service analytics data to influence product development.
• Represent the “voice of information technology” at Microsoft, compiling and sharing feedback that improves manageability, scale, and supportability of our enterprise solutions.
• Facilitate security, privacy, legal, and other compliance reviews for enterprise-level solutions.
• Develop and enforce policies that reduce risk of data exposure and sprawl through tenant-level governance policies. We then share those same policies with our product group counterparts.

Evangelize

Near and dear to our hearts here at Inside Track are our efforts to evangelize and promote what we have learned as we continue our digital transformation journey at Microsoft. While Inside Track is a primary channel to share those learnings, our Microsoft Digital team also engages directly with customers and partners here in Redmond and across the world, while also engaging in CIO forums and other events. We do that to ensure that you, as a digital transformation leader, benefit from our insights as Customer Zero at Microsoft so we can be a conduit back to our engineering teams as we collect feedback and insights from our customers and partners.

A mindset, not a marketing slogan

As we in Microsoft Digital have continued to evolve, the Customer Zero mindset has become key to our own digital transformation. It is no longer good enough to just “eat our own dog food.” We obsess over every detail to ensure our employees are the most productive in the world. As a customer, you can have even greater confidence in our products and services since we’ve already run and tested our products at global enterprise scale and have channeled our own employee feedback and insights to improve the experience.

“Similar to IT organizations in many companies, we’ve become an increasingly strategic contributor to Microsoft’s product offerings,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “In our ‘Customer Zero’ capacity, we partner with product teams across the company to bring our employee experience vision to life. This includes doing some of the product engineering work ourselves, in close partnership with product teams. Everything we do as Customer Zero to obsess over the employee experience makes our employees more productive—and that extends to our customers through our products.”

These are still the early days in this newest chapter of our journey, but we are excited to share our progress so you can better understand how this approach improves the employee experience at Microsoft, and by extension, in your enterprise too.

Here are some of the top lessons we’ve learned as Customer Zero for Microsoft:

• As “Customer Zero,” we are the company’s first customer and works in tandem with product engineering to envision and develop the best possible employee experiences.
• Through our insights and usage, we influence product engineering to improve experiences, often co-developing solutions based on our insights.
• Your enterprise can also benefit from a Customer Zero approach, by obsessing over your own experience, listening to your employees, and proactively improving experiences prior to general availability.

• Read more about how we reinventing our employee experience in a hybrid world.
• Find out how our ‘born in the cloud’ thinking is fueling our transformation.
• Explore how our change management best practices helped us launch a business intelligence platform.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.
• Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post How Microsoft Digital improves its own employee experience—and yours—as Customer Zero appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Why change?

We realized that to help our customers transform through technology, we needed to transform the experience for our own employees. The investments we made in a reimagined employee experience enabled Microsoft employees to innovate, create, and collaborate seamlessly.

Our shift to the Microsoft Azure cloud made us more agile. But even with a forward-looking vision and people-centric investments, nothing could have prepared us for March of 2020, when Microsoft employees globally were sent home to protect their health and safety. The era of hybrid work had begun.

In this article, we share how we’re making hybrid work, work at Microsoft. Our goal is to help fellow digital transformation leaders learn from our experience keeping over 300,000 people productive, connected, and empowered around the world. It describes our journey from Microsoft IT to Microsoft Digital; how we’re helping Microsoft and our customers thrive in the hybrid workplace across digital experiences, physical spaces, and cultural norms; our investments in AI to revolutionize our IT infrastructure, employee experiences, and corporate functions portfolio; and building and driving adoption of transformative new technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Teams, and the Microsoft Power Platform.

Becoming Microsoft Digital

For years, Microsoft IT operated like a traditional IT organization—highly reactive to circumstances and more focused on the technology than the experience. Of course, we cared about the experience of our users, but it was mostly outside of our direct control, as we primarily deployed and sustained solutions built by other teams or other companies. In 2017, we adopted a new name—End User Services Engineering—which reflected our transition to a modern engineering organization. Our team was now “vision-led,” focused on building and deploying the right solutions to meet the needs of people, not just deploying the latest technology. We became proactive visionaries rather than reactive practitioners.

That transformation culminated with our transition to becoming Microsoft Digital. At the core of that transformation is an obsession with the needs of our employees that transcends tools and infrastructure and extends to the entirety of their daily experience, from the day they’re hired to their eventual retirement. We steward their digital experience through every dimension of their employment, ensuring they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure needed to be productive on the job no matter where they are or what they do.

While our journey to deliver a world-class digital experience for Microsoft employees began years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic unexpectedly enabled us to accelerate the evolution of our employee experience. Grappling with the pandemic gave us time and insights necessary to ensure that everyone at Microsoft has a great digital experience, whether they’re in the office or working remotely.

Subsequent sections of this article demonstrate how we’re bringing that vision to life for Microsoft’s global employees so they can thrive in a hybrid world.

Thriving in a hybrid world

Like most large companies, our shift to remote work happened almost overnight, with impacts to company culture, infrastructure, and processes that have lasted well beyond the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. The implications of hybrid work continue to resonate—from this moment forward, every investment needs to be considered through multiple dimensions of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces, and culture.

The sections that follow reflect on our journey at Microsoft across these three dimensions of the employee experience.

Digital capabilities

The pandemic and subsequent shift to hybrid work served as an accelerant to our efforts to revolutionize the employee experience for our employees and customers, with Microsoft Viva the centerpiece of that effort. In 2023, breakthroughs in generative AI enabled entirely new ways to support employee productivity, enabling Microsoft Digital to rethink “core” IT and to reimagine employee productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Additionally, other transformative investments in Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Power Platform, and many other technologies are helping us accelerate the transformation of our employee experience, while a Zero Trust security posture keeps our enterprise safe and secure and our employees productive. More on each of these investments follows.

Microsoft Viva

When millions of people globally left the office to work from home in 2020, it marked a tectonic shift in how employees experienced the workplace and how companies supported their own employees to keep them safe and productive during a pandemic. Among the millions were thousands of Microsoft employees, and our challenges are like yours—how do we stay connected, informed, and motivated as we transition to the new world of hybrid work?

Despite positive feedback from many employees about the new availability of flexible work options, our CEO Satya Nadella describes a hybrid paradox wherein employees want both more flexible work options as well as additional opportunities to connect and collaborate with colleagues in person. And there is also compelling evidence that as employees have fewer opportunities to expand their networks and make new connections, innovation suffers. This is where Microsoft Viva initially came to market as a single, coherent platform built around the employee. Ultimately, the initial goals were centered around employee connection, wellbeing, and productivity. Now, since Viva’s 2021 launch, that experience has since shifted, rapidly evolving to a present-day focus on business impact and performance, driven by global macroeconomic concerns.

Microsoft Viva has also introduced several new Viva apps since initial launch, and the Microsoft Viva deployment at Customer Zero now includes extra capabilities in support of the new focus:

At Customer Zero, we are looking forward to new incoming AI-enabled features across the Viva Suite and seeing how these capabilities improve the employee experience. In the interim, we are still capturing employee feedback and sentiment to continue to improve the capabilities across Viva for our employees and customers, and we’re excited for what the future holds for the platform.

• Employee Experience and Engagement | Microsoft Viva
• The Case for EXP

Transforming with AI

Employee productivity reached a new level in 2023 with the widespread use of AI. Microsoft 365’s generative AI has unlocked amazing new features that assist employees with essential tasks like composing emails, making presentations, summarizing meetings, searching for information, and more. The AI era has arrived!

AI offers new possibilities to improve employee experiences like never before, enabling seamless collaboration, personalized workflows, and simplified engagement across the organization. AI will simplify the many systems our employees must use and access, reducing daily work challenges, providing flexibility to perform tasks at any time and place, and enabling smooth cooperation in a hybrid work environment.

“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless. We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers,” says Nathalie D’Hers, CVP, Microsoft Digital.

In addition to those typical employee productivity situations, we see that AI can transform other IT services and spark a wave of innovation that can enhance outcomes, reduce costs, and boost productivity for employees everywhere. We are taking advantage of this moment to use the power of AI to simplify operations and enhance services across our vast portfolio. Our goal is to use our extensive expertise of enterprise IT to speed up Microsoft’s own AI transformation while helping our customers to leverage this generational opportunity to speed up their own digital transformation.

One technology that will be central to our transformation is Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot helps you create and edit documents, presentations, emails, and more with the power of AI. It can suggest content, formatting, design, and data based on your context and preferences. It can also help you collaborate with your team and access relevant information from various sources. Research shared by Microsoft’s WorkLab team showed that early adopters of Copilot have seen remarkable benefits to their productivity:

• 70% of Copilot users said they were more productive.
• 68% said it improved the quality of their work.
• Users were 29% faster in a series of tasks (searching, writing, and summarizing).
• 77% of users said once they had Copilot, they didn’t want to give it up.

Another key technology that will transform the employee experience at Microsoft is Microsoft 365 Chat. Microsoft 365 Chat will act as a core engagement hub for our employees, enabling Microsoft Digital to redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric. Microsoft 365 Chat will enable employees to access essential information in a summary fashion rather than as a multitude of search results, delivered through highly context aware and natural language Q&A while also performing tasks seamlessly.

We’re in the early days of designing these AI-powered employee experiences and will share more as our vision matures.

• Microsoft 365 Chat
• What Can Copilot’s Earliest Users Teach Us About Generative AI at Work?
• Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption

Hybrid meetings with Microsoft Teams

Our deployment, maintenance, and support of thousands of conference rooms around the globe is a significant challenge. Because employees often encounter different conference room technology—even within the same building—it can lead to frustration, delay, and even support calls. As we prepare for a return to the workplace, we’re preparing our physical and virtual capabilities for an improved hybrid meeting experience.

An unexpected result of remote work has been an increase in meeting experience satisfaction by 31 points. The primary reason for that increase in satisfaction is simple—universal remote meeting participation helps create an even playing field, with a more inclusive atmosphere for all. Remote participants are no longer at a disadvantage to their peers attending in person, and as a result feel more included in discussion and meeting outcomes. A key priority as we prepare for the hybrid work environment will be to retain that inclusive environment and employee satisfaction through a combination of changes to physical spaces, improvements in our digital capabilities, and establishment of cultural norms that codify beneficial behaviors that began during the pandemic.

One way we’re extending that momentum is by taking full advantage of the new features in Microsoft Teams as well as new hardware in meeting rooms, like intelligent AI-powered cameras that help everyone participate equally in meetings. We will continue to take advantage of Microsoft Teams features that drive interaction and participation like meeting chat, the “raise hand” feature, as well as reactions, emojis, and integrated GIF support ensure a productive and interactive meeting experience for all.

Microsoft Teams benefits from Copilot integration as well, enabling users to quickly recap, identify follow-up tasks, create agendas, or ask questions for more effective and focused meetings. Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium can summarize key takeaways, help employees see what they’ve missed, and even pinpoint key people of interest in chats.

We’re continuing to retrofit conference rooms to utilize the latest Microsoft Teams Rooms features and capabilities, and we’ll keep partnering with the Microsoft Teams product group to push the envelope with innovative new capabilities that take advantage of investments in hardware, software, and physical space to create immersive and inclusive environments. We’ll achieve that while being sensitive to cost, prioritizing employee value. Like our customers, we face budget constraints, but we invest when we’re convinced that we’re delivering sufficient value to our employees to justify the expense. Our goal is to improve our current meeting rooms at a global scale while selectively deploying high-end rooms in targeted locations based on need. In that way, we’ll modernize the experience for all our employees while also delivering maximum value to Microsoft.

• Buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology at the Hive
• Get started with Copilot in Microsoft Teams meetings
• Advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting guide

Microsoft Power Platform

While we have thousands of highly skilled developers and engineers at Microsoft, we also have thousands of employees who are not engineers by trade, but who contribute to our success as citizen developers using the Microsoft Power Platform.

Citizen developers use no-code/low-code solutions to accelerate digital transformation of their workstreams. At Microsoft, the technologies that comprise the Microsoft Power Platform empower literally anyone in the company to transform our employee experience. After all, who’s the person most likely to identify a process that could benefit from automation, or most likely to need to collect, visualize, and analyze data? It’s not normally someone in a central IT team—it’s the employee who is closest to the problem or opportunity.

The Microsoft Power Platform—as shown in this companion graphic—is comprised of four distinct capabilities that have made Microsoft more agile and productive than ever before.

Each tool is easy to learn and allows your team to enable digital transformation from the front lines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fueling innovation.

• Microsoft Azure sellers gain a data edge with the Microsoft Power Platform
• Powering decision making at Microsoft by analyzing data with Microsoft Power BI
• Rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Microsoft Power Automate

Securing employee experiences across devices, apps, and infrastructure

When the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the global economy in 2020, Microsoft was more prepared than most organizations, not because we had anticipated the pandemic, but because we had already done the work to shift nearly every critical workload to the cloud, implementing a Zero Trust security model. A cloud-first strategy is critical in a hybrid world.

Zero Trust security ensures a healthy and protected environment by using the internet as the default network with strong identity, device health enforcement, and least privilege access. It reduces risk by establishing strong identity verification, validating device compliance prior to granting access, and ensuring least privilege access (just-in-time, just-enough-access) to only explicitly authorized resources.

Zero Trust requires that every transaction between systems is validated and proven trustworthy before the transaction can occur. Ideally, the behaviors shown in this companion graphic are required.

The security threat landscape continues to change, with attacks on corporate networks increasing in frequency and complexity, partially as a byproduct of hybrid work. Through our Zero Trust security posture, Microsoft Digital plays a significant role in protecting our corporate assets and securing the enterprise while ensuring our employees have the best possible day-to-day experience. By implementing Zero Trust within your organization, you too can mitigate threats to your critical enterprise infrastructure.

• Implementing a Zero Trust security model at Microsoft
• Transitioning to modern access architecture with Zero Trust
• Zero Trust Model – Modern Security Architecture | Microsoft Security

Physical spaces and facilities

One of the three critical questions that all digital transformation leaders need to ask as they consider a return to the workplace is “What are the changes needed in the physical environment to support an inclusive and equitable approach to hybrid productivity?” After all, the best digital experiences mean very little if you don’t have the right physical spaces or hardware to maximize their potential for collaboration. And even more important than productivity is “How can I keep my employees safe and healthy?”

Between our Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) team and Microsoft Digital, we represent the “front door of Microsoft”— the technology and the facilities. The first impression employees and visitors have when they walk into Microsoft is the physical environment and the technology they interact with, and we want their experience to be amazing. As Microsoft Digital’s Becky West put it in her recent article:

Typically, technology is added to a building many years or even decades after building construction. For example, software for booking a conference room or reserving a campus shuttle is developed independently from an office building being built, bought, or leased. This model works OK. However, to truly transform, technology needs to be integrated into the building, which requires a tight real estate and IT partnership.

While Commercial Real Estate (CRE) leaders and digital transformation leaders see things through different lenses, when both functions are aligned on vision with shared priorities and implementation, accelerated transformation of the employee experience is possible. The following are some examples of the work we’ve done with our counterparts in GWS to enable new experiences:

• The lobby check-in experience is literally the first impression an employee or visitor has when they visit a Microsoft facility, and in a hybrid work environment it’s even more important to streamline and automate that experience. Working together, we built an amazing new guest management system, with streamlined check-in and optimized check-out procedures to help employees or visitors quickly get to their next destination.
• Through our Microsoft employee mobile app, we’re enabling several new capabilities in conjunction with GWS, including the ability to order ahead at Microsoft cafeterias, or book a conference room or workspace. Soon our employees will have the ability to find available parking near their assigned workspace or meeting facility.
• With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT connected devices, we’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft. By integrating inputs from previously siloed data sources (like motion and occupancy sensors), we’re evolving the way Microsoft employees interact with their spaces, with a focus on efficiency and productivity.
• With Microsoft Dynamics 365 running on Microsoft Azure, we’re working together to consolidate all facility management processes and provide them to our vendors.
• Working together, we built a simple-to-use health attestation app using the Microsoft Power Platform to ensure that our employees acknowledge their health and vaccination status before entering a Microsoft facility. Microsoft even released a version that’s free for eligible customers.

None of these capabilities would have been possible without a strong partnership with our real estate colleagues in GWS, supported by a shared vision of the employee experience. We’ve learned that working together on a shared vision informed by employee and industry data, carefully researched by user experience designers, and using our full portfolio of digital experiences leads to transformative outcomes.

By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help our employees thrive in the hybrid workplace.

• Creating the digital workplace at Microsoft
• Accelerating Microsoft’s global real estate transformation with Microsoft Digital
• Using Azure Digital Twins and IoT to modernize Microsoft buildings
• Transforming how Microsoft manages its corporate real estate data

Cultural norms

While investments in hardware and physical spaces are important, the greatest technology in the world won’t help unless people embrace best practices and apply consistent norms to ensure that all meetings are inclusive and that remote participants continue to have a great experience. While norms might vary based on your location, culture, and technical capabilities, digital transformation leaders should consider simple steps like those shown in this graphic.

These are just a few of the behaviors and standards to consider codifying as norms in your organization to support productive and effective hybrid meetings. For additional tips, please review this Tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world article. The following resources offer additional guidance, insights, and ideas for maximizing the productivity and effectiveness of hybrid meetings.

• How Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world
• Driving Inclusive and Effective Meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams
• Designing the New Hybrid Meeting Experience—for Everyone
• WorkLab Live: Andrew Wilson and Nathalie D’Hers on the future of hybrid work
• To Thrive in Hybrid Work, Build a Culture of Trust and Flexibility

Driving adoption of new employee experiences

An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change management services to ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In fact, the importance of change management is so great, it’s reflected in our organizational vision.

Microsoft Digital is fortunate to have a global team of change management practitioners to help ensure that our employees benefit from the value of our innovations. We’ve also benefited from the Microsoft 365 standardized approach to change management. This simple three-stage model can help teams of all shapes and sizes unlock the value of their investments in digital transformation.

In addition to practical guidance, case studies, and templates, Microsoft also makes available free courseware to develop your skills as a service adoption specialist. This is a great way to develop the skills your team will need to unlock the value of digital transformation in the hybrid workplace.

• Microsoft 365 Adoption – Get Started
• How Microsoft used change management best practices to launch a new business intelligence platform
• Driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience with investment prioritization

Conclusion

The world of work has changed dramatically in the last few years. The first big shock was hybrid work, and the next is generative AI. We’ve captured some of our key learnings from that journey in this article and hope they will inspire you as you consider your own pathway to the future of work.

Hybrid work is more than a change in technology—it’s a change in mindset, a change in culture, and a change in the way you think about physical and virtual spaces to enable an inclusive and productive environment for all. The change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. If you make the time to do it right, your employees will be more engaged, more productive, and more connected, even when they’re miles away. And they’ll be far less likely to leave for a competitor who has a more sophisticated and flexible model than you do.

Generative AI, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, has the potential to unlock creativity, productivity, and effectiveness in your workforce. Be bold in embracing AI in the workplace, so your employees have the tools they need to stay ahead of your competition.

The future of work will continue to evolve, and we’ll all learn along the way. As we continue our journey, we’ll keep you updated on our progress and learnings.

• Rethink your employee experience across your digital capabilities and physical spaces to meet your business needs in a hybrid world.
• Focusing on the three critical elements of the employee experience—digital capabilities, physical space and facilities, and organization culture—will help your organization to thrive in the hybrid workplace of the future.
• Microsoft Viva can help your employees find balance in the hybrid work environment, enabling you to retain talent in a competitive labor market.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot can unlock creativity and productivity in your workplace, while giving your organization an edge as AI becomes a key tool for organizational effectiveness.
• Use the Microsoft Power Platform to unlock innovation from your front lines by enabling your citizen developers to visualize and analyze data, build apps that address common business scenarios, and automate business processes.
• Adopting a Zero Trust security posture will keep your network secure and your employees safe.
• Build a strong partnership between your IT and real estate teams.
• Ensuring you have effective change management policies in place will help you extract value from your investments in digital transformation.

• Learn about Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Check out these hybrid work solutions for your hybrid workplace.
• Read this WorkLab story on vital facts about the future of work.
• Find out if we’re ready for the disruption that hybrid work is creating for us.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Reinventing Microsoft’s employee experience for a hybrid world appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

There are very few applications or services that have had the transformative impact that Teams has had at Microsoft. Every day, over 200,000 employees all over the world wake up, turn on their PCs, and start to collaborate with Teams. It’s hard to remember what Microsoft was like before Teams, but I know I wouldn’t want to go back!

—Eileen Zhou, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Microsoft Digital was there from the beginning, although at the time we were still known as “End User Services Engineering.” Our role as the company’s IT organization was to serve as Customer Zero of this critical new enterprise capability, deploying and governing the first enterprise-grade Microsoft Teams tenant to validate and improve Teams based on our first-party experience. As Customer Zero, we’ve learned a lot and influenced the Teams experience in the five years since Microsoft Teams was released. A few examples include:

• Shaping more natural and engaging meeting experiences.
• Providing feedback on fundamentals of the experience like performance, governance, and the overall user experience workflow.
• Enabling employees to connect seamlessly with those inside and outside of their organizations. Providing ways to make remote and hybrid meetings more impactful and inclusive, like Together Mode, Teams Speaker Coach, and Live Transcription.
• Creating new ways to collaborate seamlessly, like Microsoft Loop.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we recently shared Five ways Microsoft Teams has transformed Microsoft based on our learnings as Customer Zero.

“There are very few applications or services that have had the transformative impact that Teams has had at Microsoft,” says Eileen Zhou, principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “Every day, over 200,000 employees all over the world wake up, turn on their PCs, and start to collaborate with Teams. It’s hard to remember what Microsoft was like before Teams, but I know I wouldn’t want to go back!”

Three years after the launch of Microsoft Teams, the professional landscape was forever altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was Teams that kept Microsoft employees and millions of people globally connected and productive. As our CEO Satya Nadella explained on LinkedIn, “Every organization requires a digital fabric that connects people, places, and processes.”

Microsoft Teams isn’t just our platform for chatting or for making video calls. It’s our hub for teamwork across applications and devices. Teams literally makes hybrid work work at Microsoft.

—Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Digital

Microsoft Teams is the “digital fabric” that keeps Microsoft connected and collaborative across projects, devices, and even different geographies. This blog post describes how.

[Learn how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world. Check out a new Microsoft Teams app that is helping us facilitate employee connectivity in a challenging hybrid work environment.]

The center of Microsoft’s digital fabric

While those unfamiliar with the power of Microsoft Teams may think of it simply as the place they go for meetings or chats, it’s much more. It’s a cross-platform environment enabling seamless collaboration on any device at any time, which is a critical enabler of hybrid work.

“Microsoft Teams isn’t just our platform for chatting or for making video calls,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “It’s our hub for teamwork across applications and devices. Teams literally makes hybrid work work at Microsoft.”

The Microsoft Teams product group has a lot of improvements planned for the collaboration platform.

“The next few years are going to be pretty mind-blowing,” says Jeff Teper, Microsoft president for Collaborative Apps and Platforms, speaking at Microsoft Ignite 2022. “The thing that really matters is creating engaging experiences where people stay connected. Given that distributed work is very much here to stay, we’ve got to innovate and try new experiences beyond just video.”

Staying connected so hybrid teams can collaborate seamlessly is critical for any modern enterprise.

How is Microsoft driving innovation through Microsoft Teams? There’s already a lengthy list of Teams-based experiences that are helping hybrid teams to thrive, including Microsoft Loop for seamless collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Stream for enterprise video viewing and storage, Power Virtual Agents to easily incorporate intelligent chat bots, and Microsoft Viva: our Employee Experience Platform (EXP) that supports employee connections, insights, purpose, and growth.

Beyond those experiences, there’s more innovation on the horizon with Microsoft Teams Mesh, the metaverse, and additional investments in security, app integration, and the Microsoft Power Platform. We’ll explore each of those further in a little bit.

Keeping connected in a hybrid world

In Microsoft Digital, when we think about Microsoft Teams, we reflect on three phases of product usage and growth.

• The first phase ran from March of 2017, when Microsoft Teams reached general availability and ran until March of 2020. Over those first three years, usage grew rapidly, and Teams rapidly grew beyond being a platform just for synchronous communication and asynchronous chat.
• We’re still in the second phase, which began during the pandemic. Essential before the pandemic, Microsoft Teams is now the critical tool that enables Microsoft employees—and employees, students, and teachers globally—to stay connected.
• The third phase is right around the corner. Microsoft Teams will continue to propel Microsoft into the future as hybrid work becomes the new normal for information workers globally.

This growth and innovation are fueled by our feedback as Customer Zero and that of countless customers who are striving to invest in their employees and improve their hybrid experience.

Hybrid work (the second phase)

While remote and hybrid work existed prior to COVID-19, the pandemic acted as an incredible accelerator of trends we were already observing in the marketplace. As Satya said in May of 2020, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

How did that manifest?

• Microsoft Teams meeting usage increased 148 percent
• Chat usage increased 45 percent
• 6 billion more emails were sent
• Collaboration in Microsoft Office documents increased by 66 percent

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Work Trends Index, an annual survey of 30,000-plus workers across industries, to better understand the changing world of work. Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky shared the result of the updated index in September of 2022. The three key findings were:

1. Leaders need to end “productivity paranoia.”
2. They need to embrace the fact that people come in for each other.
3. Re-recruiting your best employees is possible by offering better learning and development support.

Digging deeper into each of these insights offers an opportunity to think differently about hybrid work:

• While 87 percent of workers indicate that they feel productive in a hybrid work environment, only 12 percent of leaders have confidence that their team is productive.
• Business leaders and managers expressed an overwhelming desire to have people in the office so they could interact with their teams. Seventy-three percent of employees say they need a better reason to go into the office than just company expectations.
• Employees at all levels are looking for companies that support their learning and development needs. Seventy-six percent of employees reported that they would stay at their company longer if they could benefit more from learning and development support.

The workplace of today is dramatically different than the pre-pandemic workplace, and Microsoft Teams is the digital fabric that’s enabling our employees to thrive by:

• Facilitating connection and productivity to keep people productive wherever they are;
• Keeping teams and people connected through chat and video calls;
• Enabling the discovery and consumption of learning opportunities through capabilities like Microsoft Viva Learning;
• Helping our leaders to stop worrying about the productivity of their remote and hybrid teams by ensuring they have all the tools to remain productive and connected on any device and at any time.

When I think of tools that give Microsoft a competitive edge in the marketplace, Teams immediately comes to mind. It’s the one place where our employees go to collaborate, communicate, and to stay connected. And the innovations keep coming to ensure that Microsoft—and our customers—maintain that edge.

—Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

Critically, Microsoft Teams is the enterprise-wide hub for content discovery, collaboration, and document co-editing. At Microsoft, we’ve observed that it can help to end the “productivity paranoia” that so many business leaders are experiencing.

How has Microsoft Teams evolved for hybrid work?

As one of the most important tools to keep teams connected globally, Microsoft continuously innovates with new features and capabilities released monthly. In fact, there were over 450 new features released in 2022 alone! A few recent standouts include:

• Microsoft Polls for quick check-ins. Presenters can now launch a poll without preparing in advance. Simply ask your question aloud and people can answer by selecting one of two answers (yes or no, thumbs up or down, heart or broken heart).
• Together Mode. This feature uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting.
• Background noise suppression. Helps those who have their microphone turned on in a Microsoft Teams meeting or call eliminate any background noises, allowing meeting participants to stay focused and less distracted.
• Your favorite apps. The app store in Microsoft Teams allows you to use tools you’re already familiar with directly inside your collaboration experience. The ability to extend this with custom, developed apps, written by your own organization, minimizes fatigue-inducing context switching.

Accelerating our hybrid work journey with Microsoft Teams

In addition to new features, Microsoft Teams is the digital fabric that brings together many of the most powerful elements of Microsoft 365 into a single canvas focused on collaboration.

“When I think of tools that give Microsoft a competitive edge in the marketplace, Teams immediately comes to mind,” says Sara Bush, principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital. “It’s the one place where our employees go to collaborate, communicate, and to stay connected. And the innovations keep coming to ensure that Microsoft—and our customers—maintain that edge.”

Now, we’ll share more details on some of the most powerful integrations that have accelerated our own hybrid journey and that have helped us to achieve that edge:

• Microsoft Loop. This new app designed for the hybrid workplace enables users to seamlessly collaborate as they move freely across Microsoft 365. Loop components enable hybrid teams to collaborate on things like lists, tables, or notes across any Microsoft 365 app, including Microsoft Teams, and there are more innovative experiences to come. Visit Microsoft Loop: Flexible Canvas App to learn more.
• Microsoft Stream. Video capture and viewing is an essential part of modern hybrid work, enabling asynchronous meetings that support flexible schedules and global teams. Stream makes it simple to capture, share, and measure the impact of video in your enterprise. Visit Microsoft Stream—Enterprise Video Platform to learn more.
• App integration. Microsoft Teams features powerful apps built by Microsoft that enhance user productivity and collaboration as well as a large catalog of third-party apps for many popular and useful services. It’s also easy to integrate Microsoft Power Apps. Visit Know about apps in Microsoft Teams to learn more.
• Shared channels. Does your team collaborate with individuals outside your organization? Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels enable users to seamlessly collaborate across organizational or company boundaries. Visit shared channels in Microsoft Teams to learn more.

We’ll be publishing deep dives into each of these new technologies soon to give you a better view into how these experiences are shaping our employee experience at Microsoft and how they can support yours too.

Upgrading your physical space

One surprising outcome of the move to hybrid work was the fact that satisfaction with the meeting experience increased during the pandemic. Why? The pandemic leveled the playing field for meeting participants. No longer were remote attendees disadvantaged while in-person participants had access to physical whiteboards, could read other’s body language, or more easily participate in discussion or Q&A. It was an eye-opener for all of us in Microsoft Digital and has informed our approach to space planning and Microsoft Teams development since.

That simple insight has led to breakthroughs that enable more immersive and effective hybrid meetings. One such breakthrough is the new Microsoft Teams Rooms front row layout, which is designed to enhance hybrid meetings and foster a greater sense of connection and collaboration for remote attendees and in-room meeting participants alike. Front row moves the video gallery to the bottom of the screen, showing virtual attendees at eye level with people inside the meeting room for a more natural face-to-face interaction—as if everyone were all in the same room.

Meeting chat and a rostered view of participants with raised hands are brought to the front-of-room screen, so people in the room can easily see the conversation and actively participate.

In Microsoft Digital, we’re partnering with our peers in Global Workplace Services and the Microsoft Teams Product Group to explore different physical and virtual layouts in our interactive Hive space. Read How Microsoft is rethinking the hybrid meeting room experience with Microsoft Teams to experience the Hive firsthand. And if you want to have some fun while becoming more skilled with hybrid meetings, read how we’re teaching Microsoft employees healthy hybrid meeting habits with Minecraft.

Hybrid meeting best practices

One area where Microsoft struggled, especially in the early days of the pandemic, was facilitating inclusive and productive hybrid meetings. While there are lots of different ways to ensure your meetings are inclusive, we’ve learned that if you just do these three things, you’re more likely to have meetings that your employees see as inclusive:

• Use a centralized audio device to ensure virtual attendees can hear clearly. Laptop microphones, especially if multiple devices are in use within a single room, can create distracting feedback or echo effects.
• Turn your camera on, even if you’re in the room, so folks can make eye contact and read body language. And if you’re uncomfortable leaving your camera on for the whole meeting, start with your camera on so you can make a connection with other participants if possible.
• Designate a moderator to bridge the digital/physical divide by looking for raised hands, comments or questions in the chat, as well looking for participants who come off mute (who may be trying to ask a question or make a comment).

For more tips, see Driving inclusive and effective meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.

Looking forward—the ‘third phase’

So, what’s ahead in the “third phase” of Microsoft’s Teams’ journey? Many exciting developments are just on the horizon, including a Microsoft Teams Premium option with a host of features to enhance user experience, additional Microsoft Power Platform alignment and integration, more secure meetings, and enhancements to infrastructure to support sustained growth. But perhaps one of the more exciting developments in Microsoft Teams is supporting the metaverse with Microsoft Mesh.

Microsoft Mesh for Teams

On the horizon, Mesh for Microsoft Teams will provide even more spectacular opportunities for collaboration and teamwork in the metaverse.

Here’s how Teper described Microsoft Mesh at Microsoft Ignite: “Mesh is our platform for building immersive experiences. It’s three things. Avatars in Teams, which is fun and a first step to more 3D experiences. Second is putting that avatar in a 3D space with other people and connecting it to 2D meetings to its inclusive and everybody can participate … and then we want people to create completely custom worlds to work and learn.”

The pace of innovation in Teams has been incredible, and it’s a huge point of pride in Microsoft Digital that we’ve been able to partner closely with our product team counterparts to build, test, and deploy so many of those innovative capabilities. And the pace will just continue to accelerate as we build the collaborative features needed to power teams into the future, like the incorporation of AI in Microsoft Teams Premium.

—Claire Sisson, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

The potential for building deep, immersive worlds that enable new and inclusive ways to collaborate in the hybrid workplace is obviously very exciting. And while these are  still the very early days for Microsoft Mesh (which is available currently only as a private preview), perhaps more than just about any other technology, Mesh has the potential of helping Microsoft to achieve its mission of “empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

While our journey with Microsoft Teams started years ago, it’s clear that this is just the beginning, and the best is yet to come.

“The pace of innovation in Teams has been incredible, and it’s a huge point of pride in Microsoft Digital that we’ve been able to partner closely with our product team counterparts to build, test, and deploy so many of those innovative capabilities,” says Claire Sisson, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “And the pace will just continue to accelerate as we build the collaborative features needed to power teams into the future, like the incorporation of AI in Microsoft Teams Premium.”

Since 2017, the pace of innovation with Microsoft Teams has been blistering, and Teams will continue to innovate to meet the needs of our employees, customers, and partners as the world adjusts to the new normal of hybrid work. We’re excited to be on this journey together, and even more excited to continue to influence the direction of Teams based on our experience as Customer Zero at Microsoft.

• Learn how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world.
• Check out a new Microsoft Teams app that is helping us facilitate employee connectivity in a challenging hybrid work environment.
• Find out how we’re teaching Microsoft employees healthy hybrid meeting habits with Minecraft.
• Learn how we drove the successful adoption of Microsoft Teams internally at Microsoft.
• See how deploying Microsoft Teams across Microsoft hinged on good governance.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams: Collaborating seamlessly, teaming up fearlessly appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

A positive culture along with personal wellbeing and mental health are among the top aspects of work that employees view as “very important” for an employer to provide. Many elements of hybrid workplace culture contribute to the success of an organization, including:

• Promoting employee wellbeing
• Fostering connection and fulfillment
• Improving meeting effectiveness
• Developing inclusive and adaptable hybrid work plans

At Microsoft, we’re evolving the employee experience to meet the needs of today’s digitally connected, distributed workforce. We’re using Microsoft Viva Insights and Glint as one way to assess and address the critical needs of the hybrid workplace and increase engagement, collaboration, and productivity for all our employees and for our managers and leaders.

[Visit our Microsoft Viva content suite to learn how we’re deploying Viva internally at Microsoft.]

Insights for individuals

We use the Personal insights feature in Microsoft Viva Insights to help our employees individually prioritize wellbeing and improve personal productivity in the flow of work. The statistics and insights that are generated from your data are for your eyes only. They give you recommendations and opportunities throughout your day that you can choose to act on. For example:

• The Microsoft Viva Insights Outlook add-in recommends that an employee book dedicated preparation time for upcoming meetings on their calendar. It provides a similar reminder after responding to a meeting invitation.
• An employee can wrap up tasks during a virtual commute and log off for the day, silencing mobile notifications from Outlook and Teams during their off-work hours.

Our employees’ personal data is always kept private. We want every employee to know that personal reflections, dashboards, and insights about their own work habits are always available only to them.

Insights for managers and leaders

Leaders and managers use Microsoft Viva Insights to leverage data in making informed decisions that promote employee wellbeing and business success. With Viva Insights managers and leaders gain a more profound understanding of how work impacts their teams and individuals, enabling them to evaluate their leadership practices and pinpoint opportunities for development. They can then take corrective measures, like developing shared focus plans to create positive changes in their teams.

Whether it’s for our managers and leaders, or for our employees, we’re very serious about privacy.

Privacy by design

Microsoft Viva Insights protects our users’ privacy by design. It analyzes data from everyday work in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Graph to surface objective metrics that describe how work gets done. Viva Insights uses de-identification, aggregation, and differential privacy to offer a balance between providing useful information and protecting individual privacy.

Differential privacy is an open platform for data differential privacy, developed in collaboration between Microsoft and Harvard’s Institute for Social Science. Differential privacy uses sophisticated methods for data variation and randomization to ensure that no individual activity or metric is visible to a manager or organization leader.

Microsoft Viva Insights also adheres to local regulations for data privacy, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Engaging employees and encouraging wellbeing

We want our employees to thrive. We’re focusing on wellbeing and productivity for all employees. We’re using the capabilities of Microsoft Viva Insights to provide our employees with actionable recommendations that help employees work smarter, build better habits, and achieve balance in the workplace.

Creating deeper engagement with Customer Zero

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small-and-midsized customers.

We collaborate closely with the Microsoft Viva Insights product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of the Customer Zero partnership, our implementation teams get early access to new features and a chance to provide input into the product roadmap. This enables our own internal experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Viva Insights development process.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft Viva Insights, we have a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with the Viva Insights product team and internal business groups such as Engineering, HR, and Finance. These internal business groups identify the challenges they are facing that Viva Insights could help to solve. This partnership grants us the ability to address these challenges through early and extensive feedback to the product team. For example, our implementation teams recognized early in our adoption process that we needed more granular admin controls to balance speed of deployment with the need to review new experiences in many EU countries. We continued to partner with the Viva Insights engineering team to develop these, and other controls, that we believe will enable even greater adoption and engagement by our customers globally.

Partnering for successful change

The journey to increased employee wellbeing and productivity with Microsoft Viva Insights involves our entire organization and the vision for a better understanding of our organization requires intentional strategies for change management, communication, and adoption.

Activating change in a large organization requires the correct stakeholders and partnerships across the organization. Executive sponsors, program managers, communications, IT specialists, early adopters and others were all critical to the successful deployment and adoption of Viva Insights within Microsoft.

So much of the core focus of Viva Insights is influenced by HR, by organization culture. Our focus is on wellbeing and productivity, but that can look different from organization to organization. Our HR teams were instrumental in helping define the specifics of what makes our organization work, from how we define the term manager to how employees might work across multiple teams and internal organizations.

—Steve Reay, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Together, we established clear agreement on critical aspects of the employee experience, aligning expectations, language, and focus for the implementation of Viva Insights. Some of these aspects included:

• How does the employee experience align with our purpose, brand, and culture?
• How do we support coaching, development, and optimization of the employee experience?
• Do employees feel empowered to set boundaries on work and home life?

The answers to these questions helped our teams align with existing cultural initiatives and the broader work culture fostered by Microsoft Human Resources, a key partner. Microsoft HR played an important part in communications and strategy for Viva Insights, and how Viva Insights integrated with our culture. Steve Reay is a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience.

“So much of the core focus of Viva Insights is influenced by HR, by organization culture,” Reay says. He emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all with Viva Insights. “Our focus is on wellbeing and productivity, but that can look different from organization to organization,” he says. “Our HR teams were instrumental in helping define the specifics of what makes our organization work, from how we define the term manager to how employees might work across multiple teams and internal organizations.”

We used a hybrid change management approach by using centralized communications alongside activities driven by local adoption teams. This hybrid approach helped simplify and unify overarching communications while allowing the local adoption teams to reinforce the messaging while aligning with local initiatives and work culture. Local change management was instrumental to creating the most effective, productive, and enjoyable employee experience with Microsoft Viva Insights while also ensuring local regulations data and privacy regulations were met.

Ensuring privacy and compliance with partnership

Our end-to-end collaboration with our workers’ councils is boosting Microsoft product and service rollouts in our European Union regions. For example, including employee representatives in the rollout process was critical in helping Microsoft Viva Insights accurately measure the pulse of our organization. Workers’ councils in our European regions played a significant part in our Customer Zero process and in our larger change management strategy for Viva Insights.

Deploying any new tool at Microsoft requires a thorough vetting of the technology to ensure that employees’ privacy is protected. Data privacy compliance regulations vary from region to region. In some EU countries and regions, our employees have formed workers’ councils—representative bodies elected by our employees and with whom we actively partner to ensure the appropriate review and implementation of workplace technologies, like Viva Insights.

Microsoft Viva Insights supports productivity and wellbeing by supplying behavioral data and intelligent recommendations directly to employees themselves. Private information doesn’t go beyond their own inboxes. Still, we needed our workers’ councils to sign off, both when we initially deployed Microsoft Viva Insights, and going forward, when we update it.

In this case, two related points help us partner well with our workers’ councils. First, the agile, modular design of Microsoft Viva Insights allows our product team to deploy new features without waiting for major product updates.

Second, because we work closely with them, we’re able to get our workers’ council representatives to quickly review new features and updates, and as long as they are aligned to core privacy and labor principles we’ve established in partnership with the works councils, we’re able to deploy them more rapidly than we could in the past. This is saving Microsoft employees hundreds of hours per year in EU regions and is speeding up overall deployment of new features.

If our workers’ council representatives raise concerns we cannot quickly address, we can use the assignment of the manager role to remove those experiences in the given country or remove the Microsoft Viva Insights Service Plan for those employees.

Putting Viva Insights to work

Microsoft Viva Insights has impacted internal business group team culture across the organization by enabling our teams to establish work patterns and expectations for the entire team. For example, one of our internal business groups teams set their work calendar from 9am to 3pm, Pacific Standard Time. They made a conscious choice to allow the team members to have breakfast and dinner with their families without worrying about work communications creating an interruption. They didn’t have to guess at time zones, and they didn’t have to make assumptions about when it was OK to send an email.

Having the preparation details for an upcoming meeting delivered directly to me not only improves my productivity, but it makes me more confident. It directly increased my wellbeing.

—Microsoft Viva Insights power user, Microsoft Human Resources

With Microsoft Viva Insights, the team has established a twice weekly focus time block of two hours for each team member. This choice and pattern make it easier for the team members to schedule focus time and know that they have the leadership backing to protect that focus time and establish the wellbeing rhythms that make them productive, the team also dedicates each Friday as a meeting-free day so the team members can focus on items that they might have outstanding before the week is over.

An internal power user within HR has been using Viva Insights in this context for the past 15 months.  “Having the preparation details for an upcoming meeting delivered directly to me not only improves my productivity, but it makes me more confident. It directly increased my wellbeing.”

The team has also been using Viva Insights to set objectives for habits that they want to build as individuals. One of the most common goals has been recognizing colleagues by sending Praise through Viva Insights. Each time a team member is in the Viva Insights interface, they are reminded to encourage and send praise to their team members. This builds sense of value, contribution, recognition, and value across the team.

Our adoption of Microsoft Viva Insights at Microsoft has been both based on integration with existing HR programs and building the product into the flow of work rather than driving it as a new tool or experience. Viva Insights supports and affirms behavior that improves wellbeing and productivity. In putting Viva Insights to work, we learned valuable lessons, including:

• Implementation and adoption are long term processes. Communication, education, and feedback mechanisms should be in place throughout the lifetime of Viva Insights to foster understanding and engagement.
• Integrating Microsoft Viva Insights with existing people, priorities, and practices that your organization is working toward is very helpful. Viva Insights meets employees where they work, enabling them to use commonly used tools like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams.
• Use a hybrid approach to change management with centralized and localized communication and encouragement. Support early adopters and share success stories and best practices.

Moving forward

We’re continuing to use Microsoft Viva Insights to guide individuals and teams toward better work habits and norms to improve productivity and wellbeing. Personalized insights provided to our employees help them to improve their wellbeing and productivity within the flow of work. Our organization is using broader insights to champion beneficial organization practices, bring our hybrid workforce together and address complex challenges our business is facing. However, we’re not done. Viva Insights is a catalyst for positive change at Microsoft, and we’ll continue working with the product group as Customer Zero to ensure that opportunities to assess and improve wellbeing and productivity increase for every Viva Insights customer.

When introducing Viva Insights to an organization some of the key takeaways would be:

1. Understand the needs and requirements of an organization to help land new experiences in the context of your company culture.
2. Identify executive sponsorship and gain commitment to help provide leadership, direction, and drive team accountability.
3. Change Management and communications are critical. Be proactive at addressing any privacy concerns employees may have.
4. Engage early with works councils and any regulatory bodies in all applicable countries you have employees based in. The early engagement is helpful as the process can take weeks or months to complete but the feedback from the reviews can also help you adjust your deployments plans to ensure all employees can enjoy the experience.

• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re fueling purpose-driven employee engagement and driving efficiency internally at Microsoft with OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

The post Fostering employee wellbeing and improving productivity at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Insights appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“I’m inspired by the transformative power of AI,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “I’ve been impressed with how quickly our employees have put it to work for them.”

She would know—her team just finished deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 to more than 300,000 employees and vendors across the world.

“The contents of this guide are based on the lessons we’ve learned deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at global enterprise scale. The tips and ideas you’ll read here will help you accelerate your own time to value so you can realize the same benefits as our employees.”

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to empower, enable, and transform the company’s digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. We also provide a blueprint for our customers to follow, and so have created this guide for deploying and adopting Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Are you an IT pro?

View the full version of this deployment and adoption guide here.

Download your own copy of our full guide here.

Download a copy of this executive version of this guide here.

 

This executive summary of the complete Adoption and Deployment Guide is broken into four chapters designed to accelerate your time to value with Microsoft 365 Copilot:

Chapter 1: Getting governance right: Responsible AI depends on it

Before you even begin your Copilot for Microsoft 365 implementation, you’ll want to consider how this tool impacts your data. Copilot uses Large Language Models (LLMs) that interact with data and content across your organization and uses  information your employees can access to transform user prompts into personalized, relevant, and actionable responses.

Giving your employees this level of access means proper data hygiene is a priority. At Microsoft Digital, we use sensitivity labeling to empower our employees with access while also protecting our data. Copilot for Microsoft 365 was designed to respect labels, permissions, and rights management service (RMS) protections that block content extraction on relevant file labels. That ensures private or confidential information stays that way.

Note: This chapter outlines the highly robust, best-case scenario we created for Microsoft, but we know not every organization has a fully deployed data governance strategy. If you’re in that position, don’t worry! You can use Restricted SharePoint Search to provide instant value and protection without exposing Copilot to all of your internal SharePoint sites.

Laying the groundwork with proper labeling

We’ve developed four data labeling practices that make up our foundation for appropriate policies and settings.

Responsible self-service
Enable your employees to create new workspaces like SharePoint sites, ensuring your company data is on your Microsoft 365 tenant. That enables your people to take full advantage of Copilot in ways that align with your organizational data hygiene while you keep your company’s information safe.

Top-down defaults
Label containers for data segmentation by default to ensure your information isn’t overexposed. At Microsoft, we default our container labels to “Confidential\Internal Only.” We use Microsoft Purview to manage this process.

Consistency within containers
Derive file labels from their parent containers. Consistency boosts security and reduces the administrative burden on your employees for labeling every file they create. Copilot will reflect file labels in chat responses so employees know the level of confidentiality of each portion of AI-created responses.

Employee awareness
We train our employees to understand how to handle and label sensitive data. By making your employees active participants in your data hygiene strategy, you increase accuracy and improve your security posture.

Self-service with guardrails

The data hygiene practices above form a foundation for compliance and security but backstopping those efforts through Microsoft 365 features adds an extra layer of protection. Here’s how:

Trust, but verify
Empower self-service with sensitivity labels but verify by checking against data loss prevention standards, then use auto-labeling and quarantining when necessary. We’ve configured Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to detect and control sensitive content automatically.

Expiry and attestation
Put strong lifecycle management protocols in place that require your employees to attest containers to keep them from expiring. We don’t keep items that don’t have an accountable employee, or that might not be necessary for our work.

Controlling the flow
Limit oversharing at the source by enabling company-shareable links instead of forcing employees to grant access to large groups. To enforce these behaviors, you can set default link types based on labels through Purview.

Oversharing detection
Even under the best circumstances, accidents happen. When one of our employees does overshare sensitive data, we use Microsoft Graph Data Connect extraction in conjunction with Microsoft Purview to catch and report oversharing.

International compliance: No size fits all

Europe has extra requirements in the form of EU Data Boundary regulations and works councils, organizations that provide employee co-determination on workers’ rights or regulatory issues. Our Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment meant we needed to partner closely with our Microsoft works councils to address complex data and privacy implications.

Your experience will vary depending on your industry and where you operate, but we’ve learned that it’s best to work closely with local subsidiaries to ensure you have a complete picture of a region’s regulatory situation. Local insiders are poised to liaise with works councils (here’s how we do so internally at Microsoft) or other bodies through direct relationships. Start the process early so you can manage feedback cycles effectively and resolve any concerns through configurations that work for your employees.

Learning from Microsoft’s governance, security, and compliance practices

Bring the right people into the conversation
Don’t keep this conversation in the IT sphere alone. Bring in all the relevant security, legal, and compliance professionals.

Build a foundation for automation
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention has powerful intelligent detection, but it relies on establishing good defaults.

Think about how your employees will use Copilot
Determine the primary use cases. The kinds of collaboration and access employees need will affect your labeling architecture.

Take this opportunity to train employees
If you’ve been looking for an excuse to refresh employee knowledge around data privacy, let this moment be your milestone.

Don’t overwhelm your employees
Make labeling easy and intuitive, and ensure it isn’t overwhelming.
Employees should have a limited set of choices to keep things simple.

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

At the time of our deployment, we were the first company to do so at scale, and our implementation team had to choose from different licensing strategies. We’ve learned from experience that it makes sense to start with pilot groups who can validate the experience and enable the rest of your organization. At Microsoft, that looked like:

Scaling out your licenses

After you decide on the general shape of your rollout, you can begin building your licensing strategy. In Microsoft Digital, we started with individual licenses at the single-user level. As our implementation scaled, we tied licensing automation to Microsoft 365 groups to implement targeted licensing changes at scale. Those groups could include subsets of employees or entire organizations within Microsoft, and we keyed our automation logic to their expanding and contracting eligibility.

We highly recommend defining a phased rollout strategy and structuring your groups accordingly. That creates accountability and gives your IT admins a crucial point of contact for understanding the licensing needs of different groups within your organization.

There are three primary benefits to using groups:

Optimize licensing costs
Create groups that reflect your business needs and goals that are aligned with your respective business sponsors. Sync your licensing status changes with your group membership changes. That way, you can assign the right licenses to the right users and adjust easily if you require frequent changes (e.g., in your early initial validation phase) and avoid paying for licenses you don’t need or use.

Refine admin costs
Group-based licensing enables your admins to assign one or more product licenses to a group. This depends on your rollout strategy and progress—your admins will be able to streamline your group setup at scale, reducing your admin overhead, which is helpful considering all the licenses you likely need to manage.

Enhance compliance and security
This ensures that only authorized users are licensed and have access to resources, enhancing your security and compliance. Your admins can use audit logs and other Microsoft Entra services to monitor and manage your group-based licensing activities.

Pre-adoption communications

Given the excitement around AI, one of the biggest challenges during our phased implementation was support requests from employees not within our initial pilot groups. Most of our support requests at this stage were essentially asking, “When do I get access?”

You can easily avoid the issue through clear and honest communication. For example, when you alert your initial implementation groups about their Copilot access, you could simultaneously deploy “Coming soon” emails to the rest of your organization. That will help you avoid any confusion while simultaneously generating excitement.

Your IT implementation team can’t work in isolation. Communication, especially with organizational leadership, is a key part of your licensing and implementation strategy.

Learning from Microsoft’s implementation

Design for the “who”
When you determine your initial cohorts, base your decisions on which roles have the largest coverage and will provide the most relevant feedback.

Get your groups in place
Be thoughtful about your Microsoft 365 groups and make sure everyone knows who owns them and who’s responsible.

Engage your support team from the start
This is a new technology, so your support teams will receive requests. Ensure they’re ready by giving them early access.

Manage expectations to minimize blowback
Proactively help users understand why they have licenses or don’t. Note that your rollout strategy might be subject to change.

Bring leadership on board early
Executive sponsorship isn’t just useful for adoption. Leaders will also help you identify the key use cases within their organizations.

Experience feedback at every level
Encourage feedback for employees in your early implementation phases because that will guide your wider adoption efforts.

Chapter 3: Driving adoption to accelerate value

The fact that your employees are excited about trying out Copilot isn’t enough. We found that you need strategic, coordinated change management to drive usage and adoption.

To do this effectively, you will need to empower change agents in your organization. These are not part time roles; they are dedicated resources across your company who are responsible for the change management function, including creation of a deployment and adoption plan, facilitating principled change management practices, communicating and engaging with employees, preparing employee readiness and learning opportunities, then measuring the success of your deployment across the enterprise. At a high level, your strategy should consist of the following five steps.

Focusing on change management is key when you deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365.

How Microsoft Digital drove adoption

At Microsoft, we broke our company-wide adoption efforts into cohorts, for example, subsidiaries or business groups. Depending on the size of your enterprise, you may benefit from this approach as well. We divided our adoption along two vectors: internal organizations like legal or sales and marketing, and regions like North America or Europe. Different cohorts have different focuses, but the strategy is similar. At Microsoft, we did this in four phases:

Get ready

Effective change management requires careful planning. Begin by identifying and then working with company-wide change management leads. Next, identify members of your target cohorts who will support the adoption, including change managers, leadership sponsors, and employee champions.

Champions will be crucial to your adoption by filling several powerful roles:

• Pinpointing key usage scenarios for Copilot based on their cohort’s culture or processes.
• Providing insights that help adoption leaders build out their rollout plans.
• Most importantly, demonstrating the value of Copilot and showing their peers how powerful this tool can be in their day-to-day work.

When champions socialize their tips and tricks, our experience at Microsoft Digital has revealed that it’s best to share specific prompts and the value they provided as a concrete entry point for users. For example, a champion could say, “I saved three hours drafting this sales script in Microsoft Word using this prompt,” then share their Copilot prompt as a place for peers to start.

Works councils also play a key role at this stage. They offer the benefit of local cultural expertise and can help you identify the challenges employees face in their jurisdiction. Even something as simple as understanding proper modes of address helps smooth the road to adoption through effective communication.

Each of these sets of stakeholders has a role to play in leading your own rollout. We recommend using Microsoft Copilot adoption resources to build out your own adoption plan.

Onboard and engage

At Microsoft, we implemented this phase across each adoption cohort. Because every group will have its own champions and leadership sponsors, it’s important to treat each of them as its own organization, with its own unique adoption needs.

In advance of our general rollout, we created “jump-start” communications with links to learning opportunities:

• Localized training took the form of Power Hours in different languages and time zones. These training sessions demonstrated key Copilot scenarios across Microsoft 365 apps.
• Self-learn assets included user quick-start guides, demo videos, and Microsoft Viva Learning modules to accommodate different learning styles and preferences.

Pre-rollout communications fulfill two needs. First, this messaging is a great opportunity to launch your champion communities. Second, these communications build your employee population’s desire and excitement for their incoming Copilot licenses, then prepare them to hit the ground running when they get access.

After your Copilot licenses are live, your launch-day welcome comms are straightforward. Invite employees to access Copilot and to start experimenting with how it can fit into their work. There are many possible vectors for deploying these communications, but a multi-pronged effort that includes Microsoft Viva Amplify will deliver the maximum impact.

For support in building out your own communication plan, our adoption team has created a user onboarding kit for Copilot. These ready-to-send emails and community posts can help you onboard and engage your users.

Deliver impact

After everyone has access, it’s time to promote Copilot usage and ensure all employees are having the best possible experience and gaining the most value. For Microsoft’s cohorts, employee champions and leadership sponsors were essential levers.

It’s important to remember that Copilot isn’t just another tool. It introduces a whole new way of working within employees’ trusted apps. In Microsoft, we took great care to encourage employees to adapt a mindset to see it as part of their daily work—not just something they play with when there’s time.

Microsoft Viva Engage, or a similar employee communication platform, is a helpful forum for peer community support. In our case, it provided an organic space for champions to share their expertise and change managers to provide further recommendations and adoption content. For employees who explore best on their own, Copilot Lab provides in-the-flow learning opportunities to build their prompt skills.

Meanwhile, leadership sponsors diversified our communications strategy by deploying and amplifying messaging through executive channels like org-wide emails or Viva Engage Leadership Corner posts.

Extend and optimize

Understanding overall usage patterns and impact is crucial to optimizing usage. Our Microsoft Digital team used a combination of controlled feature rollout (CFR) technology while tracking usage through Microsoft 365 Admin Center and the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights. Together, these tools gave us the visibility and tracking we needed to establish and communicate adoption patterns. Meanwhile, IT admins and user experience success managers can access simple in-app feedback through Microsoft 365 Admin Center. But to really maximize value, our Microsoft Digital employee experience teams conducted listening sessions and satisfaction surveys.

All these insights are helping us establish a virtuous cycle to drive further value and better adoption for future rollouts, extend usage to new and high-value scenarios, incorporate Copilot into business process transformation, and understand custom line-of-business opportunities.

Driving user enablement with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Digital used Microsoft Viva to help enable our 300,000+ global users. Microsoft Viva is an Employee Experience Platform that brings together communication and feedback, analytics, goals, and learning in one unified solution. Microsoft Digital used Viva across a range of change management scenarios, including building awareness, communicating with our employees, providing access to readiness and learning resources, and measuring the impact of our deployment.

A few specific ways we used Viva to accelerate employee adoption are shown below.

We’re using Microsoft Viva to power employee adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 365 here at Microsoft.

Learning from Microsoft’s adoption efforts

Cascade adoption efforts through localization
Regional differences, priorities, even time zones can all block your centralization efforts. Your adoption leads in each cohort can help.

Empower your employee champions with trust
Monitor your user-led communities at the start. As this community of power users becomes product experts, they’ll take over.

Encourage employees to innovate
You’ll be surprised by what your employees dream up. Provide every opportunity for them to share their favorite tips and usage scenarios.

Create excitement, but set expectations
Encourage a healthy mindset around what Copilot can accomplish and where it fits. Don’t overpromise.

Gamify learning to build engagement and experience
Friendly competitions or cooperative challenges like prompt-a-thons generate excitement and invite creativity.

Understand that AI is emotional for many
Overcome AI hesitancy by encouraging employees to tackle easy tasks with Copilot assistance. That will help minimize reluctance.

Use Microsoft Viva to accelerate time to value
Viva supports user enablement through learning, effective
communication, usage tracking, and employee sentiment.

Chapter 4: Building a foundation for support

Empowering employees means making sure they have access to the right support channels. The fact that Copilot operates across a wide spectrum of Microsoft 365 apps adds complexity to support scenarios. As a result, it’s important to get your support teams early access along with your earliest pilot implementations. For Microsoft Digital, four principles define high-quality support:

Strategizing for support

Building experience and knowledge is one thing, but coming up with your approach to support requires planning and a strong idea of your users’ ideal experience. At Microsoft Digital, we take a “shift-left” approach. That means we save our human support staff time by attempting to create excellent self-service options for our users.

Shift-left principles can apply to many different support contexts, but with Copilot, we’ve found that the most important upfront action is ensuring your employees have accessible self-service support channels and communicating their availability. Work with your adoption teams to ensure they include self-service support options in their rollout communications.

Seven things we learned while preparing to support Copilot for Microsoft 365

Preliminary access
Select your initial support specialists. Include people with different Microsoft 365 app focuses, support tiers, and service audiences.

Communication hub
Establish a community space where your support team can connect and collaborate on issues. Invite non-support professionals as needed.

Knowledge base
Start a collaborative document and add learnings. This will eventually evolve into your knowledge base for internal support.

Widen access
Host information sessions with the wider support team and extend access so all relevant support professionals can ramp up.

Rehearse
Conduct role-playing and shadowing sessions so support teams can build practical knowledge and confidence.

Support go-live
Get your support resources and processes ready and push them live in advance of your Copilot deployment. Consider a dry run.

Track
Determine a tracking cadence and gather data on Copilot issues that arise so support teams can identify trending issues and tickets.

Common questions, issues, and resolutions

We’re getting questions about why particular employees don’t have licenses.

• Use employee change management communication waves to solve for this issue by alerting employees when they’ll have access to licenses.

Users are coming to us with questions that would be better served by adoption and employee material, and that isn’t our role as support.

• Work with your adoption team to preempt these issues with proactive communications. Update your self-help content and provide your support agents with ready access to different employee education resources.

Teams are looking for integration support. Where do I send them?

• Share this list of pre-built connectors to help your users integrate various data sources to Microsoft Graph. This list shares the types of content supported.

Can employees put confidential information into Copilot?

• If employees are signed into Copilot with their Entra ID, they can enter confidential information.

My organization has concerns about who owns the IP that Copilot generates. Does the Microsoft Customer Copyright Commitment apply to Copilot?

• Microsoft does not own the IP generated by Copilot. Our universal terms state “Microsoft does not own customers’ output content.”

What’s the best way to verify the accuracy of the information Copilot provides?

• Copilot is transparent about where it sources responses. It provides linked citations to these answers so the user can verify further.

Applying Microsoft’s lessons to your own Copilot deployment

Embarking on your Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment journey might seem daunting, but by capitalizing on the lessons that Microsoft Digital has learned from Microsoft’s internal deployment, you can both speed up the process and avoid any pitfalls. By anchoring your work in careful planning and making use of the steps and resources provided in this guide, you can unleash a new era of productivity through Copilot.

“Deploying Microsoft Copilot internally has inspired us to dive deeper into the power of AI assistance, which is enabling us to enhance our employee experience,” says Claire Sisson, principal group product manager at Microsoft. “With the lessons we learned from our deployment, we’re confident that we can support businesses around the world achieve more through the next generation of intelligent experiences.”

 

You’re not in this alone. If you’re looking for support or knowledge on any aspect of your deployment, reach out to our customer success team.

Learn how to get ready for Copilot for Microsoft 365 at your company.

• Deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at Microsoft
• Getting the Most Out of Generative AI at Microsoft with Good Governance
• Access the Copilot scenario library to understand different user needs and opportunities.
• Gain insights from the Microsoft Copilot dashboard from Viva Insights
• Take part in user Enablement Strategy training or watch the session on demand.
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 technical readiness guide
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 training content map
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 user experience strategy document

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Copilot for Microsoft 365 for executives: Sharing our internal deployment and adoption journey at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Viva Connections is our gateway to our employee experience. It’s a hub from which our employees can move through the many different parts of their work experience throughout their day. It’s their single place to connect with news, conversations, and resources from across the organization, personalized for each employee through AI and organizational information.

With Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what’s happening in our organization, at every level that applies to them.

—Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Human Resources

A unified experience is at the core of Microsoft Viva Connections. We use it to consolidate resource access across a huge array of company resources and touchpoints, including SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Graph, and other Microsoft 365 apps like Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft Stream.

We want it to be the first place our employees go to get informed about the company and their work at Microsoft.

“Microsoft Viva provides an experience for our employees that goes where they go; it’s like their mobile office—everything is right there in Viva, whether they’re learning at work, communicating with others or getting insights about how their team is doing,” says Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva in Microsoft Human Resources. “With Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what’s happening in our organization at every level that applies to them.”

Kaplan highlights the way Microsoft Viva Connections has ingrained itself into the everyday employee experience at Microsoft.

“Viva Connections puts the employee at the center and provides the information and tools that are most important to them. It has access to building location information, and I can see which food trucks are nearby for lunch,” Kaplan says. “I can start a maintenance request for something like the air conditioning not working correctly. I can contact TechLink to troubleshoot a technical issue I’m having. It’s all right there, accessible from the Viva Connections Dashboard.”

The Microsoft Viva Connections dashboard is the primary portal into what’s happening in an employee’s day and in the organization. It provides a centralized location to find and act on company tasks and specific action items for their job. The dashboard uses dynamic cards that employees can interact with to do things like complete simple tasks or review critical data. It’s authored in SharePoint and published to the Viva Connections app within the Teams mobile experience or to the employee’s desktop.

The feed aggregates news and conversations into a single place where they can stay on top of everything they need to know. It delivers updates with powerful targeting and scheduling capabilities. The feed enables you to efficiently reuse and aggregate existing news items and posts from SharePoint, Microsoft Viva Engage, and Microsoft Stream resources.

The resources page consolidates resources for users across the digital workplace, including resources on other platforms and sites using a familiar SharePoint-like navigation.

[Visit our content suite: Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva. See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.]

Building on our history of employee focus

Microsoft is the first and best customer of its own products. We are “Customer Zero.” As a large enterprise customer and employer, many of the issues Microsoft faces when deploying its own products are not unique. They are shared by other large multinational enterprises, and even by small and midsize customers.

Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) has been deeply invested in employee experience for years. Our involvement in Microsoft Viva Connections began several years ago when we developed MyHub, an internal app for Microsoft employees that enabled them to connect to the Microsoft company, culture, and mission.

We wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company.

—Kirkland Barrett, principal group product manager, Unified Employee Experience

Kirkland Barrett is the principal group product manager for Unified Employee Experience in MDEE. His team was responsible for the creation and deployment of MyHub to Microsoft employees more than four years ago. A team was created with members who tackled the project from their various perspectives—program management, engineering, design, and research.

“When we began, our leadership was championing this employee-focused approach to how we do things as an organization,” Barrett says. “So we set out to deeply understand and invest in improving the employee experience.”

The vision for MyHub was bringing everything that our employees want and need to do.

“We wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company,” Barrett says.

There were many different apps and touchpoints for those experiences before MyHub. Barett’s team wanted to put them in a single, employee focused app. They put employees at the center. A big part of that was reevaluating the many design teams, delivery channels, and interaction methods that were used to create interaction with Microsoft employees.

“We had a fragmented and disconnected set of tools and interfaces before MyHub,” Barrett says. “The experience was inconsistent for our employees, and it was often hard to find them in the first place.”

Out of this vision for a connected and unified employee experience came MyHub, a mobile app that Microsoft employees adopted rapidly and used extensively across the organization. As MyHub grew and matured and added functionality, momentum for the app grew, and it became a mainstay for Microsoft employees to interact with each other and the organization in dozens of ways.

Microsoft Viva Connections has become the next evolution of MyHub but extended for the rest of the world. As Customer Zero for Viva Connections, we have a unique opportunity to not only inform product development but to contribute to the evolution of one of our key projects, MyHub, as it transforms to fulfill the needs of Microsoft’s external customers. It’s a perfect example of how our own internal challenges and innovative responses are directly relevant to our customers and lead to Microsoft creating better products.

The co-development process between the Microsoft Viva Connections product team and our MyHub engineers at MDEE is one of the most integrated and cooperative examples of Customer Zero engineering at Microsoft. When MDEE designed MyHub, it was built for Microsoft, so many of the features and capabilities were created specifically for the Microsoft context.

How we do business, what’s important to our organization, how we treat our employees––all of these went into the design and development of MyHub, which meant that we could precisely focus in on feature design and how we wanted the app to provide a unified experience at Microsoft. Microsoft Human Resources (HR) was a big partner in helping us to understand the employee experience and what we wanted to accomplish holistically.

While these factors helped us design a product unique to Microsoft, it also helped our engineering and HR teams understand what made Microsoft unique. When the Microsoft Viva Connections team began development, using MyHub as a starting point, we had a clear idea of which parts of the MyHub experience would work well for the general public and which parts didn’t need to make the jump from MyHub into Viva Connections.

MDEE, the MyHub team, and Microsoft HR have provided feedback and assistance based on the four years of experience working in the employee experience space. Our collaborative effort with the Microsoft Viva Connections design team helped us adopt design features like notifications, naming, organization, taxonomy, and adoption. We’ve also contributed to many improvements and created new features in Viva Connections, including these:

• Performance improvements
• Best practices such as domain isolation, caching, and shared library features
• Accessibility and reliability improvements
• Camera integration and image upload capability
• Locations support
• Feedback mechanisms and enhanced metadata

As development continues, our MyHub engineering team is providing important feedback to the product group on the experiences our employees have with Microsoft Viva Connections. We have moved all the MyHub employee experiences we had planned to move, and our Microsoft employees are using Viva Connections for their daily needs.

Implementing Microsoft Viva Connections

Microsoft Viva Connections empowers and engages Microsoft employees at the frontline of their hybrid work experience, connecting them to the mission of the organization, each other, and the tools they need most. Here are a few examples of how Viva Connections is practically influencing the employee experience at Microsoft:

• In Viva Connections, we have an adaptive card for training. Learning is core to our culture and the primary component of our growth mindset. The training card surfaces training opportunities and obligations for each employee, encouraging them to learn, build skills, and improve their capability.
• We use Viva Connections to provide basic but valuable information to our employees, like details about their compensation and benefits. Our employees can access a card that provides current and historical information about their pay stubs, deductions, and other pay details. These are provided within the context of the cards, rather than forcing employees to sign in to a separate payroll system and use another interface to get that information.
• Our employees can connect directly to Digital TechLink, our integrated technical support system. In Viva Connections, employees can initiate a help request, communicate with support, and track the progress of any requests they have in process.

Moving from a custom solution to a commercially available product has simplified the way we support the employee experience at Microsoft. Working with a custom app that we had to manage and deploy to hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe created an entire level of process for design, development, source control, and deployment. This included tasks like maintaining versioning, publishing to app stores, and managing access for employees. With Microsoft Viva Connections, we no longer need to manage the app, just use it. It’s already available across the app stores our employees use, and that entire level of process and effort has been removed from our teams, allowing us to focus on the employee experience and implementing Viva Connections in the best way possible for Microsoft.

We realize many benefits from using Microsoft Viva Connections to unify our employee experience. Some of the most important implementation benefits include the following:

• The organization can tailor the experience for targeted employee groups—like frontline workers or people in specific regions or roles.
• We can add custom components that enrich the employee experience, using no-code configurations or powerful developer frameworks.
• We can integrate investments you’ve already made in partner solutions from leaders like Workday and ServiceNow.
• Microsoft Viva Connections and its experiences leverage the investments we’ve already made in Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, Microsoft Viva Engage, Microsoft Stream, and Microsoft Teams. It’s backed by security, compliance, and identity controls that enable us to build an employee experience you can trust.

We’re continuing to engage our employees with Microsoft Viva Connections, providing them with a unified employee experience at Microsoft. We’re also working as Customer Zero with the Viva Connections design team to build experiences into Viva Connections that benefit Microsoft customers, including day planning, compensation and benefits tools, more approval workflows for invoices, expenses, and vacation time, and many other scenarios.

We’re also working with the design team to include new capabilities, including dynamic language support, additional Microsoft 365 sources for the Feed, allowing multiple instances per tenant, and adding additional interactivity for dashboard cards.

As Customer Zero, we’re sharing our employee experiences with customers to accelerate their adoption of Microsoft Viva Connections. We’re working with the Microsoft Viva development teams to innovate, influence, and pressure test the Microsoft Viva platform, moving it forward to create employee experiences that empower our customers.

The user experience framework that we’ve built and loaded into our Microsoft Viva Connections experience is open source and now available in Git Hub so customers can use it to help them develop similar experiences for their employees.

We’re enhancing the accessibility of both Microsoft Viva Connections the product and our deployment of it. We’re also adding employee and customer listening capabilities to the product, which will allow us to use their feedback to improve the experience for everyone.

• Click here to learn more about Microsoft Viva Connections.
• Visit our content suite: Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.
• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

The post Deploying Microsoft Viva Connections internally at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.