At the heart of this transformation is an obsession with the Microsoft employee experience.

In our view, the employee experience is a nexus where personal needs and employee needs are both met. When this is great, employees are highly satisfied with the experience and are very productive. The activities that hit the mark on this range from generic experiences applicable to all employees—like finding available meeting rooms, searching for internal information, or understanding their benefits—to more role-specific experiences, like manager insights to support their teams or loading sales data into a CRM system.

The employee experience isn’t limited to day-to-day activities; it’s considered throughout the employee’s lifecycle: from onboarding and internal role changes through to retirement.

A keystone to empowering employees in how they do their jobs is to understand what employees need by identifying their top challenges and successfully meeting their needs. Before our digital transformation advanced in earnest, we would make changes without fully understanding whether they met our employees’ needs and we often wouldn’t do enough to help them adapt to the changes. This was met with limited success.

Getting to a better place required a change in mindset, as shared by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “As a culture, we are moving from a group of people who know it all to a group of people who want to learn it all.” To learn it all, we began establishing listening mechanisms to learn from our employees, recognizing that as technologies advance, employee expectations of their devices and experiences advance as well, with increasing expectations that both work seamlessly to enable them to do their best work.

[Read the second blog in the series on how Microsoft is transforming the company’s employee experience by listening to employee signals. Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience. Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.]

Strategies for capturing employee signals

When we started down the path of understanding our employees’ needs, we realized we had to develop a comprehensive set of employee signals first. To us, signals are indicators of employee satisfaction with the tool or service. Examples of signal sources include employee survey data, direct interviews with employees or leaders, and product usage data (we’ll explore these sources in greater detail in a moment). Our strategy relied on some signal sources that were already in place, but to meet our goals, we expanded our sources to ensure we listened to all employees.

Being a global enterprise, we had to consider our many cohorts of employees—all countries and regions; all roles, including individual contributors, managers, and leaders; the locations of all workers, including remote, in-office, and hybrid. We needed to make sure we didn’t exclude picking up signals from any group.

We used existing data trends to understand our employees without disrupting them (such as telemetry and usage data). This informed an initial indication of where pain points or adoption blockers might be.

We also needed to hear directly from our employees to confirm or alter those initial impressions, so we established several proactive mechanisms to gather feedback. The following diagram shows an example of some of the signal types used to gather this data. We will explore some of those listening signals more here.

Proactive employee signals

We gather proactive signals preemptively, and they’re critical in helping us understand what our employees think. Here are several ways we proactively gather those signals and some of the expected outcomes we have for them:

• Satisfaction surveys: Our approach to understanding employee satisfaction has evolved through the years, but surveys remain a foundational feedback source. We have many different teams at Microsoft who want to survey our employees, so we must rationalize how frequently we seek feedback, be strategic in asking the right questions, and adjust based on the groups we survey. If we ask a question, it needs to be worth the employee’s time to answer and valuable enough to act on based on the results. Some of our established surveys have a brand and are recognizable to our employee communities. In many cases, our strategy is to use these existing surveys by either extending them with customized questions or utilizing the data they gather. Once results are finalized, we analyze the data and consider trends against previous rounds of the same data.
• In-app feedback: This type of proactive signal is meant to meet employees where they are and allows them to provide feedback in real time as they’re experiencing a problem or bug. In-app feedback usually addresses feature-specific pain points, and it always requires people with specific expertise on the platform to help triage the feedback.
• Point-in-time interactions: For deeper qualitative insights, we use point-in-time interactions. This includes speaking directly to employees about their experiences. We do this through voluntary employee insider programs or by using our internal research teams, who are experts at gathering insights on the design of new solutions and feedback on employee workflows. Employees chosen for these programs often include our heaviest users or those whose job it is to understand the needs of different employee groups (such as sellers and finance).
• Formal business reviews: Each organization at Microsoft operates on a unique cadence and rhythm with different requirements and needs. These discussions surface important organizationally specific needs but can also help surface tool or process-related pain points correlating to the overall Microsoft employee experience too. We align representatives from our Microsoft Digital business to these areas and business units to ensure that we capture those insights.

Reactive employee signals

Reactive signals come from employees sharing their feedback and needs either directly or indirectly through their interactions with tools, and are a source of direct evidence of how they actually use a product or service:

• Communities and social channels for sentiment analysis: Sentiment algorithms to monitor key employee communities are a great way to identify trends, and we consistently capture those anonymized sentiments. Sentiment trends allow us to examine known, acute issues and look for new emerging themes. We also can use these engines to ask questions directly and get real-time feedback in an informal way that doesn’t feel disruptive to the employee.
• Telemetry and usage data: Anonymized usage data enables tracking an employee’s experience within a tool or app, which enables us to gauge adoption or success metrics for a given tool or scenario. For example, when we deployed Microsoft Teams internally, we evaluated several usage indicators to determine if our adoption goals were on track, including a gradual decline trend in email usage among employees as well as increase in Microsoft Teams functionality like chat, file share, and more.
• Support incident analysis: Our support team tags and categorizes each support incident by type, solution, and employee group (such as engineer, sales, finance, and so on) to categorize issues and themes by key demographics. We use these insights to validate the qualitative feedback we receive through proactive and reactive channels.

Connecting what employees said with how employees acted

By evaluating reactive and proactive signals, we can connect what employees say with how employees act. Consider this example. Last year, more than 40 percent of support calls for our primary sales system were related to access or login issues. This amount of volume alone had significant productivity, satisfaction, and operating cost implications. And the volume of these reported issues was growing.

At first glance, it may seem that this was a simple access issue. But it was through analysis of additional proactive and reactive signals—like business reviews and social channels—that we saw the challenge was beyond just these access issues. It wasn’t just a technical issue; it really was a training issue. Without that deeper analysis, we would have addressed the wrong problem.

Building on the foundation

In the subsequent articles that comprise this series, we will share the steps we took to change our approach by listening to our employees and demonstrating how we addressed some of their biggest pain points. Here’s what you can expect in each article:

• Analyzing and prioritizing employee signals: Understanding trends and themes across data sources and tips for data-driven prioritization strategies.
• Influencing to prioritize the change: Connecting the story in the change management strategy to the original employee signals to drive adoption velocity.

Digital transformation at Microsoft will continue as our business evolves and emerging technologies like AI and machine learning offer new avenues to accelerate that change. What won’t change is our foundational commitment to learn, grow, and obsess about not only our customers but also our employees. We’re excited to show you how.

• Read the second blog in the series on how Microsoft is transforming the company’s employee experience by listening to employee signals.
• Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience.
• Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.

The post Digital transformation through mastery of the Microsoft employee experience appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we recognize that the best way to answer this question is to analyze the signals our employees are giving us and apply a strong prioritization model to the results. That way, we can land on an accurate list of top employee challenges.

In the first post of this series, we discussed how important it has been for us to transform Microsoft’s employee experience, and shared our strategy for capturing employee signals.

Here, we shift our focus to how we consolidate, analyze, and prioritize our employee signal data.

[Read the first blog in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience. Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience. Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing Microsoft’s employee experience.]

Analysis requires subject matter expertise and context

Every source of employee signals is a data set. For us to have the best level of analysis, we have found it’s best to have experts who are close to the data and the employees providing the relevant signals in order to verify any themes identified. For example, when we get signals from a particular global role in our field (such as technical specialists), we have an expert validate the signal and give us context around what it might mean. The clarity we get comes from how well they understand any contributing factors and business context.

In the case of more technical data sets like telemetry, usage, or support incident data, we seek out application owners, support engineers, and others working in these systems to gain context. A few months ago, we noticed a 50 percent spike in employee support ticket volume related to a critical service. We verified our analysis with the support engineer who was working at the time and confirmed that an outage was the cause of the support ticket volume increase. In this case, it ended up being an acute issue as opposed to a more systemic challenge, but the conversation was critical to making this determination.

The takeaway: Every employee signal should go through verification or validation of the root cause.

Biggest challenges manifest through multiple signals

Even though they pose problems for our employees, we don’t look for the small or acute issues because they’re less important than big, complex challenges—the ones that require multiple people and organizations to work together to solve. These big problems are also often ones that haven’t been appropriately prioritized, budgeted, or solutioned. If left unattended, it’s these problems that become systemic and fundamentally harm the employee experience.

What we have learned is that those big, complex challenges are easily detected via multiple signals. We’ve also learned that it’s worth the due diligence of cross-checking any identified theme in one signal across the other signals to see if they’re related (or the same thing showing up in a different way). After cross-checking, we can have confidence that a challenge is related to a previously reported priority or that it’s a unique, new challenge.

At the conclusion of a round of analysis across all our sources of data, we have a large list of candidates that we call our “top employee challenges.” The data we use to derive these challenges becomes the reasoning behind our case for change. We’ll talk more about that in our third post in this series.

In our previous post, we spoke about our sellers having issues gaining access to a key sales system. This challenge began to reveal itself in subtle ways across almost every employee listening system we had established for sellers. We heard it in our executive reviews, in-application feedback, through support channels, in survey data, and via role-based interviews.

By triangulating across our sources, we discovered that this wasn’t just an access issue; it also illuminated a lack of consistency about how we provide access to critical tools. That lack of consistency impacted our onboarding of new employees as well as when our employees switched roles within Microsoft. The additional analysis helped us to not only better qualify the problem statement, but also gave some hypotheses for root causes. It’s because of this that we rely on multiple sources of information for a theme to emerge in our list of top employee challenges.

The takeaway: Triangulating across feedback sources leads to richer and more actionable insights.

Business impact as a prioritization model

With limited budgets and resources, our ongoing challenge is deciding which employee challenges to tackle first.

Within Microsoft, different teams have different ways of prioritizing work. We have gone through several evolutions of our prioritization model—we’ve added components, removed others, weighted them differently—but what we have found is that no prioritization model is perfect. There is a silver lining to this: every prioritization model attempts to maximize business impact, whether it’s internal or external facing. The following diagram about tackling challenges that generate business impact shows some of the employee experiences that our prioritization system could surface for us to work on next.

The point of having a model is to have a starting point for a conversation and to compare seemingly dissimilar challenges with the same set of criteria. It doesn’t have to be stack ranked if that’s too controversial, but it should be centered around your employees.

The takeaway: Use a consistent prioritization model to maximize the value of your investments.

In our final post in this three-part series—Influencing to prioritize change—we will discuss how to take an identified top employee challenge and work across your organization to influence change. We will then close the series by sharing how listening to employee signals and prioritizing them appropriately is helping us to transform Microsoft’s employee experience to make our employees even more productive and effective in their roles.

• Read the first blog in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience.
• Read the third blog in the series on how investment prioritization is driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience.
• Learn how Microsoft Digital is reinventing Microsoft’s employee experience.

The post Transforming Microsoft’s employee experience by listening to employee signals appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

A fundamental element to empowering employees is transforming employee signals to an actionable list of employee challenges and needs.

In the first and second posts in this series, we explored strategies to capture employee signals and an approach to analysis and prioritization. Part of the advantages we have at Microsoft is that we have a talented group of program managers and support teams strategically located across the globe and sitting with our employees.

In this article, we focus on how employee needs get prioritized for investment. In discussions with companies across many industries (insurance, healthcare, automotive, beauty, retail, and more), the struggle is the same: with so many competing needs, how do we prioritize the right investments and improvements in our technologies to—in our case—improve Microsoft’s employee experience?

The most challenging aspect of improving Microsoft’s employee experience is influencing the decision-makers to agree that:

1. The employee need is significant enough to warrant being a priority.
2. Funds and other resources should be allocated to fix it.
3. A plan is needed to effectively land the change once implemented with the employee base.

[Read the first blog post in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience, and check out the second blog post about transforming Microsoft’s employee experience by listening to employee signals. Learn how Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world.]

Data-driven business cases to influence

At Microsoft, we create a business case to support each identified top challenge. We’ve learned that the best business cases tell a story reinforced by irrefutable data. It also identifies root causes and potential solutions as well success measures to understand when the need has been met.

In the first and second post in this series, we discuss the example of our sellers having issues gaining access to a key sales system. Potential cost savings can provide powerful evidence to support the business case for change. We knew that our support teams were burdened by increasing support requests in multiple countries, as nearly 45 percent of support incidents were associated with these issues. The business case showed the actual cost and resource impact (both support engineer time and impact on seller productivity) associated with this issue. Identifying these costs is meaningful because they impact two different leadership groups—support engineering and sales. Support leadership faces constant pressure to lower costs while sales leadership cares about increasing face time with the customer and boosting seller productivity.

The business case also included an action plan to identify key next steps: stakeholders that need to be involved and building consensus on a path forward. Microsoft, like many large enterprises, has a complex organizational structure and competing internal priorities. As a result, it can be difficult to build consensus. The action plan is meant to provide clarity on next steps to drive stakeholder alignment. Planning up-front helps to ensure a comprehensive solution with the right levels of buy-in, avoiding headaches during delivery.

Delivering change back to employees

A substantial part of solving the employee challenge is designing and building a solution that is inclusive of people, process, tools, and information. Beyond solutioning, our focus here is on delivering a change and communicating it to employees once it has been identified, developed, and deployed.

At Microsoft, we’ve adopted a people-centric model for change management that prepares, equips, and supports employees as they move through a change. We have team members who are embedded in strategic locations around the globe, which helps us build deeper relationships, empathy, and cultural understanding of how a change might be perceived at a local level. Our change approach is customized by business requirements and local subtleties. Changes to address a top employee challenge are easily connected back to the employee signals. Because of this, we can articulate a change in the context of the original employee pain point: “You asked, we answered.”

Our people-centric model creates a virtuous, closed loop cycle. Now that the employee feels heard and their challenges are addressed, employees are empowered to be more vocal about their future experiences.

We’ve had many successes with this approach and continue to evolve as we learn more about empowering employees through our listening efforts. It’s one of our key methods for driving digital transformation at Microsoft.

How are you empowering your employees at your company? To share your experiences, ask other IT professionals and partners for advice or information, and find additional resources, join the new Microsoft 365 Community.

Let’s keep the conversation going! Please continue to visit Microsoft Digital Inside Track for more on how we’re digitally transforming at Microsoft.

Read the first blog in this series about how digital transformation is powering the Microsoft employee experience.

Read the second blog in the series on how Microsoft is transforming the company’s employee experience by listening to employee signals.

Learn how Microsoft is reimagining meetings for a hybrid work world.

The post Driving the transformation of Microsoft’s employee experience with investment prioritization appeared first on Inside Track Blog.