We’ve initiated a fundamental change in the way our employees interact and communicate, with Microsoft Teams as the hub for communicating, meeting, and calling. We’re using change management processes and education so that our people can adopt and use Teams to its full capacity. As adoption grows, we are learning from the process and modifying our strategy to help people more efficiently make the cultural shift to the modern workplace with Teams.

Accelerating digital transformation with Microsoft Teams

Teamwork is an important aspect of the modern workplace, and a key element of enabling digital transformation at Microsoft. Microsoft Teams brings together tools and communication methods and is a hub for teamwork. Here on the Microsoft Digital team, we’re on our own path to digital transformation, and we believe that Teams has the potential to offer a new, more efficient way to work. Teams offers significant changes to collaboration, teamwork, and productivity within the Microsoft 365 universal toolkit that we want to realize in the modern workplace at Microsoft. The changes that Teams offers include:

• Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork within Microsoft 365. Teams fulfills the collaboration and communication needs of a diverse workforce, including chat, meetings, voice, and video. The look and feel of these functions is fast and fluid, has low-overhead, and is instantly familiar.
• Microsoft Teams integrates with all the apps our employees use. Teams integrates with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, the Planner task management app, Stream video portal—even Power BI—so employees have the information and tools they need. Team members can also include other apps and services in their workspaces, for the team and organization. Teams allows the ability to customize workspaces with tabs, connectors, and bots. For our developer community, Teams has an extensible platform for building apps with a rich set of capabilities to support high-performing teams.
• Microsoft Teams offers a complete meeting experience. With the advent of Teams-capable conferencing devices, Teams modernizes the meetings experience. Before a meeting, team members can review conversations; during a meeting, teams can share content and use audio conferencing and video. Teams supports private and group meeting capabilities, scheduling capabilities, and free/busy calendar availability.
• Microsoft Teams has integrated security. Teams comes with the enterprise-grade security integrated with the Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Azure Active Directory. It fits neatly into our primary solution for identity and access management, and allows us to maintain control over our data and environment.

Microsoft Teams, in combination with Microsoft 365, creates a hub for modern collaboration and effective teamwork. It empowers our employees to engage with the business and each other in a way that transforms our business for the better, moving our entire organization closer to fully realizing digital transformation. We want to shift our center of gravity to Teams to speed employee productivity and the velocity of communication.

[Find out how to get started with Microsoft Teams. Get in-depth guidance on Microsoft Teams adoption. Visit the Microsoft Teams product page. Explore transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams: Collaborating seamlessly, teaming up fearlessly.]

Making adoption happen with change management

At Microsoft, the official decision to implement a workstyle change is typically made at the organizational or executive level. However, the impetus for change starts earlier, in response to the changing business needs of our people or parts of our organization. We have diverse groups that need to work in different ways, and adapting to modern workstyles is exactly what Microsoft Teams adoption is about. Our management recognizes that each of these groups has unique needs, and those needs factor heavily into how we manage organizational change.

Making change a more practical reality

While we want each employee at Microsoft to be empowered to adopt Microsoft Teams in the way that best fits their workstyle, we also realize that identifying the most common uses of collaboration tools helps our people see how Teams can benefit them every day. So, we give them a snapshot of “a day in your digital life.” We built our vision of Teams into the most common tasks in the modern workplace. For example:

• Get up to speed during morning coffee. Use Microsoft Outlook to check email and manage your calendar, Microsoft Teams to check chats and stay current on projects, and the Microsoft 365 productivity apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents.
• Stay connected on your commute. Use Microsoft Teams to join personal meetings or chat with voice and text, Teams and Microsoft Stream to watch live video meetings, and Microsoft Outlook to connect to a meeting from an email or calendar item.
• Hold meetings at the office. Use Microsoft Teams for both small meetings and large meetings with conference room hardware and anonymous participants.
• Collaborate with your team. Use Microsoft Teams to communicate using chat, video, screen sharing, and to coauthor files within a team. Use OneDrive and SharePoint to save and share documents to and from the cloud.
• Connect across the company. Use Microsoft Viva Engage and Yammer to track organizational updates, share knowledge, and find experts and answers. Use SharePoint to create and manage communication sites and publish news for broad groups of stakeholders.

At the core of managing organizational change is understanding how to manage change with a single person. Because overall adoption depends on wide adoption by our employees, much of our change management process revolves around meeting the needs of each employee. The essential needs are:

• Awareness of the need for change.
• Motivation to adopt or support the change.
• An understanding of how to make the change happen.
• The ability to implement or acquire the desired skills and behaviors to make the change.
• Organizational support and reinforcement to make the change permanent.

Establishing structure for change

We also recognize the need for a structured, documented process to help our adoption team coordinate change. We need to provide a common toolset for them to use and enable them to scale initial change into company-wide adoption. We’ve adopted four pillars to help us deliver well-managed change from start to finish.

Awareness

The awareness pillar is about landing the message. Before we even got our employees into training, we knew we needed to make a good first impression, hit the points that will interest them, and find the message that excites employees about Microsoft Teams. The awareness pillar encompasses several important tasks:

• Identify key roles to use teams and describe the value and impact. Our field and role guidance helps our adoption team identify how Microsoft Teams provides value to our employees. We examine the different roles within Microsoft and identify how Teams functionality serves those roles.
• Create a visual campaign to build awareness. Our worldwide visual campaign used a combination of physical and digital advertising and signage across Microsoft campuses, as well as on our internal portal sites and social media platforms to efficiently get Microsoft Teams in front of as many people as possible. We wanted Teams to be recognizable, and we wanted our employees to be aware of its availability and benefits.
• Use internal social channels to engage communities and build excitement. Community engagement is about preparing the organization for adoption and increasing overall awareness. We extended the reach of our awareness materials into company portals. We used Yammer to broadcast our message across the organization and encouraged dialog among employees.
• Inspire adoption with a supportive community of power users and influencers. Creating a community of power users and fans will inspire adoption within their spheres of influence, answer questions, help with social engagement, and give product feedback. Champions are key to ensuring the success of communities. Having executive buy-in reinforced the campaign. When management describes how they personally use Microsoft Teams in a message or speech, people take notice.

Engagement

The engagement pillar builds on awareness and starts putting Microsoft Teams in the hands of our users while ensuring they have the training, guidance, and tools to succeed with it. Engagement is about integrating Teams into our employee’s modern workplace in a way that increases collaborative productivity.

• Run a pilot program to test readiness. The pilot is one of the most crucial components of the adoption process. Early users at Microsoft tested Microsoft Teams and helped us identify how and why our employees would want to use it. We used the pilot program to test and find areas where training or configuration would encourage broader adoption.
• Create buy-in with stakeholders by designing engagements to build momentum. In these engagements, we sat down with our business teams to give hands-on, in-person guidance for using Microsoft Teams. We offered common scenarios for using Teams, demonstrated Teams features, and gave general guidance. It allowed us to focus in on a business team and show how Teams would be used in their day-to-day work.
• Establish opportunities for Q&A. Our Art of Teamwork Tour was an open, large-scale forum for us to present our vision for Microsoft Teams at Microsoft. We identified important and common use cases and showed how Teams could be used. We presented not only the benefits of Teams to the individual, but also to the whole of Microsoft. We explained to our users how Teams fits into our organization.
• Develop internal resources for support and information about using Microsoft Teams. The Toolkit for Teamwork gave people resources to help them move forward with Teams. It offers practical resources to increase engagement and encourage effective use of Teams. The toolkit includes templates, training resources, tips, and tricks.

Measurement

The Measurement pillar keeps track of the practical steps of the engagement pillar. Once we’ve engaged the user community, we need to track the effectiveness of our efforts. Measurement is about acquiring actionable feedback on the adoption process and using that feedback to refine and improve the process.

• Use your pilot feedback to elevate opportunities, offer insights, and adjust course. Our pilot program included a broad cross section of our user base along with some of our most involved and passionate Microsoft Teams adopters. Feedback came through support staff, social channels, UserVoice, and representative leaders. The program validated use-case scenarios and kept us aware of problems and successes during early rollout.
• Create the key areas your organization will use to understand adoption and measure success. We developed monitoring methods and metrics to track progress. We gathered usage statistics to gauge overall adoption and correlate trends to time-of-day, business events, and engagement efforts.
• Establish listening systems to measure engagement. Listening systems provided active feedback from our user base. We used multiple listening systems, including Yammer, to increase our awareness of what our users were saying and how they were responding to Microsoft Teams. Our internal helpdesk identified issues and helped us prepare to mitigate common issues.

Management

The Management pillar is the final pillar of the four and has the longest lifetime of any pillars in the change management process. Management is about gaining efficiency and ensuring user satisfaction once Microsoft Teams is in place. Management means continuing to support Teams and finding user stories and additional training opportunities to support Teams users at Microsoft.

• Improve deployment from employee feedback. As people continue to use Microsoft Teams, we are gauging its effectiveness through the feedback we receive. This helps us identify feature additions or changes, develop additional guidance and training, and adjust Teams implementation, when necessary. We also make sure that training and support is relevant to our people, so they can use the product to the best of their ability.
• Identify user stories. User stories help us show our people how their peers are using Teams. Stories also help us identify active Microsoft Teams users that can be champions for the product in their realm of influence at Microsoft. We try to get a cross-section of stories that are relevant across the organization. These stories evolve based on implementation and needs of the business, and we continue to listen for new stories.
• Continually assess and improve processes. We are continually assessing all processes around Microsoft Teams. We found that some things in our general processes worked well at the start of the adoption process but didn’t work as well later on or once our deployment reached global audiences and employees in the field. It’s a continual process of assessing and improving.
• Stay informed on product and feature changes. We track feature updates and potential changes in Microsoft Teams. This helps us understand how new features affect our use cases, so we can best determine how to implement them.
• Develop support for ongoing use cases and a maturing user base. As people get more familiar with Microsoft Teams, they find new ways to be more productive and collaborate efficiently. We’ve found that the more empowered our employees are to embrace Teams, the more they find their own ways to incorporate Teams into their workflow.

Recognizing Microsoft Teams adoption as social and behavior change

Harnessing employee ingenuity is critical to the overall success and relevance of a business. Working together, people generate more ideas and feel more connected to their work, which improves engagement and retention. Our employees are increasingly mobile and need to have resources and tools available wherever they go. To meet the needs of this changing modern workplace, Microsoft Teams was built as a chat-based workspace in Microsoft 365, with persistent chat, easy file access, customizable and extensible features, and the security that teams trust. We’ve started using Teams to streamline communication, improve collaboration, and get more done together.

However, successful Microsoft Teams adoption is not just technology adoption; it represents a change in behavior. Teams is more than a product—it is a fundamentally different way of working. This change is about people. We found that adoption was as much about social and cultural changes and challenges as it was about technology and tool implementation. Adopting Teams is a different journey than we’ve asked our people to take in the past. With Teams, we asked them to make four fundamental shifts in behavior:

• Chat instead of email. Move away from email as a primary method of communications for fast-moving teams and project management.
• Live in the cloud. Use all Microsoft 365 components in the cloud.
• Embrace flexibility. Empower them to embrace the flexibility of Microsoft Teams for customization.
• Work mobile. Help people to work in whatever way and place suits them best.

To accomplish this journey, we needed to educate people by managing change and offering them readiness skills they may have never embraced for any other product rollout. Even if an advanced customer has these skills within their organization, the change to both collaboration and meeting scenarios can benefit from a fresh approach.

Establishing a communications framework: Spark, ignite, bonfire

Understanding that Microsoft Teams adoption was about social and behavior change, we used the spark, ignite, bonfire communications framework to achieve our primary goals. This framework:

1. Captures the messages, placement, and methods of communication for a change.
2. Defines how these messages will be used to capture the attention of your audience and convert it to sustained interest and engagement.
3. Grows interest and engagement into new behavior patterns, cultural change, and sustainable business outcomes.

Selecting our sparks

The sparks are the “what” of the campaign. They alert your audience to changes and opportunities, and they provide the small but vital beginnings of communicating change. The sparks for Microsoft Teams, and how we used them are:

• • Identify your target audience. Our primary audience for Microsoft Teams is our entire organization. We wanted full engagement throughout Microsoft, but we knew that we would need to refine our communications depending on which of our main demographics we were trying to engage. We used work done in the past with personas, or common company roles and positions, which we customized for the Teams deployment. For each persona, we identified common tasks and work trends and identified how that persona might use Teams in their day-to-day work life. Personas include information about which part of the company the employee works in, their common methods of collaborative communication, and other information about any pain points they experienced and how likely they were to adopt new technology and workstyles. We used a segmented and staged approach to control the velocity of adoption and ensure our adoption processes were as refined as possible.
  • Define your key message(s). We wanted a key message that would speak to our target audience. In an audience as broad as Microsoft, we used several key messages that were focused enough to generate interest and engage our employees. Our key messages included:
    • Chat for today’s teams. Communicate in the moment and keep everyone in the know.
    • A hub for teamwork. Give your team quick access to everything they need right in Microsoft 365.
    • Customize for each team. Tailor your workspace to include content and capabilities your team needs every day.

• Choose the best channels. We needed to choose where and how we were going to get our key messages out. We chose a combination of physical and geographical placement alongside digital placement to ensure that we reached the global Microsoft audience in the most effective and cost-efficient manner. These included:
  • Internal website. We used CSEWeb, our internal SharePoint portal for IT self-help for several pieces of adoption communication. It was the central location for all learning materials, content, and internal announcements about Teams. It also contained FAQs, explained the need for change, and provided a high-level roadmap. It hosted user stories that showed Teams adoption successes.
  • Readiness and gamification. We are creating quizzes and other gamified tools and messages to engage employees. We use small, “snackable” content to make it quick and easy for our people to learn more about adopting Microsoft Teams.
  • Social campaign. We used social networking platforms within Microsoft to get our spark messages out to employees and share user success stories. Yammer gives us a huge opportunity to reach our users. We use it for marketing messaging, user engagement, and answering user questions. It gives us a ready means for social engagement within our organization.
  • Personal targeted communications. We selected specific audiences to be leaders and encouragers of Microsoft Teams adoption. Our Sales group was a big one, because they constantly operate in a highly communicative, dynamic workspace. We used personas to make sure our content and approaches met the needs of many different users and addressed different challenges across different user groups. We also told real user stories about people in different roles, so employees could identify with the use case and apply the lessons to their role.
  • Email. We used email to communicate critical upcoming changes that would affect the way employees use Microsoft Teams and the services that Teams was replacing.
  • Signage. We also adopted traditional methods to put Microsoft Teams in front of our employees. This included signage on campus roads and in campus buildings. We used digital displays on our campuses to reinforce key messages, highlight learning resources and opportunities, and highlight new features.

Moving to ignite

This is the “how” of the campaign. Ignite is designed to convert immediate attention into short-term focus and initiate our adoption steps. We combined our sparks into an ongoing engagement that ignited action from our audience. During the ignite process, we used the following tasks to circulate our sparks:

• Build a communication and readiness plan. We built our communication and readiness plan based on our assessment of our employees and the communication specifics we created with our sparks. We created an internal launch event. The goal was to build awareness and excitement around Microsoft Teams. The launch kicked off a months-long campaign that included many different channels and approaches.
• Create a detailed communications schedule. Part of the planning process included scheduling monthly themes and scheduling out the major elements of our plan. For example, when would we offer in-person training at our main campus in Redmond, and when would we begin rolling out training around the world? We aligned to the product roadmap so we could promote new features as they were released. We also looked at opportunities to partner with other corporate events. For example, we gave participants in the annual Hackathon guidance about how to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate while hacking. Event organizers put the guidance on the hacker resource site.
• Produce creative content for sparks. We created several types of content to reach our users, both detailed and brief. We also created readiness and learning material that was suited to different learning styles.
  • We created user stories to tell real-live success stories from Microsoft employees in different roles across the company.
  • We developed readiness content in the form of both Work Smart guides and web content to help employees who want step-by-step instructions.
  • We produced visual promotional assets to catch employee attention: digital signage, physical signage, online promos for major internal portals, and Yammer posts with visuals and links to more information.
  • We developed content for in-person and online learning sessions and delivered them on campus. We also gave presentation decks and train-the-trainer sessions to training teams managed by our IT Site Operations teams around the world so the sessions were up to date on the product and messaging was consistent.
  • We developed a variety of readiness content. Having readiness content available in different formats is important to suit different learning styles. We had written guides, in-person training, and learning videos.
• Manage campaign execution. Our campaign team worked together to ensure that our communication was being received effectively and the tools we put in place were understood and used properly.
  • Sometimes we had to adjust our approach mid-flight; for example, if we weren’t seeing attendance numbers we wanted for training, we’d look at new, creative ways to get the word out.
  • We also listened for feedback and ideas from our users and trusted stakeholders and adjusted, as needed.
• Generate and review campaign reports, to see progress compared to goals. We used several reporting tools and metrics to gather and measure the success of Microsoft Teams adoption throughout the organization.

Throughout the campaign, we tracked our adoption progress, and focused on growth among weekly active users. We regularly published a report to stakeholders that also looked at the effectiveness of our various channels: web traffic, promo click-throughs, training attendance, training satisfaction surveys, Yammer activity, and how often questions on Yammer were answered.

Adding to the bonfire

Every change communication or campaign should feed the bonfire, which is a constantly growing beacon of the success of Microsoft Teams adoption here at Microsoft. As successes are achieved and advertised, the bonfire helps to:

• Achieve sustainable business outcomes.
• Drive cultural change within the company.
• Establish social norms that encourage taking quick action.
• Draw people to act and connect in new ways.

The most important aspect of the bonfire is that it adds to and integrates with the organization’s high-level technology and culture strategy. Our Microsoft Teams campaign was a piece of a bigger approach to modern workplace communication and readiness. We provided clarity on “what tool when” for our employees to help them understand how Teams fit into the bigger picture and how we envisioned Teams fitting into their workstyle.

During Microsoft Teams adoption, we did our best to be aware of the process, learn how we could improve the process during adoption, and provide lessons that could be applied to future adoption and change management initiatives at Microsoft. Here are few of the things we learned.

• Capitalize on the reach of your marketing campaign. Our initial strategy was in person, getting Microsoft Teams in front of key users and working with them. While it was time-consuming, we found later that were able to reach field and global audiences using virtual methods to broaden our reach. We missed some opportunities to capitalize on early mover enthusiasm within those audiences and found some champions who were creating and sharing their own content.
• Understand the primary use cases for your organization. We approached our people by identifying personas within our organization that defined the most common ways Microsoft Teams would be used. This included not only typical daily use scenarios, but also deeper, scenario-based guidance to help people make the right decision.
• Understand toolset and appropriate-use scenarios. We discovered that directly addressing what tool our users should use for common collaboration tasks helped ease the transition and curb confusion. Directed use gave employees a starting point and then enabled us to measure, through feedback, whether changes or adjustments were needed. At the beginning of the campaign, we didn’t give people a lot of specific guidance, which hurt general adoption. Later, we developed guidance for specific use cases and developed step-by-step guides to take users through important and common tasks, which left them more empowered and engaged with Microsoft Teams.
• Understand the impact of Microsoft Teams on your existing collaboration and teamwork tools. During adoption, we learned that there were times when users weren’t sure what features were available, or if they could or should use a feature—especially when it worked like something they were already using. In contrast, we had a business group that had not used Skype before. We focused on essential scenarios and offered very clear guidance. Because they had not been Skype users, the change management strategy and focus had to be different.
• Align new capabilities and features to your organization’s strategy. We found that our Microsoft Teams adoption needed to be targeted and molded for our vision of transparent communications and open collaboration. Align capabilities to your business strategies rather than allowing technology to direct your strategy.
• Understand your audience. We originally looked at our users in a group, typically organized by work roles. This worked well for several parts of the adoption process, but we failed to look closely enough at secondary groups of users based on factors like age, workstyle, and geography. Once we examined these secondary groups, we found a new set of use cases and scenarios that helped us penetrate even deeper into our user base.
• Plan for executive sponsorship. In the middle of the campaign, we realized that we didn’t adequately involve leadership to help drive Microsoft Teams adoption. We weren’t giving our leadership guidance that was specific or simple enough that they could use it easily. Once we created guidance and a toolset for them to help champion Teams, they were much more engaged and willing to put their effort into Teams adoption within their scope of influence.

Here are more Microsoft Teams resources:

• • Find out how to get started with Microsoft Teams.
  • Get in-depth guidance on Microsoft Teams adoption.
  • Visit the Microsoft Teams product page.
  • Explore transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams: Collaborating seamlessly, teaming up fearlessly.

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

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The post Microsoft Teams increases collaboration in the modern workplace at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

With Microsoft 365 employees can check in one place for the latest updates, files, and data for their projects and work. As a hub for teamwork, our collaborative toolset empowers our employees to be productive and enables our entire organization to change at the speed of our business.

Examining collaboration change

The collaboration landscape is changing daily. The average worker is collaborating with more people, more often, and in more dynamic ways.  They are hybrid or remote and working on a schedule that promotes their wellbeing and allows them to be their most productive. The typical worker has seen several important collaboration changes that affect them and their business, including:

• Workers are taking part in twice as many collaborative teams as they did five years ago.
• The average information worker has seen the time spent on their day-to-day tasks increase by 50 percent.
• Companies that invest in collaboration and teamwork are five times more likely to be high-performing.

The changing face of collaboration

The change in collaboration isn’t simply about statistical increases. The way our employees collaborate is also changing:

• Collaboration spans organizational boundaries. Teamwork extends beyond the borders of our internal organization, and we need tools that enable fluid external collaboration while protecting our business and our users. Now Microsoft employees can collaborate with any external user seamlessly in a secure and scalable way.
• Teams are increasingly globally distributed. Our teams need ways to connect across locations and time zones that suit their workstyles. We have many teams that span five or six time zones and multiple countries and regions. Our teamwork solutions need to connect our users to their teams wherever and whenever they need them.
• Teams work increasingly asynchronously. Especially with hybrid work, employees need to be able to get work done on their schedule while still staying connected and deeply involved.
• Our workforce is increasingly diverse. Diversity presents itself in our organization in many ways, including lifestyle, culture, and demographics. We have five generations in the workforce at the same time, presenting varied expectations of how and when people believe they can be most productive.
• Collaboration is critical for enterprise success. The ability for our people to build on the work of others is a fundamental principle at Microsoft. We can’t afford to have our employees siloed and working apart from each other. We want our employees working with and for each other in teams.

Our goal, and likely yours too, is to enable workers to embrace modern work styles and increase collaboration by providing tools to meet the needs of our continually changing business.

Focusing on workspace instead of workplace

Of course, one of the biggest forces we’re dealing with is the way we’ve changed how and where we work. In the past, the pace of business was generally slower. Data was parked in on premises datacenters. Computers were something we used primarily at work, and work was done only from the office. Decisions were made during specific business hours. Our culture revolved around what the individual achieved.

Today the situation is quite different, and technology is enabling the difference. Worker expectations have changed in many ways:

• There are now expectations around pervasive connectivity.
• Millennial hires are impacting the workforce; they are the first digital natives.
• Work isn’t linear. People are working simultaneously in more teams, more often than ever before.
• Technology has streamlined processes. More time is available for our organization to focus on improving employee experiences, and our employees have access to tools that can greatly improve their productivity.
• It’s easier for employees to move from project to project and for organizations to use talent on demand.

Our company culture is focused on employee experience and how we can use teamwork to achieve organizational goals. Our employees want to access their workspace whenever and wherever they need. They are constantly connected, networking, and collaborating, and we reward them for teamwork and the results their teams produce, not the amount of time they spend in the office.

Driving collaboration for our enterprise

We constantly assess our organization to better understand the collaborative landscape. We examine the scenarios in which people work together and rely on technology and services. The better we understand how our teams work, the more completely we can enable a collaborative toolset and mindset that empowers them to achieve greater productivity.

We’ve found that collaboration is just as much about culture as it is about technology. Collaboration serves the needs of our people and business. Because people participate in multiple teams simultaneously, each team must establish its own collaboration standards.

We ask important questions about our teams, including:

• Who are we? Who makes up our team and what kind of team are we?
• Are we similar to other successful teams in our organization? Can we learn from what those teams have done?
• What is the fundamental nature of our work (such as creating products, providing service, or orchestrating results) and how does that determine how our team operates?
• How long will this team work together? Is our work temporary or ongoing?
• Where are members located? Does the team have global or regional factors to consider?
• Which practices and tools does the team use already? How well are they working now? How will change affect them?

By observing teams, we discovered collaboration patterns that were particularly successful in our organization. For example, agile engineering teams, support functions, sales organizations, communications initiatives, and organizations reporting to a senior leader are patterns that we reference in our training and guidance.

Enabling collaboration and teamwork at Microsoft

Productivity extends beyond thinking about technology. It’s about creating flexibility that speaks to the needs of our lines of businesses and employees—helping them achieve what CEO Satya Nadella has set out as a mission for the entire company: “It is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Microsoft 365 is one of the key contributing technologies in our collaborative environment, and we’re using it to support modern collaboration across our enterprise.

Our Microsoft 365 environment looks something like this:

• 300,000 groups, each of which comes with a modern SharePoint team site
  • 205,000 teams
  • 134,000 Outlook email groups where using the full capabilities of the modern group improve upon the legacy Distribution List experiences, providing file storage, group calendar and mail archive
• 60,000 non-group SharePoint sites for classic team sites, portals, and communications sites
• 300,000 OneDrive for Business accounts
• 5,000 Viva Engage communities

Using Microsoft 365 for better collaboration and teamwork

Microsoft 365 provides us with a unified environment for collaboration and teamwork. All services are managed under the same framework and identity management solution. Our data is protected by first-class security and encryption standards, and our collaboration landscape, hosted in the cloud, is more centralized and unified than it ever was on-premises. Additionally, with files and tools based in Microsoft 365, we can easily share with people inside or outside of our company, from wherever we’re working, whenever we need to. Content sharing, shared calendars, and team chat ensure that we’re always in sync with our teams.

Microsoft 365 gives our business a boost with tools to enable us to build business solutions by extending Microsoft 365 functionality. We’ve built integrations with Microsoft 365 in several ways, including creating bots to answer questions in Teams chats, using a SharePoint site with PowerApps to show data from different data sources, and integrating our data and applications into the Microsoft 365 environment.

Different apps, different collaboration types

We use each purpose-built application in Microsoft 365 to drive different aspects of collaboration and teamwork.

• Microsoft Teams is the hub for teamwork where groups that actively engage and are working on core projects can connect and collaborate.
• SharePoint is the center for files, news, and pages shared within the team and the center for sharing information outside the team. SharePoint group-connected team sites enable Microsoft Teams and SharePoint communications sites with Viva Engage to broadly share information. Every group uses SharePoint as its content service, so we have one place to store and share files.
• Outlook and Exchange Online enable people to communicate in a familiar way and take advantage of modern distribution lists with groups in Outlook. Within Microsoft, we’re replacing classic disconnected distribution lists to get the calendar, group file management, and other capabilities in Planner.
• Viva Engage is for people to connect across their company, sharing ideas on common topics of interest. Within Microsoft, employees participate in company-wide strategic conversations in the Senior Leader Connection community. Organizations set up crowd-sourced support forums. Divisions sponsor events that are broadcast via Stream and encourage related real-time conversations and Q&A in Viva Engage.
• Microsoft 365 enables synchronous and asynchronous collaboration so that you can build on each other’s work and find out what others have done while you were away. You can record meetings in Teams and replay them, get AI-generated meeting summaries, and work on documents via Teams and SharePoint.

With these tools coming together in Microsoft 365, our teams get access to holistic solutions when they need them using single team membership across apps and services. What’s unique about teamwork in Microsoft 365 is that all these applications are built on an intelligent fabric that uses the capabilities and strengths of each application to support and supplement the other applications.

Establishing a hub for teamwork in Microsoft Teams

Teamwork is a key element of empowering connection at Microsoft. Teams brings together tools, information, and communication methods for seamless connection and flow. Microsoft Teams has revolutionized hybrid collaboration, teamwork, and productivity within the Microsoft 365 universal toolkit.

• Teams is the hub for teamwork within Office 365. Teams fulfills the collaboration and communication needs of a diverse workforce, including chat, meetings, voice, and video. Because one of the persistent comments from employees has been that there are too many places to keep track of information, Teams has won fans because of its ability to bring together conversations, notes, meetings, and files. Through extensible features like tabs and apps, capabilities from other systems can be integrated into a team.

Several of our support teams now manage support incidents within Teams. They can pin real-time dashboards with relevant data, integrate alerts from monitoring systems, and quickly bring new participants up to speed on issues. Because Teams is familiar across the company, using these functions is fast and fluid, setup has low overhead, and incidents can be resolved more quickly.

• Teams integrates with all the apps our employees use. One challenging question from employees is how to manage communications that start in the inner loop and then traverse to the outer loop, and vice versa. We manage this scenario with both Teams and Viva Engage. Our community about what’s new with the evolving Teams product is open to everyone within Microsoft (outer loop). Sometimes tough questions posed by the community require focused discussion among experts (inner loop). We manage this by configuring Teams connectors and tabs to represent the outer loop conversations within the Teams context. Thus, the experts can discuss the questions and form plans through rapid informal Teams discussions then publish the necessary information concisely to the broader Viva Engage community.

Teams also integrates with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, the Planner task management app, Stream video portal, and even Power BI—so employees have the information and tools they need. Team members can also include other apps and services in their workspaces for the team and organization. Frequently, engineering teams include integration between Visual Studio projects and channels so that work items can be easily discussed with people who may not use Visual Studio.

• Teams allows the ability to customize workspaces. We can customize Teams workspaces with tabs, connectors, and bots. For our developer community, Teams has an extensible platform for building apps with a rich set of capabilities to support high-performing teams.

• Teams offers a complete meeting room experience. We see that with the advent of Teams-capable conferencing devices, Teams has modernized the meeting experience. In one group that focuses on productivity services, team members propose topics and review preliminary conversations before their meetings. During a meeting, teams can chat, share content, and use audio conferencing and video. After the meeting, shared content and conversations are available for reference and follow-up. For broad information sharing, Teams supports channel meetings, which allow participants to drop in on an open meeting if the topics interest them. They can even add it to their personal calendar so that they don’t miss it or just catch up on the conversations, notes, and recordings afterward.

Teams, in combination with the rest of Microsoft 365, helps you stay connected with your work groups.  It empowers our employees to engage with each other and the business in a way that transforms our organization for the better, moving us closer to fully realizing digital transformation.

Sharing information using SharePoint and OneDrive for Business

SharePoint and OneDrive for Business are the source for our file storage, page, business process, and sharing needs.

Using SharePoint to collaborate within a team

We use SharePoint as the primary repository for storing files and data for collaboration at Microsoft. Files, data, and processes that contain corporate info, belong to teams or projects, and anything else that gets shared internally are all stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business.

Office 365 groups are the primary vehicle for managing access in SharePoint with simplicity. A group-connected SharePoint site grants access to group members by default. Site ownership and permissions can also include a wide collection of people. Check-in workflows can be created to assign a document to the next person in line when a reviewer checks it in. If a document is important to the success of a project, it’s important that team members can access it, even if the original author is no longer working on the project. In SharePoint Online, permissions are granted on a site basis, with the option to uniquely share or restrict individual documents. If an employee is a member of the group for the SharePoint site, they typically have access to documents stored on the site. Although they can share outside of the group, the group is the standard definition for access.

With SharePoint, our teams get a collaborative advantage, and supporting that collaboration becomes much simpler within the Microsoft 365 framework. For example:

• Files aren’t stored on a user’s hard drive. Cloud storage is more secure, has continuity, and it’s accessible to employees any time and from any device.
• The group-connected SharePoint site becomes the focal point for the team’s files with deep integration into Microsoft Teams.
• Sites and content are discoverable through search. Team-specific metadata can be added to further improve search results.
• We can apply policies and governance.
• SharePoint provides us better control over permissions.
• We can apply lifecycle management and workflows, and version histories are available.
• Shared content remains available even as team members change. If a team member leaves for a vacation, their team can still share their work.

We use SharePoint as the center for internal document storage and document sharing, but it also hosts all our internal  sites. The MSW homepage—our company intranet homepage—gets about 1.3 million clicks per month, and the site is used by nearly 163,000 employees per month. Employees go there to get company news, learn about major announcements and events, find other internal sites, and search internally. Not only is the MSW site the busiest portal at Microsoft, it’s where we keep core employee content. Employees can find everything including campus maps, expense forms, and meal card balances. It’s the gateway to all other major company sites that also run on SharePoint.

Protecting enterprise files with the cloud

Data can easily be lost or stolen when employees work from files saved to their own devices. Our employees work from the cloud because it’s more secure, it makes collaboration far easier, and we can apply policies and governance.

We encourage our employees to use Microsoft OneDrive for Business as their individual file library for personal work files and files that don’t need to be shared with others or that don’t contain corporate data. OneDrive for Business safely stores your files in the cloud. By default, files saved to OneDrive for Business are private, unless you place them in a shared folder or intentionally share them. OneDrive for Business makes it easy to access and sync your files from anywhere on any device.

OneDrive for Business is a good choice for collaborating and sharing your files, even if they have a limited scope or lifecycle. For example, an employee creates a blog post and wants a colleague to review it before it’s posted. In this case, we expect to use the document once without needing additional storage or context information. We want our employees to use OneDrive for Business for all personal file storage scenarios.

Here are some advantages of using OneDrive for Business from an IT perspective:

• Files aren’t stored on a user’s hard drive. Cloud storage is more secure, has continuity, and is accessible to employees even when their primary device is not. If something goes wrong, the employee can recover their files or revert to a previous version.
• It’s discoverable for the people it’s shared with.
• We can apply policies and governance.

Collaborating and connecting with Viva Engage

Viva Engage is the Microsoft social network that supports broad, online community and connection. People use communities to share knowledge, ask questions, and discuss topics with people that span organizations, roles, and locations. With storyline, individuals have a personal space to share their ideas, interests, and observations. Leaders post announcements to their audiences that enable recipients across Microsoft to react, comment, and share their own perspectives.

With Leadership Corner in Viva Engage, you can get to know your leaders and what they’re thinking about. This platform lets you follow their latest posts, discover the communities they’ve joined, and attend their AMAs to ask them questions directly. Leadership corner provides tools for learning about your leaders and building lasting connections with them.

Viva Engage also provides an open forum for our events where attendees can ask questions and comment about a live broadcast. Presenters and other participants can read these comments as they’re posted and respond in real time.

To ensure that CEO broadcasts reflect what’s on the minds of our employees, we use Viva Engage in advance to solicit employee input, and speakers can address those curated questions or concerns during the meeting and in later follow-ups.

Overall, Viva Engage transforms the way our employees collaborate by breaking down the barriers that location and role have historically presented. Viva Engage conversations don’t have these boundaries. People, groups, and teams who wouldn’t normally be able to engage in conversation can connect through Viva Engage.

Click here to learn more about transforming employee engagement with Microsoft Viva Engage.

Adding intelligence with Microsoft Graph

We also have unified, suite-wide intelligence with Microsoft Graph. Graph maps the connection of people and content to surface insights and is a key technology powering Microsoft 365 Copilot. For example, in most places where you type a name in Outlook 365, the autocomplete uses Graph to suggest people based on the “people I work with” edge. This same technique powers organizationally relevant suggestions in Copilot. Specific examples of this include:

• Email address autocomplete in Outlook. Outlook autocompletes names from those whom our employees recently emailed and people they have actively collaborated with across different projects in different parts of the suite.
• Context-based people and content guidance in Delve and SharePoint. Delve shows documents that are being worked on by an employee or by people in their network based on the capture by Graph of the people with whom they work. SharePoint Home does something similar, except it shows sites being worked on by the employee or by people with whom they work.
• Recently used documents. Office Backstage is powered by Graph. The recent documents shown on one device are the same as those shown on another device, even if the document hasn’t been worked on from the second device.
• AI-generated insights powered by your data. Microsoft 365 Copilot uses Graph data to identify connections between people and their business data to deliver accurate, relevant, and contextual responses.

Enabling cultural change

At Microsoft, the official decision to implement a change like Microsoft 365 adoption is typically made at the organizational or executive level. However, the impetus for change is often a response to the changing business needs of our people or organization. We have diverse groups of people who need to work in different ways. The culture has shifted to work in place, hybrid work, and asynchronous work. With Microsoft 365, our employees are encouraged to support their peers and teammates and build from each other’s work, and they’re rewarded when they do. It’s a core attribute of driving cultural change at Microsoft.

Making change a practical reality

We want each employee at Microsoft to work seamlessly, securely, and feel connected with colleagues and leadership wherever they are.

During morning coffee. Use Outlook to check email and manage your calendar and use Teams to view chats and stay up to date on projects. Use Office Apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents.

From your home office. Use Teams to host or join personal meetings or to chat with voice and text. Use Stream to watch live meetings, and Outlook to connect to a meeting from your email or calendar.

Meet at the office. Use Teams to host personal meetings with smaller groups and manage notes and actions in Teams channels. Use Teams meetings to host or join conference room meetings using conference room hardware.

Collaborate with your team. Use Teams for chat, video, screen sharing, and file coauthoring within a team. Use Office apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents and share documents from the cloud. Use Planner or Project to track actions.

Connect across the company. Use Viva Engage to see for organizational updates, share knowledge, and find answers. Use SharePoint for communication sites and news for broad groups of stakeholders.

Setting up a structure for change

Individual needs are at the heart of change, but we also recognize the need for a structured, documented process for people who manage the change. We provide a common toolset for them to use and help them to scale up to organization-wide adoption. We use four pillars of change management to help us from start to finish. These pillars are applied repeatedly within Microsoft as technology capabilities and business needs evolve. The four pillars are:

• Awareness. The awareness pillar is about landing the message. Before employee training, we knew that we needed to make a good first impression, interest people, and find a message that excited them about Microsoft 365. Our employees needed to understand how Microsoft 365 would help them and why they should give their time to our initiative. Microsoft Viva Insights offers a clear understanding of how work patterns impact wellbeing, productivity, and business performance through data-driven visibility. You can access personal, manager, and leader insights conveniently via the Viva Insights app in Microsoft Teams, on the web, and in Outlook.
• Engagement. The engagement pillar builds on awareness and starts putting Microsoft 365 in the hands of our people along with the training, guidance, and tools to succeed. This includes training, consulting, and a champion community that supports early adopters and leads engagement in their organization.
  Viva Engage introduces a fresh employee experience, fostering connections among people throughout the company, regardless of their location or work hours, to ensure inclusivity and engagement for all. The Viva Engage app, integrated into Microsoft Teams, empowers organizations to cultivate a sense of community, ignite engagement with leadership, leverage knowledge and insights, and establish personal networks.
• Measurement. The measurement pillar tracks the steps of the engagement pillar. After we engage people, we need to measure adoption success by tracking against the success metrics we set. Measurement is about getting actionable feedback and using that feedback to improve the implementation and adoption process.
• Management. The management pillar has the longest lifecycle of any of the pillars in the process. Management is about gaining efficiency and ensuring user satisfaction after Microsoft 365 is in place. It means continuing to support established groups and finding user stories and training opportunities that encourage broader collaboration at Microsoft. This pillar serves as a bridge between the initial implementation and the sustained success of Microsoft 365. It involves monitoring and fine-tuning the system to optimize its performance and meet evolving needs. By continuously evaluating and addressing user feedback, the management pillar helps identify areas where further enhancements and improvements can be made.

Enabling behavior and cultural change for collaboration

Harnessing employee ingenuity is critical to the overall success and relevance of a business. Working together, people generate more ideas and feel more connected to their work, which improves engagement and retention. Our employees need to have resources and tools available wherever they go. To meet the needs of remote and hybrid workplaces, we’ve used Microsoft 365 to streamline communication, improve collaboration, and get more done together.

However, successful collaboration with Microsoft 365 is not just technology adoption; it represents a change in behavior. Microsoft 365 is more than a product—it’s a fundamentally different way of working. The core priority is people. We found that adoption was as much about social and cultural changes and challenges as it was about technology and tool implementation. Adopting Microsoft 365 for collaboration is a different journey than we’ve asked our people to take in the past. With Microsoft 365, we’ve established nine fundamental shifts in behavior that we ask our users to embrace:

• Groups instead of distribution lists. For teams that like to communicate in Outlook, move from classic distribution lists to Outlook connected groups so that the group gets the full benefit of the group SharePoint site and calendar.
• Chat instead of email. Move away from email as a primary method of communications for fast-moving teams and project management.
• Posts instead of one-way messages. Storyline and community announcements encourage participation and provide inclusion in celebratory company moments.
• Live in the cloud. Use all Microsoft 365 components in the cloud.
• Embrace flexibility. Empower users to embrace the flexibility of Microsoft 365 for customization.
• Work mobile. Help people to work in whatever way and place suits them best.
• Catch up when it’s convenient. Unable to attend every meeting you’re invited to? You can watch the recording later and see where your name was referenced and action items assigned to you––all on Microsoft Stream. Ask an attending member to record or click the record button from the Teams meeting chat window.
• Send links, not attachments. Everyone should be working on the same copy of a file in a team SharePoint site or individual OneDrive location. This helps to ensure version consistency, track feedback and changes, allow multiple people to concurrently author, ensure discoverability by the team in enterprise search, and enable enterprise security and legal compliance.
• Share externally directly from SharePoint or OneDrive rather than emailing attachments. We share files directly from SharePoint or OneDrive so the team, with our partners, is working on the same copy of the file, and access can be audited or revoked at any time. Any company compliance, auditing, and real time content scanning through DLP happens when the file is shared in place.
• Bring in external project partners as members in groups. A core team participant, even outside of the company, should be able to participate in the project’s Teams with Planner and SharePoint to keep the project conversations in one place.
• Use Teams Shared Channels for persistent cross-organization collaboration. When employees collaborate in a Teams channel, their collective work is kept in the same workspace. External guests are granted access to the shared channel.

To accomplish this journey, we needed to educate people by managing change and offering training that focused as much on behaviors as on product capabilities.

Managing compliance and security in immersive collaboration

Because Microsoft 365 is hosting our complete collaboration environment, we’re serious about protecting our data, organization, and users in Microsoft 365. Our compliance and security landscape in Microsoft 365 relies on our identity and access strategy, which governs all of the processes and tools we use throughout the identity lifecycle for employees, supplier staff, and partners. As a cloud-first company, we use features in the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security suite, powered by Microsoft Azure and Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), the default directory solution for Microsoft 365, along with on-premises identity and access management solutions to enable our users to be securely productive from anywhere.

Using Microsoft 365 identity models

Microsoft 365 supports three identity models that support a variety of identity scenarios. Depending on how an organization wants to manage identities, it can use a cloud identity model, federated identity model, or the synchronized identity model. We use Azure AD Connect to integrate our on-premises directories with Azure AD. It gives users a single identity in Microsoft 365, Azure, and software as a service (SaaS) applications that are integrated with Azure AD. We use multi-factor authentication to protect our users and ensure the safety of our data.

Enabling external collaboration while protecting our data

Collaboration at Microsoft involves a huge amount of external teamwork. We collaborate and share with industry peers, partners, and vendors. For secure external collaboration, we use identity in Microsoft 365 to verify that external collaborators are who they say they are, and then we use that identity in Microsoft 365 groups to grant access only to resources needed for collaboration.

External collaboration could be something as simple as providing read-only access to a single file, or it could be as complex as an external identity that is part of our Microsoft 365 group membership and participates in teamwork activity in SharePoint, Viva Engage, and Teams.

A big part of external collaboration is finding a reliable and secure way to let the outside in but also to ensure that collaboration and control over our data happens on the inside as well. We want our data stored on our tenancy, under our control. Rather than circulating files outside of our Azure tenancy for external collaborators to view and work on, we keep the files within our tenancy and invite collaborators in so that the work they do and the data they access is within the scope of our security, monitoring, and governance practices. When we have this type of control, we can selectively allow external collaborators the roles and permissions they need.

We have numerous other controls that span our Office 365 groups—including eDiscovery, general data protection regulation (GDPR), multi-geographical controls, and data loss prevention (DLP). They help us rationalize security and compliance and underpin our collaboration environment in Microsoft 365.

Enterprise collaboration is about culture change and empowering people to work together to achieve the best productivity results. We’re moving from a culture of competition to one of cooperation. The tools we use play an important role in this change, but we need to pay attention to behaviors as much as we pay attention to tools.

We’re changing the way that people work and contribute to teams.

Modern collaboration with Microsoft 365 is just as much about cultural change as it is the adoption of new tools, and many of the lessons we’ve learned focus on the benefits of enterprise collaboration and teamwork when it’s implemented across the organization and driven by executive sponsorship. Here are some of the most important lessons we’ve learned:

• Leaders stay better connected with their people. Without open communication, leaders feel disconnected from their people. We use Viva Engage for our monthly company meetings. Satya and his leadership team engage with employees and often chooses topics he will cover based on postings in our Senior Leader Connection community. Across the organization, we use Viva Engage to connect remote employees, work out loud, and discuss topics to drive better decisions.
• Shared team workspaces create hubs for teamwork. Teams and individuals work in many places, and a good model for teamwork supports collaboration. Microsoft Teams makes it easy for people to create virtual team workspaces to increase their productivity. Colleagues’ contributions are visible, integrated, and discoverable across the team. Sharing is fun and inclusive, so each member can express their own style.
• Being productive anywhere empowers a global workforce. We need our employees to have access wherever they are. Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams are enterprise-grade productivity solutions that simplify employees’ lives by allowing them to work and connect with others anywhere. Unified presence information allows people to see each other’s availability, making it easier to meet.
• Connecting people and sharing information enriches global teamwork. We need our employees to be connected and informed to be competitive in our business. Teams chat and Viva Engage conversations connect our entire organization and enable our people to connect and share across the world on global teams.
• Employees unify around customers and partners. It’s essential to bring people together to work across organizational boundaries. Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage each enable multiple avenues that provide an easy way for employees to stay connected with customers and partners using familiar Microsoft 365 capabilities.
• Large group collaboration creates efficiencies. Collaboration between larger teams and communities creates greater efficiencies than forming multiple, smaller collaboration spaces. More members allow for conversation that is broader and more inclusive, especially for high-level and organization-focused communication.

We’re using Microsoft 365 to empower our employees to achieve more by driving better teamwork and collaboration in our teams. Microsoft 365 services provide a unified, extensible framework within which we can achieve our business goals, support modern workstyles, and enable continued digital transformation. Microsoft 365 empowers our entire organization to collaborate and change at the speed of our business.

• Discover how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365.
• Read more about transforming change management at Microsoft with Microsoft 365.
• Explore reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world.
• Read more about OneDrive for Business feature shifting how employees save files within Microsoft.

The post A foundation for modern collaboration: Microsoft 365 bolsters teamwork appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“The company’s employees use Teams as their primary client for calling, holding meetings, chatting, and collaborating with colleagues,” says Frank Delia, a senior program manager in Microsoft Digital. Think of it as the place for your day-to-day tasks and responsibilities.

“It’s the single screen where employees can have a conversation right alongside their work in real time, whether coauthoring a document, attending a meeting, or collaborating on projects across apps and services,” Delia says.

On the other hand, Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) powers communities that connect people across teams and organizations across Microsoft.

“It allows leaders to engage with employees at every level while enabling organizations and departments to communicate at scale,” Delia says.

Diving a bit deeper, Viva Engage communities empower employees to share their knowledge, find experts, and get answers from their peers—all while fostering an inclusive culture where they can connect with each other around shared interests and experiences. It’s the place where people can have company-wide discussions, engage in the company’s cultural transformation, and connect in communities that cross the boundaries of their day-to-day work.

“If you’re trying to reach a large audience, then Viva Engage is a good interactive platform to do that,” Delia says. “Our CEO sponsors a community that brings people across all levels of the company into conversations with senior leaders about our company strategy.”

In contrast, when someone wants to collaborate with their direct colleagues, they do it in Microsoft Teams.

“Teams is well-suited to work for a team trying to accomplish a specific task,” Delia says. “It’s a hub for teamwork.”

Viva Engage is inherently open and content is discoverable by default.

“People who haven’t joined a community can discover conversations and be @mentioned to solicit their input,” Delia says. “Teams is about an invited set of people chatting. If you aren’t explicitly added to the team, you won’t see the conversation. Viva Engage conversations reach people who otherwise wouldn’t see the conversation.”

Better together

Delia says Microsoft employees are finding smart ways to use Teams and Viva Engage together. Now, notifications for both show up in the Teams activity feed.

“Every team is different,” Delia says. “There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to collaboration.”

When people at Microsoft need help on something and don’t know who to turn to, they might ask their colleagues in a community for help or find and post questions within Answers in Viva. Many employees might jump on the thread to troubleshoot the problem. Often, an expert gets @mentioned by someone watching the conversation and join the thread with an official explanation or product information.

The two organizations that build Teams and Viva Engage use each other’s products every day.

“Even the Microsoft Teams development group uses Viva Engage to share the latest product information and in-turn get feedback from their fans in the Microsoft Teams community in Viva Engage,” Delia says. “And vice versa––the Viva Engage team uses Teams chat for spontaneous collaboration.”

Throughout Microsoft, product teams work in Teams and use Viva Engage to connect with people across the organization to answer questions, solicit feedback, and crowdsource ideas for new features, Delia says. Viva Engage communities act as a front door for each team.

Each product has its own strengths.

“Viva Engage embraces a sense of openness, and a desire to have single conversations on important topics,” Delia says. “Because I can find or a colleague can share a conversation even if I’m not a member of a community, I don’t have to follow everything. It allows our community to work together to solve challenges.”

Answering thorny questions

What happens when a thorny question comes up on a Viva Engage thread? That’s when the conversation might switch to Microsoft Teams. The experts can move the conversation into a designated Teams channel where they can talk candidly with their fellow subject matter experts about how to answer the tough question, agree on how to respond, and then head back to Viva Engage to share their best answer or preferred solution.

Eva Etchells, a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s End User Readiness and Communications team, is one of those who uses both Viva Engage and Teams to get her job done.

“My whole thing is to live in Viva Engage,” says Etchells, who sits on the team that answers common IT-related questions that employees post in Viva Engage. “We’re a catchall for all the work issues people have—sometimes we’re the librarians for the company.”

Etchells says she uses Teams to find and contact subject matter experts who know the answers to specific questions, and then she invites them to provide answers directly in Viva Engage.

“Not everybody is in Viva Engage,” Etchells says. “Our most important job is to make sure the questions our employees have get answered, and we use both Viva Engage and Teams to do that.”

“Teams is for working with people you know, chat, calling, projects, and so on,” Delia says. “Viva Engage is for community building, organization-wide conversations, and finding knowledge, information, and answers from people that you may not know or even know how to find.”

Happy collaborating.

• Discover migrating Microsoft Viva Engage to Native Mode unlocks the benefits of Microsoft 365.
• Explore transforming employee engagement at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Unpack Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.

The post Unpacking how Microsoft employees collaborate on Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track Blog.