Ensuring compliance doesn’t have to be a roadblock—just ask the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany. This group of employee representatives has partnered with their employer, Microsoft, to speed up how the company develops and deploys new products and services to its employees, a story that resonates with customers who have similar challenges at their companies.
Across Europe, workers’ councils are responsible for representing employees and protecting their rights. Elected from a company’s workforce, representatives protect against misuse of employee data and ensure compliance with local employee related law. Germany’s workers’ councils are among the most well-established in Europe, so they’ve become leaders in the conversation around employee data usage.
In the past, when Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, wanted to deploy a new tool or service in Europe, the Microsoft workers’ councils in countries/regions there would undertake a lengthy, product-wide review process to ensure it didn’t violate employee rights. Any features that made personal, behavioral, or performance data usable to the organization triggered extensive reviews that could take up to a year and a half to complete.
The Microsoft Digital team, charged with deploying new features and services, needed a way to avoid delays and rollbacks while meeting regulatory obligations across all of Europe.
We have new functionalities every couple of weeks. We’re moving away from separate applications and toward platform thinking where everything is in one environment, for example in Teams or Dynamics 365. And then we’re adding modules, which means we have to think differently about how we review.
—Anna Kopp, regional director, Microsoft Digital
The solution?
Microsoft Digital, in partnership with Microsoft Human Resources and the company’s legal team, developed a collaboration with the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany that would triage and streamline approvals and then take that framework and use it to inspire similar collaborative efforts across all the countries that have workers’ councils.
[Learn how Microsoft is building an employee-centric experience. Experience the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft. Find out how Microsoft reinvented the employee experience.]
Building a process for success
Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company, started by grappling with how agile software development has changed the nature of deployment—moving toward modular releases for individual features within larger platforms, which dramatically sped deployments up because it avoided lengthy, product-wide reviews.
“We have new functionalities every couple of weeks,” says Anna Kopp, regional director of Microsoft Digital in Germany. “We’re moving away from separate applications and toward platform thinking where everything is in one environment, for example in Teams or Dynamics 365. And then we’re adding modules, which means we have to think differently about how we review.”
The Microsoft Digital team undertook a full inventory of existing tools and categorized them by how they interact with employees’ private information. Features that presented no risk to employee privacy received expedited approval, so the team could move on to modules that share workers’ information in one way or another.
For those features, the team collaborated with the workers’ council to determine what components needed closer scrutiny. Does a tool’s contact card reveal an employee’s org chart? Does it employ gamification or stacked ranking? Are there red, yellow, and green indicators attached to employee names—no matter how benign their intentions?
Each of these elements has implications for how employees’ personal information and behaviors appear or how others might interpret their performance. As a result of their review effort, the team developed a review process for new features Microsoft plans to release.
First, the team must confirm the feature interacts with employees’ information in a limited, private capacity that General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are complied with, and that Microsoft commits to not make any performance and behavior control with the data. After that threshold is cleared, Microsoft Digital fills out a single-page intake form asking simple questions like the tool’s name, its audience, its owner, and access rights to the data. Finally, the Microsoft workers’ council expedites a simplified review that takes under four weeks.
Features that share employee information more widely or if Microsoft intends to carry out performance or behavior control with the data enter a second, more extensive process. Microsoft Digital completes a lengthier form that outlines things like how the tool would fit into the organization, how managers might use it, and if the information it presents could inadvertently suggest an employee’s performance to anyone other than really necessary roles or persons (e.g., a direct manager).
Trustworthy codetermination organized in this way—between the workers’ council and Microsoft—gave us speed and structure, and it gave us confidence. Because we’ve established strong relationships with stakeholders, we’ve been able to start from a place of compliance in product development and engineering.
—Peter Albus, chairman, Microsoft Germany Central Workers Council Committee for Employee Data Privacy
That form typically gives the workers’ council everything it needs to approve a feature. But if they still need more information, they initiate a dialogue with other teams; including product, engineering, and human resources.
Trust through collaboration
“What we try to do is balance the benefit with the risks,” says Peter Albus, dedicated workers’ council member and chairman of the Central Workers Council Committee for Employee Data Privacy for Microsoft Germany. “How can we mitigate the risks while enabling the benefit? If the added value is sufficient, we mitigate the risks through technical settings or organizational orders (policies).”
Beyond minimizing the time a feature might take to roll out, increased dialogue between the workers’ council and product teams has helped engineers anticipate regulatory demands and build solutions accordingly.
“Trustworthy codetermination organized in this way—between the workers’ council and Microsoft—gave us speed and structure, and it gave us confidence,” Albus says. “Because we’ve established strong relationships with stakeholders, we’ve been able to start from a place of compliance in product development and engineering.”
The ongoing deployment of Microsoft Viva illustrates how streamlined this process has become. Viva, Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform (EXP), includes modules that interact with workers’ information differently.
Microsoft Viva Insights supports productivity and well-being by supplying behavioral data and intelligent recommendations directly to employees themselves. Private information doesn’t go beyond their own inboxes, so Microsoft Digital only needed a quick sign-off on the feature.
Microsoft Viva Learning is an AI-powered platform that offers relevant training to employees. In its initial form, Viva Learning included capabilities for tracking progress against course recommendations. Those tracking elements meant that the tool needed further review. But with only minor progress-sharing elements involved to secure approval, the team was able to put the tool into action quickly.
Microsoft Viva Manager Insights provides team leads with data about employees’ work patterns to help assess their workloads. That extra layer of behavioral data necessitates a more in-depth review.
But because the approval of Microsoft Viva Insights and Microsoft Viva Learning was so rapid and approval of Microsoft Viva Goals is coming, the workers’ council can give Viva Manager Insights their full attention. As a result, they’ve substantially reduced the turnaround time for Microsoft Viva compared to previous releases—from one and a half years to a target of around six months.
Cloud, agility, compliance
This more flexible, triage-friendly form of review wouldn’t be possible without cloud-driven agile development, which, for example, enables modular releases for individual features within Microsoft Teams. Agility in product development leads to flexibility in the approval process because entire products aren’t held back by individual feature reviews.
Instead, teams can easily activate or deactivate modules hosted within larger platforms without disrupting the overall experience. Kopp sums up the value of that modularity: “You can bring out the non-critical modules much faster and spend your time reviewing the ones that really need it.”
Meanwhile, increased collaboration between the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany and product teams helps the cross-company collaborative group anticipate and resolve many compliance issues before features reach the approval process. As a result of this multifaceted collaboration, Microsoft Germany is winning back hundreds of hours per year, and they’re sharing those lessons with other country and regional offices in Europe.
A leader in trust
Internal rollouts are only the beginning of the story. The rigorous process developed by the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany is a story worth sharing with partners and customers in hopes that it will help them streamline how they roll out new product features and services at their companies.
Roxana Schupp, account executive for Microsoft Dynamics 365, says it’s become a sales differentiator and a way to build relationships with customers who are trying to solve some of the same challenges at their companies.
“The customers are looking at us as a benchmark,” Schupp says. “The way we deal with data and how we address management or usage of systems in order to comply with regulations in different countries, those are very important for them.”
As a result of this close collaboration between Microsoft Digital and the German workers’ council, an unofficial rule has emerged across Europe. “If it works in Germany, it should work everywhere,” Kopp says.
Here are some tips on how you can better partner with your workers’ councils to streamline how you roll out new features and products at your companies:
- Build a robust triage system: Establish parameters for triggering reviews and criteria for different levels of engagement.
- Understand that you’re allies: Teams focused on compliance aren’t there to be blockers. They want to make sure enablement is compliant.
- Establish trust through dialog: Build internal awareness across teams to bring everyone to the table.
- Engage early: Seeking feedback early in the product development process avoids churn and rework.
- Embrace modularity: Deploying on a feature-by-feature basis empowers effective compliance triage without delaying overall product rollouts. Make the features configurable at the geo/country level to comply with local regulations.
- Ask good questions: What do you need to see? Why is this a concern? What are your fears?
- Compliance and privacy are non-negotiable, so ensure that your technical settings and policies mitigate risk while providing benefits.
- Learn how Microsoft is building an employee-centric experience.
- Experience the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft.
- Find out how Microsoft reinvented the employee experience.
Tags: compliance, data privacy, Microsoft Viva
