Our employees at Microsoft are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot to find answers, work faster, communicate more effectively, and boost their creativity. Copilot has become a true personal AI assistant.

To make this tool even more valuable to our employees and users at all companies, we’re creating new agents with specialized AI-powered skills and capabilities built around specific needs and use cases.

An agent specializing in workplace services—starting with HR and IT—is now available as part of a private preview our customers can sign up for here, with support for additional services (such as Facilities) coming soon. The public preview will be available in the first quarter of 2025 and general availability is scheduled for the second quarter of 2025.

Our team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, has played an integral role in building and piloting the Employee Self-Service Agent. In addition to co-developing it with the Copilot product group, we’re also serving as its Customer Zero, meaning we’re the first company to use it. As such, we rolled out early versions of it to our HR and IT professionals and wove their feedback into the product.

“We’re very pleased with the results we’ve seen in both HR and on the IT side in the support space,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “These agents aren’t just speeding up how our teams help employees get the answers they’re looking for, but they’re also giving employees better answers right from the start.”

Augmenting employee self-service with intelligence

At Microsoft, AI has created new possibilities that support our culture of enabling employee self-service, especially in HR and IT. In a survey by our Microsoft 365 Copilot Research Hub, our employees said they’re spending too much time and energy searching for policy related information and navigating siloed systems to complete simple tasks related to their professions.

Like most companies, our HR and IT employees work in complex enterprise environments where they need to take action or find information across hundreds of tools and content repositories. When an employee can’t discover the information they need or accomplish crucial tasks, they’ll typically take one of two routes: They’ll either do without a service or file a ticket for support. The former leaves the employee unsatisfied, and the latter takes up valuable HR and IT staff time.

As industry leaders in HR and IT, and as the creators of Microsoft 365 Copilot, we designed the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot to take on these well-known challenges.

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot gives users the right answers at the right time with context-tailored responses grounded in official content sources. Through natural language queries on key HR and IT questions that they input into the Microsoft 365 Copilot interface of their choice or a company site, the assistant empowers them to quickly locate the resources or tools they need.

“The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot reorients problem-solving from a tool-based focus to a task-based focus,” says Kyle von Haden, principal PM manager for the Employee Self-Service Agent team in the Copilot product group. “It allows somebody to think about the problem they’re trying to solve and just express that rather than thinking about what tool they’ll need to do it.”

When an employee makes an inquiry, the agent connects to SharePoint and other knowledge sources and additional responses can be retrieved from our Microsoft Graph. When needed, it can also retrieve and integrate data from SAP SuccessFactors or ServiceNow. From there, the agent provides the employee with an answer that creates a single, reliable starting point for them to resolve their query—clearly distinguishing between answers from official content and those from the broader Microsoft Graph data.

“It’s exciting to see the transformation of employee experience and support through generative AI with simple conversations,” says Rajamma Krishnamurthy, senior director leading the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence. “As Customer Zero for this new suite of capabilities, we take great pride in channeling our insights and past investments in improving the employee experience at Microsoft and for our customers into this new era of AI.”

The agent includes pre-configured prompts, responses, and templates for self-service use cases so admins can configure the tool with minimal effort and maximum impact for employees.In addition to SAP SuccessFactors and ServiceNow, it also includes other third-party software integrations built into Microsoft 365 Graph and Copilot Studio, which allows administrators to build new connections via Microsoft Cloud Services to streamline business processes.

Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Knowledge access

Guidance from official sources, custom tailored to the individual employee

Examples:

• Looking up company policies
• Finding team member anniversaries
• Identifying which training courses are due

Action-taking

Take action on key HR and IT issues directly from the Employee Self-Service Agent

Examples:

• Submitting time off requests
• Requesting a new computer
• Updating name and transferring direct reports
• Checking and remediating device compliance

Business agility

Reduced case volume and tickets back into HR and IT

Examples:

• Freeing up HR and IT agents from simple or easy to resolve tasks
• Improving employee satisfaction and productivity

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot provides employees asking for help in the HR and IT spaces with a single starting point for knowledge access and task completion.

Microsoft Digital has already implemented these capabilities in small-scale pilots, in partnership with our HR, IT, and product teams to ensure the agent balances utility with security and employee privacy.

“The tool needs to be able to segregate data properly while still presenting the information employees need from a variety of sources in one place,” says Poorvaja Lingam, a principal PM in Microsoft Digital responsible for enabling the IT function in the Employee Self-Service Agent. “Natural language means AI can detect the context that’s relevant for the action it needs to take.”

Those capabilities depend on a layer of connectors, agents, and plugins that loop the Employee Self-Service Agent into different content repositories, third-party apps, and tools. As the team responsible for much of the agent’s configuration and administration, Microsoft Digital’s Elite Builder group created these background elements through another Copilot extensibility tool: Microsoft Copilot Studio.

This tool, based on Microsoft Power Platform, lets low-code, no-code, or pro-code developers enhance Copilot with agents and build their own custom experiences. It’s the key to configuring the Employee Self-Service Agent to access the tools and repositories relevant to our internal organizations.

Similar to other enterprises, HR and IT are natural places for us to start with profession-based agents because of how resource-intensive and complex they are.

HR services, simplified

As an organization, our HR team balances a long list of priorities that support both employees’ needs and the company’s priorities.

“HR is harnessing the power of AI to support our exceptional employees in achieving their professional goals and aspirations, while also addressing needs that affect their livelihoods,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of Digital Strategy and Innovation for HR. “These innovations are driving greater business agility and efficiency, ultimately creating more value for both our employees and the organization.”

There’s an almost dizzying array of solutions and information repositories that support those goals—from payroll to benefits to skilling and more. The HR team uses more than 100 tools to handle these functions.

“Within HR, responsibility for policies and documents does not rest with a single individual, but rather with multiple program owners who have different areas of expertise,” Ajmera says. “Employees need to be confident they’re getting the right information and taking the right action.”

With the sheer scope and complexity of our organization, employees can get lost or confused trying to find guidance on our HR portal. The Employee Self-Service Agent speeds up that process and minimizes the need to reach out to HR professionals.

Instead, all an employee needs to do is enter a natural language query through the interface of their choice. These queries can be articulated in the same conversational manner that an employee might use when speaking with an HR representative. They could ask it questions like:

• Can you tell me how to update my preferred name?
• Show me my pay stub and help me understand my benefits deductions.
• Do I have any training due?

Besides answering questions, the Employee Self-Service Agent can also help you complete tasks. For example, you could say, “Help me schedule time off in February.” To bring back a holistic response, connectors link the agent to common tools like ServiceNow, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors, and to public-facing knowledge bases and internal SharePoint sites, email correspondence on the topic, and any other Microsoft 365 Graph info. The intelligence of the assistant and the ability to find information or invoke tools to complete tasks within a single pane is a giant leap forward for our employees.

Compared with our pre-existing HR virtual agent, we’ve discovered that people within our pilot who use the Employee Self-Service Agent are 25% more likely to receive a correct response and, as a result, we expect they will be 31% less likely to create a support ticket.¹ Early reports suggest that knowledge discovery is getting faster as well.

Even though it’s still early days, the impact of the agent is clear.

“When people come to HR, they’re now getting responses that are faster and more personalized,” says Christopher Fernandez, corporate vice president in HR. “It’s great to see this positive impact—which is exactly what we are aiming for in enhancing the employee experience. This HR innovation would not have been possible without all the thoughtful work and close collaboration across Microsoft Digital and Product.”

Unburdening IT through AI assistance

Routine IT issues are time-consuming for both employees and IT professionals, with much of that inefficiency being tied to how their larger IT organizations function within their companies.

“For an employee to stay productive, they need to have a simple, accessible, and transparent support experience,” says Silvina Olkies, senior director of Global End User Support Services and Employee Experience in Microsoft Digital. “Having multiple entry points for support can lead to confusion and inefficiencies.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is helping us move away from traditional bot, phone, and email support channels. Instead, employees have a single, intelligent entry point to IT. Although HelpDesk support is one of the primary scenarios for IT, the platform also facilitates self-help for other common questions like sign-in information, device status, or internal network connectivity.

The main value driver for the Employee Self-Service Agent is in providing an alternate default to human agents as a first touch. Instead, the platform can help users resolve the vast majority of questions and issues on their own.

The vision is that only the most pressing and complex problems—ones that genuinely require human intervention—will reach our support professionals. To streamline the process further, the entire experience will take place within a single, intelligent pane.

“Our vision is for the support to start and end in Copilot,” Olkies says. “From there, whether you resolve your issue through a comprehensive self-service experience, or you transition seamlessly to a live agent, you remain within a unified, streamlined interface.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent is already helping a small test group of employees get answers faster, reducing support incidents, and reclaiming time for agents to focus on more complex and interesting problems. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we conduct IT services.

Early results are extremely encouraging. To date, the overall self-help success rate has increased by 36%, while information discovery saw a 34% gain in self-resolution. Importantly, user satisfaction for the IT function grew by 18%. It’s clear that employees appreciate self-service experiences enhanced by AI.

Exploring the new frontier of AI-enabled employee self-service

The time savings and increased accuracy that the Employee Self-Service Agent unlocks don’t just benefit general employees. They also drive efficiency gains for HR and IT professionals themselves.

“Many join HR because they want to make a positive impact on others’ lives and contribute to a better workplace,” Ajmera says. “By answering routine admin queries, the Employee Self-Service Agent sets subject matter experts free from the day-to-day minutiae of people knocking on their doors, allowing them to provide meaningful consultation, enhancing their impact and satisfaction at work.”

Despite significant investment, HR program owners struggle with benefit utilization due to awareness and ease of use. The Employee Self-Service Agent improves utilization by providing relevant information when employees are engaged. For example, when an employee asks about their 401k balance, the system can also show their contribution rate and highlight any unclaimed company match.

Our experience in creating and implementing the Employee Self-Service Agent internally has provided valuable lessons for customers who want to adopt the solution. First and most importantly, it’s crucial to properly govern your data estate. That ensures a baseline of data safety thanks to Copilot’s adherence to data loss prevention policies and other guardrails.

“We’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting to ensure customers can easily configure and manage this solution, but it’s important to be thoughtful,” Krishnamurthy says. “A big bang approach might not be the best way to get started, but rather by asking pertinent questions about the initial scope, the areas you might want to start with, and who your audience should be.”

The product team has used these lessons to shape the solution itself. The Employee Self-Service Agent supports a phased roll-out that increases in complexity as an organization’s maturity progresses:

• An out-of-the-box experience facilitates a no-configuration, focused employee self-service lens for optimized responses to common HR and IT questions.
• The minimum configuration delivers answers to employees via official content sources and company-crafted answers where necessary, lowering search time and frustration while improving trustworthiness and administrative control.
• Additional configuration reduces cost and decreases time to value for HR functions, including company policies, employee profile management, payroll, and benefits and IT workflows like ticket management and live agent support.

“As your engagement with the solution deepens, we’ve made it easy to tell the agent where your authoritative content or data lives through templated connectors, then the tool will make sure it’s surfaceable,” von Hayden says. “There’s an ongoing process of continual refinement and improvement until you’ve fine-tuned the solution to exactly what your organization needs.”

The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot demonstrates not just the power of AI but its elasticity. It represents the next step in tailoring AI to specific business needs to enrich culture, empower people, reshape processes, and accelerate performance.

“The technology is there,” D’Hers says. “Now it’s about applying it to real-world scenarios so it can help people achieve their best.”

Here are some tips for getting started with the Employee Self-Service Agent at your company:

• First, we suggest finding one or two of your biggest pain points and addressing those.
• Start on broad patterns to get horizontal scale. Seek out easy wins with less complexity to drive early value.
• Content is key: prioritize knowledge bases, accuracy, and content creation.
• Focus on continuous improvement through quality, accuracy, and user feedback.
• Make sure your content is accurate and well-governed.
• Take a data-driven approach where you clearly identify and communicate the primary volume drivers in your business.
• Ensure content excellence by prioritizing authoritative knowledge and implementing rigorous processes for accuracy, curation, and review.
• Work to keep your users within a single platform, which will enable you to provide them with a seamless self-help experience.
• Continuously enhance your response quality and accuracy by measuring and acting on user feedback.
• Start testing with your human agents who usually answer questions, effective, clean, and well-governed.

The out-of-the-box experience for the Employee Self-Service Agent for Microsoft 365 is currently in limited private preview. Sign up here to be included in the next phase.

• Find out how Microsoft’s pivot to generative AI is being fueled by its rich IT history.
• See how Microsoft Digital is leading AI transformation with an AI Center of Excellence.
• Learn how we’re redesigning how we work at Microsoft with generative AI.

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

The post Boosting HR and IT services at Microsoft with our new Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Teams aims to change that with its AI-powered Intelligent Recap feature in Microsoft Teams Premium.

Intelligent Recap uses machine learning to make meetings more useful for people who attend and for those who need to catch up on what happened later.

Intelligent Recap can summarize meetings and identify key discussion points and action items. It also has special organizational properties, allowing employees to view meeting recordings in color-coded segments that can be sorted by speaker or topic.

“Microsoft Teams Intelligent Recap is a game-changer, especially for busy organizational leaders,” says Claire Sisson, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital, the internal IT organization at Microsoft.  “Whether you need to follow up on tasks, share notes, or catch up on a meeting you missed, Intelligent Recap has you covered.”

• Learn how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.

How Intelligent Recap works

Microsoft Teams has a meeting recap feature that includes generating meeting transcripts. The technology behind Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium uses AI to take this type of capability further.

After a meeting is recorded, Intelligent Recap identifies spoken names and the general topics being covered in a meeting. The technology can suggest “chapters” that organize and summarize meetings. It can even suggest action items based on what was discussed.

That information, along with information about events that happened within the meeting, such as when participants shared their screen, is made available to all meeting participants within a few minutes of the meeting’s conclusion.

Let’s take a look at how we use Intelligent Recap internally here at Microsoft (and how you can use it at your company).

Intelligent Recap results

Efficiency for everyone

Intelligent Recap gives us visual indicators that help meeting participants—and non-participants—quickly refer to key moments in a discussion.

Some indicators are shown to all meeting participants, while others are only seen in a participant’s personal view.

Personalized timeline markers include indicators that bookmark moments such as when one of our employees joined or left a meeting and when their name is mentioned.

These personalized indicators make it easy to catch up on anything from the meeting someone might have missed. Perhaps more important, everyone else can be confident that that person will catch up in real time.

Intelligent Meeting Recap helps to eliminate those few minutes at the start of a meeting debating how long to wait for a delayed colleague.

“There’s no need to wait around anymore before we start a meeting,” says Chanda Jensen, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, who manages the roll out of new Teams meetings features internally at Microsoft. “Since we have Intelligent Recap, those who’ve joined late or need to leave early in a meeting can easily watch anything that they’ve missed before or after using the personalized join and leave markers.”

Another marker shows meeting participants anytime someone mentions their name. The marker will also pop up a very brief snippet of transcript surrounding the mention, so viewers can easily see the context of the mention.

Using at-mention markers

All participants can see an interactive, visual representation of the participants who spoke during the meeting, called the speaker bar.

The speaker bar reduces time spent scrolling back and forth through a transcript or recording to find a remark you want to reference.

“Let’s say I’m very interested in something one particular colleague had to say,” Jensen says. “I can easily click on their speaker bar, and the recording will jump exactly to that point.”

AI takes notes for you

A major leap for machine learning within Microsoft Teams Premium is Intelligent Recap’s auto-generated topics, chapters, notes, and action items.

Intelligent Recap can identify sections of recorded meetings and summarize them. In a few minutes after a meeting concludes, a bar of AI-generated topics synchronized to the recording appears below the meeting video.

“This feature automatically captures the topics that were brought up during the meeting, and divides them into color-coded segments,” Jensen says. “So, if you were only interested in a specific topic that was discussed, you can easily skip to that, and the recording will go to that section.”

As part of this feature, an “AI Notes” tab is populated with “Meeting Notes” and “Follow-up Tasks.”

This is meant to make note taking and meeting follow-up more efficient, especially for busy participants and teams that work asynchronously.

“It gives you a basis for your notes and tasks, rather than having to create everything from scratch,” Jensen says. “It’s almost like sending your personal note-taker right to these meetings.”

Employee benefits

The response to Intelligent Recap has been enthusiastic here at Microsoft.

“This is one of the most impactful features I have seen introduced with hybrid work,” says Tyler Russell, a senior engineering architect on the Azure Databases SQL Customer Success Engineering team. “This functionality improves my productivity significantly and I have started recording more meetings because of it.”

For those involved in long meetings or who have significant meeting conflicts, Intelligent Recap is proving especially useful.

“I was recently involved in a half day, extensive leadership meeting,” says Mike Friday, senior director on the Global Customer Experience—Strategic Programs Team. “Having the Intelligent Recap feature enabled me to quickly catch up with my team through AI-generated notes.”

Boosting asynchronous communication

The features and benefits of Intelligent Recap represent progress in making asynchronous work more efficient.

Traditionally, meetings must take place at a specific time. This creates tension with asynchronous work conditions, where employees live in different time zones and with various living circumstances.

An urgent meeting might be delayed because of the need to include someone in a different time zone, or canceled because one participant has a sick child.

Intelligent Recap’s AI-driven features enable teams to maintain their velocity without losing collaborative value from a team member.

“A lot of my colleagues overseas constantly have to catch up on the Redmond time zone work content,” Jensen says. “Now that AI is capturing the dialogue in these meetings, it’s so much easier for them. They can quickly read the AI-generated summary to see if there’s anything that needs their attention, and if they are mentioned, they can rapidly review that specific part of the recording.”

Intelligent Recap makes it possible for asynchronous teams to welcome more diversity in terms of geographic location and other factors that can impact same-time availability.

Our team looks forward to furthering the feature’s capabilities and offering support in multiple languages beyond English.

“Microsoft’s AI and machine learning capabilities helped bring Intelligent Recap to life,” Sisson says. “Intelligent Recap represents the dawn of a new era for Teams. We expect to continue to roll out AI-based features to make asynchronous work easier, more collaborative, and more effective.”

Here are our top learnings from using Intelligent Recap:

• It will enhance meetings for those on the call and those who couldn’t make it at the time of the meeting.
• It will summarize your meetings, take notes for you, and identify key discussion points and action items for attendees.
• It offers personalized timeline markers and presents information by topic or speaker in color-coded segments, streamlining meeting catch-up.
• It paves the way for diverse teams with varying needs and global locations to collaborate more effectively.

Sign up for a Microsoft Teams Premium trial and try out the Intelligent Recap feature.  

• Learn how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.
• Read more about meeting recap in Microsoft Teams.
• Unpack Intelligent recap in Microsoft Teams Premium, now available.

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

The post How we’re recapping our meetings with AI and Microsoft Teams Premium at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

IT journey at Microsoft

The rapid advance of AI is enabling us to rethink every dimension of IT. From the apps, workflows, and services that power our employee experience, to the network, infrastructure and devices that power our employee productivity, everything is evolving quickly.

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

In this article, we describe some of the ways we’re already using AI, as well as new investments we’re making to accelerate our own AI-powered transformation—and to inspire yours.

{Learn how we’re reinventing the employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.Discover how we’re improving our Employee Experience as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.}

Resilient and secure infrastructure powered by AI

Reliable and secure access to corporate resources is paramount—especially at a company that has fully embraced flexible work. Our employees depend on a foundation of network connectivity to seamlessly access the tools and services they rely on every day. Harnessing the power of AI to ensure our employees stay productive and our network remains resilient and secure is one of our top investment areas in Microsoft Digital.

“AI offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink our enterprise infrastructure,” says Heather Pfluger, general manager of Infrastructure and Engineering Services in Microsoft Digital. “It’s an exciting time to be an IT leader at Microsoft as we consider all the ways IT can make our services more efficient, secure, and reliable.”

One way we’ll do that is by infusing data-driven intelligence into every part of our infrastructure, engineering, and operations to eliminate configuration drift, comply with standards and security policy, reduce operator effort and errors, and efficiently respond to rapidly changing business needs.

Investments in software defined networking and infrastructure-as-code are already improving reliability and network adaptability. AI is helping us automate workflows that deliver network services, detect anomalies, and manage compliance. We’re using real-time streaming telemetry from network devices to drive continuous operational improvements. We’ve used data from past incidents to train an AI model that will help our network engineers to reduce the time needed to mitigate infrastructure incidents with the goal of reducing or eliminating network outages and increasing employee productivity.

Securing the Microsoft network and other endpoints is critical to AI and Machine Learning (ML) are among our best tools to enhance the security and compliance of our cloud and on-premises network and hosting environments.

While Microsoft already benefits from a Zero Trust security posture, we’ll use AI and ML to further strengthen our network by automatically assigning devices to the right network, removing the burden on IT admins to classify and assign networks manually. We’ve implemented consistent access controls for wireless and wired networks to further improve security and reduce legacy VPN usage. We’re also building AI and ML capabilities to automate our security workflows, including analyzing device vulnerabilities, detecting anomalous firewall traffic flows, and managing incident diagnosis and remediation.

A vast network of interconnected devices running many different operating systems relies on our network for seamless connectivity. Managing these devices requires significant time and resources. To better manage them, we’re investing in a range of new AI-powered device capabilities spanning the entire device lifecycle.

AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting is a key investment area. We’ll use AI and ML to schedule essential maintenance tasks and autonomously fix errors and performance issues. This will reduce downtime, prolong device lifespans, and ensure employees have a consistent and productive experience by avoiding problems and errors. We’ll also use AI to analyze device settings, network activity, vulnerabilities, and user behavior, enhanced with demographic data and location metadata to offer relevant solutions for common and emerging device problems. We aim to help IT administrators be more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios.

{Learn how we’re moving Microsoft’s global network to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Discover How AI will impact the future of security.}

Employee experiences enhanced with AI

AI enables possibilities to simplify the employee experience in unprecedented ways. Our vision in Microsoft Digital is to use AI to simplify the employee experience by providing a single endpoint for most common tasks. We envision a workplace where AI seamlessly integrates into our employees’ workflows and simplifies the number of systems they must learn and navigate. We’re working to deliver a unified, connected, and personalized experience where our employees can access critical data, tools, and insights, all from one place.

“We see AI as the key to unlocking the full potential of our employees,” says Sean MacDonald, partner director of Employee Productivity in Microsoft Digital. “AI enables us to deliver personalized experiences that empower our employees to work smarter, faster and happier.”

With Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot as a central engagement hub, we’ll redesign the employee experience to no longer be app centric, but rather employee centric, to meet people in the flow of their work.

Navigating with Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Our employees will discover information and services through natural language Q&A to complete tasks more smoothly. Business Chat will support a range of different employee experiences like diving into employee benefits, facilitating career planning, processing expenses, finding information, exploring workplace amenities, purchasing devices, or upskilling for a new role. We’ll connect different Copilot features and our internal data to Business Chat and reduce the time to get answers or insights by more than half. Our employees can still use web or app experiences if they prefer, but Business Chat will become a primary entry point for many workflows.

Generative AI will also change how our employees experience support services. We aim to increase employee productivity by addressing IT issues automatically or remotely through AI-powered chats that often don’t require an agent.

{Learn more about how we’re deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot at Microsoft. Discover how Microsoft Digital is reinventing employee productivity in the hybrid workplace.}

AI-powered transformation powered by good governance

We’re working to strike the right balance with AI—we want to use it to transform the way we work and to empower our employees while also protecting the company. To get this right, we’re laser focused on adopting the right governance measures.

“We’re going to be one of the first organizations to really get our hands on the whole breadth of AI capabilities,” says Matt Hempey, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It will be our job to ensure we have good, sensible policies for eliminating unnecessary risks and compliance issues.”

Our team in Microsoft Digital manages some of the most complex Microsoft productivity tenants in the world, and the governance of those tenants can be a challenge. Unmanaged assets like Power BI workspaces, Power Apps, or even Microsoft Teams groups increase the risk of oversharing sensitive data and can compromise the health and security of the environment. AI will be instrumental in helping us manage our tenants more effectively by helping us to detect issues and by automating time-consuming compliance tasks.

High-quality enterprise data with strong data governance is another key to our AI-led transformation. We’re establishing processes and frameworks to ensure data quality, with assigned data owners to supervise them. We’re using tools to measure data quality and produce a quality score, enhancing confidence and trust among users so they can be confident using the data in AI scenarios.

However, high-quality data is useless without ongoing governance.We have years of experience managing Microsoft’s vital tenants, and we’ve experienced the complexities of governance at global enterprise scale. AI raises issues around privacy, reputation, and copyright. Responsible and ethical applications of AI, powered by effective data governance, are our priority, so that we as a company can keep innovating without risking security or reputational damage. Using tools like Microsoft Purview, we’ll pay attention to the source, sensitivity, and lifecycle of data for AI, focusing on discovery, classification, and protection. Our goal is to safely handle sensitive data, ensuring ethical uses to achieve the right business outcomes.

{Discover how Microsoft Digital is governing its key productivity tenants to support AI. Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.}

Transforming our approach to IT

In Microsoft Digital, we’re committed to innovating with AI to revolutionize our employee experience and to rethink IT management, work that we’ll power through consistent governance practices and high-quality enterprise data.

“From making our employees more productive to improving their experience in the hybrid workplace, to preemptively anticipating issues with our services, infrastructure, and devices, AI is fundamentally changing how we manage information technology at Microsoft,” D’Hers says.

As we’ve done since the early days of IT at Microsoft, we’ll push boundaries to become a catalyst for AI innovation for our employees and for our customers. Just as we helped shape the past three decades of enterprise IT innovation, the next steps we take on our IT journey here at Microsoft will help shape this new era of AI. We’re excited to continue sharing our insights from our journey of AI-powered transformation with our customers and partners.

Here are some learnings that we hope will help you in your journey to transform your approach to IT with AI:

• AI has the potential to revolutionize every facet of IT administration and the employee experience. Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot can increase employee productivity by making information easier to find and by reducing or eliminating repetitive and mundane tasks, which will enable your employees to focus on higher value work.
• Enterprise data is your most valuable asset in the era of AI. Invest in data and tenant governance so you can use your data to support AI-powered productivity and collaboration workloads using Azure OpenAI and other services. Microsoft Purview offers a great solution to protect your sensitive enterprise data.
• We’ll be using the power of AI to rethink our entire IT portfolio here in Microsoft Digital. As Customer Zero for some of Microsoft’s most important products for IT professionals, our insights and product enhancements will improve the experience for our customers as well.

Get started with Azure AI.

• What is Azure OpenAI Service?
• Learn about Azure OpenAI Service.
• Get started with Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how we’re reinventing our employee experience for a hybrid world here at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our employee experience as the company’s Customer Zero.
• Find out how data and AI are driving our transformation.
• See how we’re getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.

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

The post Powering a generational shift in IT at Microsoft with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Editor’s note: This is the third video in our ongoing series that showcases our in-house experts using real-world scenarios to explore the transformative capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Kai Cheng is among our first employees to train her colleagues on how to use Microsoft 365 Copilot—she was there when we at Microsoft became the first enterprise to fully deploy it. She learned a lot during those early days, findings and insights that she is now happy to share with customers in this video.

Press play to hear Cheng share her best tips for getting your employees to start using Copilot at your company.

Kai Cheng gives examples of ways you can use Microsoft 365 Copilot to make your day more productive and improve the quality of your work.

Cheng says you should always start with the “why.” She also suggests you communicate how Copilot improves productivity and efficiency. For example, while most know that Copilot can summarize documents and recap meetings, she reminds us that these capabilities are just the beginning.

Digging deeper

According to Cheng, showing off the capabilities of Copilot is not just about saving time. Its true power lies in its ability to improve the quality of deliverables and help users build new skills. For instance, Cheng demonstrates how users can use Copilot to ask questions about a document, leading to a deeper understanding and more informed decision-making.

This approach transforms passive reading into active learning, enabling users to grasp complex information and apply it effectively.

Learning with Business Chat in Microsoft 365 Copilot

Cheng also highlights the potential of Business Chat as a powerful learning tool. Instead of relying on traditional search engines, users can ask Copilot to explain concepts in a way that’s tailored to their level of understanding. For example, a user from a non-technical background can ask Copilot to simplify explanations or provide relevant examples, making learning more personalized and accessible. This feature turns Copilot into a personal tutor, capable of adapting to individual learning styles.

Another significant benefit Cheng discusses is using Copilot to improve the quality of work deliverables. Beyond just drafting and editing documents, Copilot can suggest improvements such as adding visualizations or refining content to make it more compelling. This ensures that users not only complete tasks efficiently but also produce higher-quality outcomes that stand out.

Cheng encourages users to focus on how Copilot can unlock new productivity levels. For example, Copilot can automate routine tasks like meeting summaries and task prioritization, allowing users to spend more time on strategic, high-impact activities. By freeing up time, Copilot enables users to focus on what truly matters.

Before you demo Copilot

Cheng suggests that anyone preparing a Copilot demo always starts with three key considerations:

• First, how would you complete the task without Copilot?
• Second, how can Copilot improve the process?
• Finally, compare the two approaches to identify and communicate the specific benefits that Copilot offers.

This method ensures that your audience fully grasps the value of Copilot, making your training sessions more effective and impactful.

Thank you for watching Cheng’s presentation! We hope it helps you get started with your Copilot training and adoption efforts at your company.

• Check out Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Interested in becoming a Copilot Champ? Sign up for our program. Make a difference. Become a Champion.

• Watch the first video in our Copilot Champs series: Showcasing how our product managers are using Microsoft Copilot.
• Watch the second video in our Copilot Champs series: Using Microsoft 365 Copilot as a trusted advisor for your Six Sigma projects.
• Learn more about how our Copilot Champs Community is helping drive Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption here at Microsoft.

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

The post Getting your Microsoft 365 Copilot training right appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Why change?

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

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

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

Becoming Microsoft Digital

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

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

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

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

Thriving in a hybrid world

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

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

Digital capabilities

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

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

Microsoft Viva

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

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

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

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

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

Transforming with AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hybrid meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Power Platform

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

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

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

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

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

Securing employee experiences across devices, apps, and infrastructure

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

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

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

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

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

Physical spaces and facilities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural norms

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

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

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

Driving adoption of new employee experiences

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s exactly what we designed Microsoft Viva Engage to do.

To capture those benefits, we rolled out Microsoft Viva Engage’s newest features to our hundreds of thousands of employees here at Microsoft. Making this happen required a cross-disciplinary team of product specialists, change management practitioners, communicators, and executive sponsors.

We’re creating an environment where deep, meaningful human connection is ambient. If we solve for that, we won’t have this perceived dichotomy between flexible or hybrid work and employees who feel connected.

—Chris Owen, Microsoft Viva program manager, Human Resources

[Learn about all the ways Microsoft Viva is making work life better at Microsoft. See how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday. Find out about Microsoft’s employee-centric experience.]

Keeping connected in the modern work world

Microsoft Viva Engage is the next evolution of our enterprise social platform Yammer, giving our employees a place to connect, express themselves, and find belonging that builds meaningful relationships at work. We’re using it to transform the way we do corporate communications. And while Viva Engage helps all employees connect, its latest features unlock especially powerful ways for our senior leaders to connect with people across their organizations and people with each other across organizations and networks.

We wanted to make sure we were telling the right story and reaching the right people. So we started thinking about how we could best help leaders understand how Viva Engage could make their jobs easier.

—Melissa Cafiero, communications and readiness lead, Microsoft Digital

“We’re creating an environment where deep, meaningful human connection is ambient,” says Chris Owen, Microsoft Viva program manager with Microsoft Human Resources. “If we solve for that, we won’t have this perceived dichotomy between flexible or hybrid work and employees who feel connected.”

We started using Microsoft Viva in helpful new ways starting in in Fall 2022:

• Leadership Corner is a dedicated space for communications and connecting with leaders.
• AMA (Ask Me Anything) events give leaders and employees the chance to make direct connections through Q&As with their colleagues.
• Employee Resource Group brings together employees who can support each other, share ideas, and build community.
• Storyline announcements deliver messaging directly to a leader’s most appropriate audience.
• Social campaigns rally people around shared initiatives through common social media behaviors.
• Analytics demonstrate value and guide behaviors through testing and learning.
• Answers, the latest feature, provides a crowdsourcing forum where employees can get their questions answered.

These features perfectly position Microsoft Viva Engage for a leadership-driven approach to adoption.

Building a strategy for success

The adoption team’s first challenge was finding a way to earn buy-in from our senior leaders. Microsoft Viva Engage is an enterprise social app, and executives are our biggest influencers.

“We wanted to make sure we were telling the right story and reaching the right people,” says Melissa Cafiero, communications and readiness lead in our Microsoft Digital (MSD) organization. “So, we started thinking about how we could best help leaders understand how Viva Engage could make their jobs easier.”

Cafiero’s team partnered with a wide range of collaborators across HR, change management, and product to build a strategy for reaching the executive community.

“We started digging into the size of this audience and the breadth of communication roles at Microsoft,” Cafiero says.

One group stood out: Global Employee and Executive Communications, a team known as GEEC. These professionals work with executives to craft internal communications, so they’re perfectly positioned to influence the influencers.

The adoption team started recruiting GEEC members into a new Early Adopter Program (EAP) for Microsoft Viva Engage. The program had three requirements:

• Become a superuser – Members were encouraged to set aside 30 minutes per week to learn about Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Collect insightful feedback – We asked them to share their insights with the adoption team to help us shape the features and direction of Viva Engage.
• Generate best-use scenarios – We encouraged them to actively use Viva Engage to find ways to promote adoption.

They also had the opportunity to join regular workshops, pop-up focus groups, a bespoke Microsoft Viva community within the app, and 1:1 follow-ups. As a result of this high-touch engagement, they had the comfort and confidence to use the tool in their everyday work and explain its value to executives.

“We started to see what they needed as corporate communicators to best leverage Viva Engage,” Owen says. “An important learning was that we shouldn’t be feature-focused but problem-focused. We asked what challenges these communicators face and began to co-create solutions for how they can best use this app to solve them.”

Viva Engage lets employees see you as someone approachable, someone who cares about them, and by using these features, you can build a culture of involvement that you couldn’t before.

—Paula Bohn, senior business program manager, change and adoption, MSD

Thanks to the adoption team’s work, we had buy-in from key members within the corporate communications discipline. They grew into an engaged group of superusers who were excited to apply Microsoft Viva Engage to their work with executives.

Building groundswell for Microsoft Viva Engage

With the release of leadership-focused features, we were in an excellent position to capture executive buy-in for the rollout.

“We talked to leaders about how employees often see executives as these unreachable entities,” says Paula Bohn, senior business program manager for change and adoption with MSD. “Viva Engage lets employees see you as someone approachable who cares about them, and by using these features, you can build a culture of involvement that you couldn’t before.”

Supported by the communications professionals in the EAP program, our leaders came to the table with a full understanding of Microsoft Viva Engage’s value and how it works. As a result, we had strong buy-in from our internal influencers.

One of the most successful activations came at the end of 2022, when we launched a Microsoft Viva Engage social campaign asking employees to look back over the last year: #2022Reflections. When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella contributed his own reflection, it received over 200,000 impressions. That gave the adoption a massive boost.

“My change management team can jump through plenty of hoops to make adoption readiness happen, but a tool doesn’t actually land until employees see their leaders modeling the behavior,” Bohn says.

Microsoft Viva Engage shines through top-down deployment driven by senior leadership. But as it reached a critical mass of usage and engagement, the team took steps to reinforce adoption for all employees.

“Once we began to see leaders posting to their organizations in ways that weren’t possible before, the number of questions and requests for enablement quickly exceeded our capacity for white-glove treatment,” says Frank Delia, senior program manager for Office 365 services management and adoption with MSD. “That’s when we realized we needed to scale this information to meet demand.”

It’s not just about enabling leaders—everyone can take advantage of Microsoft Viva Engage’s capabilities. The best way to fuel Viva Engage usage is to drive interest in solving challenges that teams have and not on trying to get them to deploy a particular feature.

Company-wide adoption efforts included an extensive communication strategy featuring product documentation, in-tool directional supports, internal blogs, and all-employee emails, all while sourcing feedback from GEEC members and employees alike.

Paired with the excitement and engagement of connecting more closely with our top leaders, the groundswell of Microsoft Viva Engage usage continues to surge. As of March 2023, monthly active usage (MAU) for the Viva Engage app in Microsoft Teams stood at 71 percent of Microsoft employees. That’s nearly double its 38 percent MAU before we launched the new features in November, and much higher than our adoption target of 50 percent.

A roadmap for adoption success

At this point, Microsoft Viva Engage usage is high, and the feature sets are fully in place. The next steps are all about scale.

Now that this adoption is firmly established, Microsoft employees’ experience and feedback provide valuable insights for future deployments. Both the approach to communications and the EAP will feature heavily in our next big rollout.

“To me, adoption means users fully understand the product and its value, and they wouldn’t want to do without it.” Bohn says. “That’s the real measure of a successful adoption.”

The specific technology and key players may be different, but the core adoption process will remain our north star. It’s all about communicating value, capturing your key players, and making sure your technology meets your customers’ needs.

• Different approaches are valid for different tools, so select a top-down or bottom-up approach based on your use case.
• Be problem-focused—not feature-focused—to capture value for your key stakeholders.
• Be diligent about building a usage framework and differentiating use cases.
• Identify who your influencers are and who’s influencing them.
• Thoroughly research your target roles and their work.
• Train your early adopters and influencers extensively because other employees will follow their lead.

• Learn about all the ways Viva is making work life better at Microsoft.
• See how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday.
• Find out how Microsoft is building an employee-centric experience.

The post Transforming employee engagement at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Engage appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Although these features have proven to be incredibly useful to our employees and our wider organization, there are also concerns about how retaining Microsoft Teams meeting data might affect our security posture, records retention policy, and privacy. Just like any other company, we at Microsoft have to balance these varying aspects.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re leading cross-disciplinary conversations to ensure we get it right.

{Learn how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365. Discover getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.}

Policy considerations of Microsoft Teams meeting data retention

Our Microsoft Teams meeting data comes in the form of three main artifacts: recordings, transcriptions, and data that AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot and recap services can use to increase our general business intelligence.

We find meeting recordings and transcripts are helpful for many reasons, including helping us overcome accessibility issues related to fast-paced, real-time meetings or language differences—this is a powerful way to level the playing field for our employees. Our ability to share recordings and transcripts also supports greater knowledge transfer and asynchronous work, which is especially helpful for teams that operate across time zones.

Microsoft Teams Premium enables AI-generated notes, task lists, personalized timeline markers for video recaps, and auto-generated chapters for recordings. Within a meeting, the Microsoft 365 Copilot sidebar experience helps our late-joining employees catch up on what they’ve missed, provides intelligent prompts to review unresolved questions, summarizes key themes, and creates notes or action items.

The helpfulness of these tools is clear, but data-retention obligations introduce challenges that organizations like ours need to consider. First, producing and retaining this kind of data can be complex if it isn’t properly governed. Second, data-rich artifacts like video recordings occupy a lot of space, eating up cloud storage budgets.

“We tend to think of the recordings we make during meetings as an individual’s data, but they actually represent the company’s data,” says Rachael Heade, director of records compliance for Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA). “We want to empower individuals, but we have to remember that retention and volume impacts of these artifacts on the company can be substantial.”

In light of these potential impacts, some organizations simply opt out of enabling Microsoft Teams meeting recordings.

Asking the right questions to assemble the proper guardrails

Our teams in Microsoft Digital and CELA, our legal division, are working to balance the benefits of Microsoft Teams meeting data retention with our compliance obligations to provide empowering experiences for our employees while keeping the company safe.

“Organizations are always concerned about centralized control over the retention and deletion of data artifacts,” Heade says. “You have excited employees who want to use this technology, so how do you set them up so they can use it confidently?”

Like many policy conversations, getting this right starts with our governance team in Microsoft Digital and our internal partners asking the employees from across the company who look after data governance the right questions:

• When should a meeting be recorded and when should it not?
• What kind of data gets stored?
• Who can initiate recording, and who can access it after the meeting?
• How long should we retain meeting data?
• Where does the data live while it’s retained?
• How can we control data capture and retention?
• What does this mean for eDiscovery management?

These questions help us think about the proper guardrails. Our IT perspective is only one part of the puzzle, so we’re actively consulting with CELA, corporate security, privacy, the Microsoft Teams product group, the company’s data custodians, and our business customers throughout this process.

“As an organization, this is about thinking through your tenant position and getting it to a reasonable state,” says David Johnson, tenant and compliance architect with Microsoft Digital.

Our conversations have brought up distinctions that any organization should consider as they build policy around Microsoft Teams meeting retention:

• The length of time a meeting’s data remains fresh, relevant, or useful
• The difference in retention value between operational and informational meetings, for example, weekly touchpoints versus project kick-offs or education sessions
• The different risks inherent in recordings compared to transcriptions
• Establishing default policies while allowing variability and flexibility when employees need it
• Long-term retention for functional artifacts like demos and trainings

From sharing perspectives to crafting policy

Our policies around Microsoft Teams meeting data retention continue to evolve, but we’ve already implemented some highly effective practices, policies, and controls. Every organization’s situation is unique, so it’s important that you speak to your legal professionals to craft your own policies. But our work should give you an idea of what’s possible through out-of-the-box features within Microsoft Teams.

The policies we’ve put in place represent a mix of technical defaults, meeting options, and empowering employees to make informed decisions about usefulness and privacy. They also build on the foundations of our work with sensitivity labeling, which is helping secure data across our tenant.

• Transcript attribution opt-out gives employees agency and reassures them that we honor their privacy.
• User notices alert employees when a recording or transcription starts, allowing them the opportunity to opt out, request that the meeting go unrecorded, or leave the call.
• Nuanced business guidance from CELA through an internal Recording Smart Use Statement document helps employees understand the implications of recording, when not to record, and when not to speak in a recorded call.
• Recommending that employees “tell and confirm” before recording empowers and supports our people to speak up when they don’t believe the meeting should be recorded or don’t feel comfortable.
• We didn’t wait for Compliance Recording: Although this choice would require that a user consent to recording before unmuting themselves, we decided that opt-outs and user notices provided sufficient agency to our employees.
• Meeting labels that limit who can record mean only the organizer or co-organizer can initiate recordings for meetings labeled “highly confidential.”
• Only meeting organizers can download meeting recordings tokeep the meeting data contained and restrict sharing.
• The default OneDrive and SharePoint meeting expiration is set to 90 days to ensure we minimize the risk of data leakage or cloud storage bloat.

These policies reflect three core tenets we use to inform our governance efforts: empower, trust, and verify.

“The bottom line is that we rely on our employees to be good stewards of the company,” Johnson says. “But because we’ve got a good governance model in place for Teams and good overall hygiene for our tenant, we’re well set up to deal with the evolution of the product and make these decisions.”

We can’t recommend that any organization follow our blueprint entirely, but asking some of the same questions as we have can help build a foundation. To start, read our blog post on how we create self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365 and explore this Microsoft Learn guide on meeting retention policies in Microsoft Teams.

With a firm grasp of the technology and close collaboration with the right stakeholders, you can guide your own policy decisions and unlock the right set of features for your team.

Here are some tips for approaching meeting data retention at your company:

• Face the fear and get comfortable with being uncomfortable: First, establish your concerns, then work toward optimizing your policy compliance.
• Consider how to support your company’s compliance obligations while allowing your employee population to take advantage of the product, and let those things live together side-by-side.
• Connecting with your legal team is essential because they’re the experts on assessing complex compliance questions.
• Investigate meeting labels and what policies you might want to apply to meetings based on sensitivity and other attributes.

See how Microsoft Teams Premium can help you manage your data retention.  

• Learn how Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365.
• Discover getting the most out of generative AI at Microsoft with good governance.
• Unpack Microsoft Teams Premium—the smart place to work.
• Check out our Microsoft Teams Premium overview for administrators.
• Work with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

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

The post Empowering employees after the call: Enabling and securing Microsoft Teams meeting data retention at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Power Automate, part of the suite of tools offered by Microsoft Power Platform, is a low-code, cloud-based automation service powered by AI. In the company’s own words, Power Automate enables customers to streamline processes across their organization to save time and focus on what’s important.

While that might sound like corporate jargon, I can personally attest to its effectiveness. Power Automate has indeed helped my organization save time and focus on what matters most. By “my organization,” I’m referring to Microsoft itself—specifically, the Microsoft Charlotte Campus and the Blacks at Microsoft (BAM) Employee Resource Group. Power Automate has been essential in planning, organizing, and running our community service events, thereby amplifying their impact and continued viability.

As a senior software engineer at Microsoft, I specialize in data engineering, working on the systems that power Microsoft’s financials through big data analytics, revenue reporting, and product insights. Beyond my technical role, I’m also deeply passionate about giving back to the community through volunteerism. At the Charlotte campus, I’ve channeled this passion into organizing outreach and volunteer events, specifically focusing on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education.

Power Automate has been a game-changer in helping me maintain what I call work-life-volunteering balance. It allows me to stay focused on my primary work duties, keep a healthy personal life, and actively engage in my passion for service. Burnout, especially in tech, is a very real thing. By automating tasks that would have otherwise been overwhelming, Power Automate has helped me avoid burning out, ensuring I can excel at my actual job while still having an impact in my community. I’d like to share how it can help you do the same, but first, story time.

Building community through service

I joined Microsoft in 2020, right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, I was living in St. Louis, Missouri, but decided to relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Microsoft has an office and was looking to expand. (Fun fact: it’s the oldest Microsoft office outside of Redmond, established in 1990!) Relocating during the pandemic presented its own set of challenges. COVID had essentially shut down the city’s social scene and the Charlotte office, making it difficult to meet new people and coworkers. Having spent my first year in Charlotte mostly isolated, I was eager for opportunities to get out and connect with people, both at the office and in the city at large.

Knowing that volunteering is an effective way to build community, I quickly sought out opportunities to get involved, both through local nonprofits and at Microsoft. It didn’t take long to find calls for volunteers throughout the city. My first step was volunteering with a local nonprofit called the Carolina Youth Coalition, which focuses on propelling high-achieving, under-resourced high school students to and through college. As a mentor and writing tutor with the organization, I began looking for ways to connect the students—many of whom were interested in technology—with Microsoft’s presence in Charlotte.

Discover Days: The first big step

I started by investigating the possibility of bringing the students to the Microsoft Charlotte campus for a field trip. My hope was for a fun and informative day complete with a campus tour, networking opportunities, a hearty meal, and some cool swag for them to take home. When I reached out to Chemere Davis—Charlotte Campus Community Lead and BAM North Carolina Chairperson—to see if such a visit would be possible, I was met with an emphatic yes. At the time, it surprised me, still being new to Microsoft, but now, after four years with the company, I see it as a reflection of Microsoft’s genuine commitment to empowering local communities.

That fall, 50 Carolina Youth Coalition students visited Microsoft Charlotte, sparking an annual tradition and an ongoing series of similar events with other local schools, known as Discover Days. Since then, my involvement in STEAM education events in Charlotte through Microsoft and BAM has only grown.

As my volunteer commitments grew, finding a more efficient way to plan, run, and manage events became essential; Power Automate provided the perfect solution. This year, it was crucial in elevating our Discover Days series from isolated single-school visits to something even more impactful.

“When we used Power Automate to ping team members directly in Teams and remind them 1:1 to sign up for our recent Charlotte software engineering Day of Learning event, we saw registrations double overnight—even though we had already sent several emails to the members,” says James Bolling, a principal group engineering manager and Microsoft Charlotte campus director. “It’s clear to me that our team is living and working in Teams Chat and not email these days.”

Every year, the many worldwide chapters of the Blacks at Microsoft Employee Resource Group host an event called BAM Minority Student Day. The event provides a 1-day conference-like experience for underrepresented high school students, engaging them in activities that introduce them to STEAM careers. In 2024, I had the privilege of leading the BAM Charlotte edition of this event, which brought together 400 students and 40 educators from 21 high schools across the region.

While I was excited to take on the challenge of leading the event, I was concerned about how I’d be able to balance my work responsibilities, personal life, and volunteer efforts in a healthy way. Power Automate became key to making it all possible.

Making it happen with Power Automate

Here are some ways that Power Automate enabled us, as the BAM Charlotte chapter, to pull off our incredibly impactful 2024 Minority Student Day.

• Streamlining volunteer coordination: We integrated Power Automate with Microsoft Forms, Lists, Teams, and Outlook to automate the management of over 100 volunteers, streamlining role assignments, calendar invites, and communications. This ensured that each volunteer was informed of their responsibilities and schedule with minimal manual oversight. By doing so, the administrative burden on leads was greatly reduced, ensuring smooth coordination and a successful event.
• Reporting in real time: We linked Power Automate with Microsoft Forms, Lists, Planner, and Excel to generate and distribute reports on registration numbers, volunteer assignments, and task completion statuses. This gave our planning team the crucial data needed to make informed decisions as the event date neared, allowing us to adjust plans and resources to stay within capacity and budget constraints.
• Efficient task management: Through integration with Microsoft Planner, we were able to automate task assignments, progress tracking, and reminders. Tasks were assigned to the appropriate team members based on their roles, and automated notifications ensured that deadlines were met. This was crucial in managing the many moving parts of the event.
• Automating document handling: Power Automate worked in tandem with SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Adobe Sign to manage the flow of important documents, such as signed consent forms and event materials. We were able to automatically save documents to the correct folders, update relevant lists, and notify the appropriate team members, significantly reducing the risk of lost or misplaced documents and simplifying the administrative workload.
• Enhanced event promotion and engagement: We used Power Automate alongside Teams and Outlook to boost event promotion. Personalized messages were sent to Microsoft employees via the Teams workflow bot, creating a more engaging and direct line of communication. This approach increased overall engagement compared to previous years.

“I am incredibly impressed with Segun’s meticulous attention to detail and innovative use of Power Automate to streamline the planning and running of our Employee Resource Group programs, and especially our Minority Student Day and our summer mentorship program,” says Chemere Davis, a senior business program manager and chairperson of Blacks at Microsoft North Carolina. “His efforts significantly increased our efficiency, allowing us to focus on enhancing the experience and impact for almost 600 students in the past year.”

Check out the recap of BAM Minority Student Day in Charlotte in this LinkedIn post, and another example of Microsoft’s culture in Charlotte at our Give Fair also posted on LinkedIn

If you’re interested in using Power Automate to help your organization focus on what’s important and automate the rest, here are some resources to get you started.

Check out the Power Automate template gallery for ready-to-use, customizable workflows that offer a wide range of automation possibilities. Here are some templates that were helpful to our community event planning and organization efforts:

• Send an email to a responder after a Microsoft form submission
• Create a daily summary of Planner tasks by bucket
• Create a Planner task when a Microsoft form is submitted
• Microsoft form processing to Outlook and SharePoint
• Create a task in planner from Microsoft forms and a post Teams message
• Create a Planner task when a Teams channel post starts with “To do”
• Notifying a chat when Planner tasks change status
• Generate an Adobe sign agreement and get a signature
• Track Microsoft forms responses in Excel and notify through Teams and Outlook

If you don’t already have a license, go here to sign up for a free trial of Power Automate.

• Check out how we’re rethinking supplier content at Microsoft with Power Automate.
• Learn how we’re empowering and securing our citizen developers with the Microsoft Power Platform.
• Watch to see our tips on how to become a citizen developer on the Microsoft Power Platform.

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

The post Simplifying nonprofit volunteering at Microsoft with Power Automate appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Watch as Dave Rodriguez interviews Trent Berghofer about using the Windows 365 Cloud PC platform to provide our employees with virtual loaner PCs when they need a backup machine to keep working.

Rodriguez is a principal product manager on the Frictionless Devices team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. He talks with Berghofer about using the Windows 365 Cloud PC platform to provide employees with a low-touch, personalized, secure Windows experience hosted on Microsoft Azure.

“With Windows 365 Cloud PC, we’ve been able to accelerate our digital first support model for hybrid employees and deemphasize our reliance on walk up, in-person support at the on-site service locations,” says Berghofer, general manager of Field IT Management and leader of the Support team in Microsoft Digital.

Issuing Cloud PCs to our employees allows them to return to productivity on a machine they already own or have on their person because we don’t have to send them physical back up machines. This allows them to get back to productivity faster and reduces our costs.

Try the Microsoft Windows 365 Cloud PC platform at your company.

• Get more info on how we’re using the Windows 365 Cloud PC platform internally here at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re reinventing our Employee Experience in our hybrid world.
• Check out how we’re running our customer service and support contact centers on Microsoft Azure.
• Find out how we’re boosting employee device procurement at Microsoft with better forecasting.

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

The post Providing employees with virtual loaner devices with Windows 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Building the most empowering digital workplace experience for Microsoft employees takes solid partnerships. Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), the organization that powers, protects, and transforms Microsoft, collaborates closely with teammates in Global Workplace Services (GWS) to enable a workplace that uses physical infrastructure, devices, and cloud services to create an integrated experience that’s unparalleled. The digital workplace is deeply integrated with Microsoft products and services, including Microsoft Azure IoT, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365, to increase productivity, create efficiency, enable accessibility, and eliminate friction.

Nathalie D’Hers, CVP of Microsoft Digital Employee Experience, talked about the importance of this collaboration with her counterpart Michael Ford, CVP of Global Workplace Services.

“Due to the nature of our roles, a commercial real estate leader and a technology leader see things from a slightly different lens,” D’Hers says. “I believe that what’s most important in achieving mutual success is to first align on vision to have a shared sense of where you want to go. Then it’s just figuring out how we’re going to get there. A lot of it relies on formulating a vision that both teams are comfortable with and then agreeing on the path to get there.”

Keeping up with a dynamic, hybrid work environment also represents a massive, ongoing investment in employees. The Digital Workplace investment is a leading example of how enterprises can transform their workplaces. This article showcases how to deploy digital workplace experiences at scale while making them secure, inclusive, accessible, and manageable. It also shows how these investments lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity. To find out more about how the Digital Workplace investment fits into the broader vision for a better employee experience at Microsoft, read Reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.

Catalyst for change

The global pandemic forced us to rethink the digital workplace. Prior to COVID-19, we were already championing an effort to be more open, transparent, and collaborative, as many companies were moving their employees from traditional office settings into more contemporary environments optimized for teams. Teams were already becoming more collaborative, and the nature of work was changing. But never has it become more necessary for workforces to learn to quickly adapt to becoming more agile and innovative than since the pandemic.

Interestingly, the pandemic has brought the MDEE and GWS teams closer together.

“There’s beauty and power when people work together in a moment of crisis,” D’Hers says. “Some of the things that might have been challenging outside of a crisis became easier. Prioritizing deliverables and determining the things we must do right away versus things that we could delay became easier, even budget prioritization and alignment was easier because we were working as one team.”

As employees prepare to return to the physical office and assess what a new hybrid workplace reality will look like, employers need to ensure an environment that empowers employees throughout their workday while keeping them safe and secure. At Microsoft, our teams are taking a holistic approach to improve the methods employees use to get to, engage, and work on campus.

At the same time, employees and their respective teams will be more distributed as we continue to embrace a “work from anywhere” approach. The nature of collaboration has significantly changed, and employees want a digital workplace that enables them to be productive in their work, engage with team members, and feel empowered no matter where they are. As Microsoft Chief Digital Officer Andrew Wilson says, “The digital employee experience is the employee experience.”

Establishing priorities

Microsoft Digital focuses on three key priorities that capture the experiences in which the Digital Workplace investment is relevant: putting employees first, creating compelling experiences that matter, and measuring the value of efforts.

• Employees first. How do our employees get to and around work safely and efficiently? From the morning commute to navigating buildings to getting home at the end of the day, moving around safely and efficiently is a foundational need for employees right now, and within the communities where worksites are located.
• Create compelling experiences that matter. Employees expect more flexibility in their choice of workplace, and they want new experiences that were not available pre-pandemic. How do we provide dynamic access to services? What tools can we provide to enable effective collaboration and focus? Interaction within the workplace should be friction-free and straightforward.
• Measure the value of efforts. The workplace should offer the most powerful solutions available for getting work done, both when employees are working collaboratively and when they’re focusing on their own work. Increased real-time analytics and building health and utilization metrics will be key to our real estate team (GWS) having a comprehensive view of physical spaces, so we can quickly prioritize and respond to changing employee preferences.

Through the lens of these priorities, the Microsoft Digital team created a framework for improving the employee experience. These powerful new capabilities are simple to use and integrate and combine securely and efficiently with other initiatives to accelerate digital transformation at Microsoft.

Making the digital workplace a reality

The vision for the digital workplace includes investments in infrastructure and physical components. With our three key priorities in mind, here are some of those experiences we’re evaluating to make a more compelling, start-to-finish workday for employees.

Priority 1: Putting the employee first

Employees need to be put in control of how they interact with Microsoft campuses. Social distancing and attention to safety are part of the post-COVID norm, and workplace technology must adapt to that.

Health and well-being have been emerging imperatives and now they are more important than ever. The campus of the future will have a strong focus on all aspects of an employee’s health and well-being. Onsite food and beverage programs will enable users to order ahead and have seamless payment to minimize waits and optimize their mealtime, access customized food delivery options, and obtain catering for special events. Helping employees find extra time, take breaks effectively, and find ways to maintain fitness at work are all important aspects of a reimagined on-campus experience. Health self-attestation apps to ensure employee safety as well as optimized temperature, lighting, and other environmental factors will all play a role to ensure optimal productivity.

Social distancing expectations will influence physical and digital designs. For example, Microsoft updated internal transportation offerings to enable a quick transition to social distancing if needed in the future, including fewer occupants per vehicle. Multimodal journey planning tools are also forthcoming to enable employees to easily select from a variety of options and quickly adapt to individual wellness preferences and hybrid schedules.

Similarly, we’re researching ways to monitor crowding in cafeterias so we can signal the best time to visit. Machine learning will help us develop models to improve our employee services in a safe manner.

Additionally, we want our employees to feel safe when there are visitors on campus. This means touchless visitor check-in to reduce health concerns and providing host notification and simple access to the Microsoft guest Wi-Fi network. Ideally, the visitor welcome experience begins prior to a visit, by providing visitors with a preregistration check-in and helpful information about their upcoming visit.

Key initiatives

By enabling these “employee first” initiatives, several key benefits occur:

• Improved and informed commuting decisions.
• Space for recharging and resetting with Health and Wellness resources.
• Order-ahead dining, seamless payment, and cafeteria crowdedness indicators.
• Clear access to health attestation and optimized environmental controls.
• Touchless visitor arrival and departure experiences.

Priority 2: Creating compelling experiences that matter

The physical spaces employees encounter when they’re in the office, especially the meeting room experience, are critical differentiators as employees begin to return to worksites. This section addresses two key areas: workflow improvements—improving the employee’s experience throughout their day as they arrive, engage, and work on campus—and meeting room improvements, specifically what changes need to be made to represent the new hybrid norm and to ensure a fair and inclusive meeting experience, whether you are joining from campus or remotely.

Workflow improvements

At Microsoft, an improved employee experience will be available through a variety of interfaces that meet employees wherever they may be. This includes a company-wide employee mobile app, smart building and lobby kiosks, desktop applications, and AI/bots that make applications predictive. Moving towards a variety of smart building capabilities that provide employees with flexibility and complement the way they go about their day will be the norm moving forward.

As Microsoft employees begin returning to worksites, they’ll have to start preparing for something they haven’t experienced in a while: their commute. That experience should be supported with smart recommendations about the best way to get to work, navigate traffic, and park their car. Smart parking allows for a proactive response to users’ parking needs. The parking design will lead to better space utilization, greater employee satisfaction, and improved safety and productivity when employees can easily and quickly find a vacant parking spot.

When people reach a facility, the arrival experience needs to be frictionless, welcoming, and secure. For employees, we’re working towards a mobile access option to enable fast and secure entry into Microsoft buildings. This system also eliminates the lost-badge scenario and helps Microsoft ensure the safety of employees while they are in buildings.

Employees’ commutes don’t end once they reach the office; they spend time moving within buildings and campuses during the workday. Enabling this travel by providing quick and easy shuttle bookings for employees on campuses and digital and physical indoor wayfinding to help employees find a colleague, conference room, or other location is key. The goal is to improve employees’ ability to get directions from one location to another across Microsoft facilities.

After employees get to work, they want on-demand and intelligent access to workplace services such as finding and booking a conference room, accessing transportation, making facility requests, as well as dining and wellness services that add value to their day.

In addition to enhancing the employee and visitor experience, partnering with the GWS team to reduce environmental impact through improved transportation offerings is also critical. For example, one of Microsoft Digital’s primary goals is to provide GWS counterparts with transportation utilization information so that they can optimize fleet operations and contribute to lower carbon emissions while still enabling the best possible employee experience.

Key initiatives

By focusing on these key workplace experiences, we can make it easier for employees to go about their day, adding value to their commute and on-campus experience:

• Seamless commute and fast parking.
• Badgeless entry.
• Clear and visible wayfinding.
• A move toward smart building capabilities.
• A focus on environmental sustainability.

Meeting room improvements

Microsoft Digital is also focused on addressing the challenges of the conference room experience at scale by simplifying the process for joining a meeting and sharing content, improving audio reliability, and driving video availability and adoption, whether on site or remote. Meeting rooms that were once built and operated largely by facilities staff are becoming critical endpoints for digital collaboration. Computer-driven room systems (such as Microsoft Teams Rooms) can now be deployed and supported at scale in a cost-effective manner.

With nearly 16,000 meeting spaces at Microsoft, our “north star” is to provide a simple, consistent, reliable experience no matter where you are in the world. We’ve been most effective at achieving this goal in the Puget Sound region by leaning heavily on Microsoft Teams Rooms and Microsoft Surface Hubs. In 2022, we’ll move beyond our corporate headquarters and focus on delivering better meeting spaces globally, continuing to drive more capability at lower cost, increasing the number and type of spaces we support, and delivering new scenarios for our employees.

Remote attendees should find it simple and easy to join a meeting from wherever they are. By using Microsoft Teams to imagine the meeting experience beyond the conference room or traditional desktop connection, we’re working toward a friction-free, fully featured, and inclusive remote connection experience. With the right peripherals (good lighting is important) and Microsoft Teams enabled devices like headsets, speakerphones, and web cameras, everyone that has joined the meeting will be well represented and have a great meeting room experience.

To empower remote meeting attendees, we want to provide an experience on par with that of in-person attendees. We’re examining technical improvements to make sure remote attendees are included equally and can access meeting-specific content such as physical and digital whiteboard drawings, and by building functionality to ensure that employees of every ability have access to a full-featured meeting experience, including automated notetaking, automated task creation, and more intelligent integration of meeting information into the collaboration experience. For more ways to ensure the best use of these technologies and to create a culture of inclusive meeting experiences, check out Microsoft’s tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world.

Finding an available meeting room can be a challenge and will prove especially difficult for employees who haven’t been on campus for a while. Wayfinding (the ability to use an app or digital service to find your way within a building), resource management practices, and scheduling systems will offer help locating and making more efficient use of available rooms. And by enabling automated booking and management processes that continually reevaluate meeting room usage, we can reduce occurrences of double bookings, unused rooms, and cancellations that aren’t reflected in room availability, ensuring everyone has a space to meet.

Microsoft Digital has also developed a set of meeting room standards that we deploy around the world to ensure consistency of experience and supportability, helping to increase efficiency and reduce costs. By deploying this globally, we enable more accurate inventories, better visibility across more assets, efficient alerting capabilities, and improved remote access. By also developing more streamlined support processes, we’re building manageability and support for a new generation of communal devices.

Key initiatives

Enabling these meeting and collaboration experiences allows for the following improvements:

• Deployment of Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Decommission old conferencing technology.
• Improved meeting space reservation time.
• Ensured inventory accuracy and device visibility.

Priority 3: Measuring the value of efforts

Optimizing usage of space was difficult pre-pandemic even though there was a long, stable history of how spaces were utilized day in and day out. In a hybrid work environment, determining space utilization and the new normal of employee building utilization patterns will be even more challenging. By using data science and modeling to provide timely and accurate occupancy and facilities data, Microsoft can make better decisions about how its workspaces, buildings, and campuses will be utilized, which informs return to workplace occupancy planning as well as long-term real estate portfolio strategy.

Compounding the challenge is that, as we discover the new patterns of building occupancy, the need for occupancy data becomes more real time. Prior to COVID, occupancy data was looked at less frequently (several times a year). We have updated our dashboards to reflect this need for real-time data and to provide pre- and post-pandemic comparisons that can be separated by organization and region, to account for global locations being in various stages of COVID response. This data will come from both badge swipes and IoT sensors.

MDEE is also working closely with GWS to help them improve how they manage their facilities and operations, including efficient facility management, energy-smart buildings, and back-of-the-office processes such as lease management and utility bill payments. To achieve this optimization, the cross-functional team is building a state-of-the-art facility management system using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Services, Microsoft Azure Digital Twins, and a real estate Microsoft Azure data lake. This technology combines to influence this transformation of facilities usage and management throughout the industry. The campus of the future will rely heavily on AI and machine learning to help improve precision of occupancy modeling and optimize energy use by up to 50%.

Key initiatives

By focusing on real-time data and machine learning, we can predictively model attendance, transportation and dining usage, cleaning signals, and more, resulting in the following benefits:

• More precise occupancy and building portfolio planning.
• Increased usage of real-time data.
• Enhanced end-to-end facility management.
• A digital twin of a physical building for providing an integration platform for smart spaces.
• Quick onboarding of data from sensors and third-party systems to our Smart Building (digital twin) system.
• Digitized floorplans.

Conclusion

At Microsoft, our investments in the Digital Workplace put employees at the center of their experience and ensures that those experiences add value to their day. Employees and guests will have simple, consistent, and reliable technologies, meeting spaces, and collaboration devices that allow them to be highly productive and conduct business with ease and professionalism. At Microsoft, the digital workplace experience will serve as a model of workplace productivity and an inspiration to our customers around the world.

• A strong partnership between an IT team and real estate team can produce amazing results.
• COVID has created an uncertain future for employee experiences, and a lot of opportunity to redefine the digital workplace. By doing continual, small-scale experiments, you’ll be better prepared for a wide range of possibilities.
• Prioritize the employee first by putting them in control of their environment, whether it’s on campus or a hybrid experience. Once basic needs are met, the focus is then on creating compelling experiences that matter and measuring the value of those efforts.
• Computer-driven room systems (such as Microsoft Teams Rooms) can be cost-effectively deployed and supported on a global
• Data, especially real-time data, has an even larger prominence because of the need for rapid decision-making by employees, human resources, and real estate teams (for example, space utilization and space effectiveness).

• Explore shining a light on how Microsoft manages Shadow IT.
• Discover powering IoT experiences at Microsoft.
• See what is buzzing with meeting room excitement in The Hive.

The post Creating the digital workplace at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we’re leaning on AI to enhance our internal device management strategy.

AI is helping us to simplify and improve the experience our employees have with their devices by predicting and auto-remediating issues, supporting proactive solutions, and enhancing the operating system’s look and feel.

As hybrid work becomes the norm—and the expectation—for our employees, how we in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, give them access to the tools they need to successfully innovate, create, and collaborate has evolved. Employees want a dynamic, device-agnostic experience that focuses on providing them with the data and tools that they need from almost any location, using a wide variety of devices, including PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

“We’re investing in AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting to reduce friction in device management,” says Daniel Manalo, a principal service engineer at Microsoft Digital. “We’re using AI and machine learning to help us schedule essential maintenance tasks and fix errors and performance issues autonomously.” “This is reducing downtime, prolonging device lifespans, and ensuring our employees have a consistent and productive experience by avoiding problems and errors.”

Manalo and his team are investigating ways to use AI to analyze device settings, network activity, vulnerabilities, and user behavior, enhanced with demographic data and location metadata to offer relevant solutions for common and emerging device problems.

While device management focuses on the employee experience, Manalo reminds us that Microsoft Digital support teams can benefit greatly as well.

“We want to help our support team be more productive through quicker decisions about device replacement, software updates, capacity increases, and other common support scenarios,” Manalo says.

Using AI to reduce friction in device management

Our employees use a wide variety of devices as their primary productivity tools to access their work and succeed in their roles. Our responsibility at Microsoft Digital is to ensure that each of our employees can be productive and connected to Microsoft tools and corporate data, regardless of the device they use.

There are more than 750,000 devices in use at Microsoft including Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux devices. Approximately 60% of these are Windows devices, while iOS, Android, and macOS account for the rest. Of these devices, approximately 45% are personally owned employee devices, including phones and tablets. Microsoft empowers employees to use the managed devices that enable them to be their most productive.

Microsoft Intune supports the modern management model at Microsoft. Intune provides cloud-based device management capabilities across Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and Linux devices. Devices are registered in and authenticated by Microsoft Entra ID. Because it’s cloud-based, Intune removes the dependency on the local network, and managed devices can connect across the internet from anywhere. Modern management includes and supports both corporate and personally owned devices, including mobile devices.

However, even with the benefits of modern management, we recognize that there’s room for improvement.

Employee productivity and sentiment are directly affected when the condition of their device and the underlying infrastructure deteriorates. Unexpected reboots, application crashes, emerging vulnerabilities, and compatibility problems all negatively affect the employee experience. The situation is further aggravated by potentially long wait times with Helpdesk to resolve support tickets. And not all issues are reported by employees.

Our support teams spend large amounts of time manually pulling together data and insights to make long-term preventative decisions about device replacement, software upgrades, capacity increases, and more. They don’t have aggregated views with device health insights and the toolsets to analyze patterns and trends to reduce their decision-making time or increase their confidence that they made the right choices.

Put simply, we understand that our modern management processes have gaps, and we’re filling those gaps with AI-powered tools and services.

“The goal is to make the device smarter,” says Senthil Selvaraj, a principal product manager at Microsoft Digital. “We want the device—and the services that support it—to be intelligent and able to predict or detect issues on the device and self-remediate.”

Selvaraj’s team is focusing on using AI to provide detection and remediation in a way that prioritizes and respects the employee experience. “We don’t want our tools to consume a lot of local resources when the employee might need those resources for other tasks,” he says. 

Selvaraj says the focus is on creating a productive and frictionless device experience at all times. “We don’t want additional load on the device, so we want to make sure we’re running automated remediations at the right time without any impact to users,” he says.

Integrating AI for proactive maintenance and issue resolution

Disruptions in our enterprise device and infrastructure environment increase support costs and reduce employee productivity. When employees encounter an issue, they must stop whatever they’re doing and either fix the issue or report it to the IT helpdesk. Long resolution times for support tickets and lack of detailed insights for IT administrators further impact employee productivity and increase our support costs.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft, we’re developing and implementing AI-powered solutions that will simplify and improve the employee device experience.

“We’re developing an AI and automation solution that monitors, predicts, and resolves device and infrastructure issues for employees and IT admins,” says Dave Rodriguez, a principal product manager on the Frictionless Devices team in Microsoft Digital. “The solution uses data from our enterprise devices, such as laptops, network devices, sensors, and meeting room equipment to find and fix problems before they impact the users.”

The team is building capabilities that will actively solve IT challenges and lighten our employees’ cognitive load by proactively delivering solution-focused notifications and recommendations, while also addressing their queries about their device experiences.

“Using generative AI and natural language understanding, we’re providing IT administrators with a conversational AI experience,” says Pandurang Kamath Savagur, a senior program manager with Microsoft Digital. “This is enabling them to query patterns, observe analytics, and get recommendations across the device and infrastructure environment to manage and prevent disruptions.”

Specifically, our new solution provides an automated, AI-driven device experience by:

• Mining the vast telemetry that we capture across our devices and infrastructure to ground AI-based remediation and automation.
• Aggregating and collating the anomalies detected across devices and infrastructure to identify root causes of issues and impacted areas.
• Combining near real-time telemetry and historical anomalies and issues to predict and fix issues across the enterprise device landscape before they start negatively impacting employee productivity.
• Providing IT administrators with deep insights into the health and performance of enterprise devices by analyzing signals and demographic data to detect anomalies and proactively identify issues.
• Integrating with existing Microsoft products such as Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Teams that support and supply the employee device experience.

We’re excited to realize the potential of this solution for device support as we extend implementation and roll out to the larger device community at Microsoft.

Improving device security results with Microsoft Copilot for Security

Our security and IT teams are using Copilot for Security to protect at the speed and scale of AI, while remaining compliant to responsible AI principles.

Copilot for Security integrates directly with Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Intune, and many other security-relevant data sources to create a unified experience for large language model (LLM)-powered prompting, grounded in the data from integrated solutions.

We’re moving toward a holistic approach in which we enhance common use cases with Copilot for Security capabilities, including:

• Incident summarization. Copilot for Security is helping us gain context for incidents and improve communication across our organization by using generative AI to swiftly distill complex security alerts into concise, actionable summaries to enable quicker response times and streamlined decision-making.
• Impact analysis. Copilot for Security uses AI-driven analytics to assess the potential impact of security incidents, offering insights into affected systems and data to prioritize response efforts effectively.
• Reverse engineering of scripts. It helps us simplify malware investigation with automated reverse-engineering for scripts so every analyst can understand the actions executed by attackers. It also analyzes complex command-line scripts and translates them into natural language with clear explanations of actions.
• Guided response. We receive actionable step-by-step guidance for incident response, including directions for triage, investigation, containment, and remediation. Our support team also receives relevant deep links to recommended actions that allow for quicker response.

Copilot in Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot

Windows PCs are still the primary working environment for our employees. and are critical to our business. Copilot in Windows is an AI-powered assistant that’s built into the Windows operating system and uses advanced machine learning and natural language processing to provide intelligent suggestions, automate tasks, and integrate seamlessly with Microsoft services. 

Copilot in Windows brings Copilot to the taskbar, providing a natural language companion ready to assist our employees. It’s transforming how Microsoft employees work, allowing them to focus on strategic and creative tasks. 

Integration with Microsoft 365 Copilot is at the core of our Copilot in Windows deployment at Microsoft Digital. 

“Microsoft 365 Copilot provides the most productive integration for our employees,” says Harshitha Digumarthi, a senior product manager at Microsoft Digital. 

Integrating Microsoft 365 Copilot with Copilot in Windows ensures adherence to enterprise security, governance, and trust standards. It also gives Microsoft employees a generative AI tool grounded in our enterprise data to get relevant, authoritative, and helpful answers and content directly from the Copilot in Windows interface.

Digumarthi’s team is also dedicated to understanding how updates influence user productivity and experience.

“We’re asking the important questions,” Digumarthi says. “How can Copilot in Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot enhance productivity? Will it introduce any changes that might lead to confusion?” 

Looking forward

We’re constantly examining new ways to use AI to extend our device management capabilities and are working toward integrating Copilot for Security more deeply into our device management and security practices. We’re also deploying our automated AI device management solution to a wider set of devices as we continue to refine existing features and develop new ones.

AI is making us rethink device management at Microsoft Digital. We’re using AI to enhance the user experience, predict and resolve issues, support proactive solutions, and improve security outcomes. This integration spans the entire device spectrum, from the employee experience to the services and tools that facilitate device management. We’re only just starting to uncover the possibilities in AI to simplify and improve device management and empower our employees to work from anywhere, on any device. We look forward to growing our device management capabilities alongside AI advancements in the future.

You can start your company’s path to AI-powered device management practices with the following key takeaways:

• Consider AI-supported tools. Explore how AI-powered predictive maintenance and intelligent troubleshooting can reduce friction and downtime in device management.
• Capture the power of generative AI. Use AI-driven analytics and generative AI to gain insights, recommendations, and guidance for device security and incident response.
• Implement Copilot in Windows. Use Copilot in Windows and Microsoft 365 Copilot to access an AI-powered assistant that can provide intelligent suggestions, automate tasks, and integrate with Microsoft services.
• Learn and adapt. Learn from the Customer Zero experience of Microsoft Digital and how they’re using AI to enhance the device and user experience across different platforms and devices.

Here’s how to get started with Copilot in Windows. 

• Learn how modernization is helping us along on our internal device management journey.

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

The post Rethinking device management internally at Microsoft with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The TRP has been on a journey since it first launched in 2015, undergoing several iterations including initially being hosted by a third-party vendor. In July 2021, it was brought in-house and hosted on Microsoft Azure to have more control and flexibility to further enhance the experience. As part of this continual improvement, understanding and hearing from employees and managers about their usage and satisfaction with the tool has been critical to its overall success and the latest iteration of the portal.

“We took a three-phased approach to help us inform the most recent design, as well as guide the objectives, goals and principles for the future state of this tool,” says Nur Sheikhassan, a principal group engineering manager on the Rewards and Compensation team in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience.

Phase 1—Understanding TRP usage

The goal of phase one was to establish a baseline understanding of usage and gather insights into what was working and what wasn’t. One-on-one interviews were conducted with both employees and managers to obtain feedback. Our key findings included:

1. Integration of tangible and intangible total rewards: Understanding that total compensation and benefits are often comprised of both tangible elements (such as money) and intangible elements (such as culture and work/life balance), we found it’s important to surface both in order to clearly communicate the total value of the compensation and benefits package and highlight it in a way that provides clarity rather than clutter.
2. Make TRP more discoverable: The discoverability of TRP, particularly outside of rewards season, had been particularly low. Clearly and consistently branding the site and situating it within areas employees commonly use could help them discover employee tools and content related to rewards more easily.
3. Optimize for the complete task flow: The tool needed to fully consider the complete flow of a potential task. We identified all the information one might be in search of to learn about their total compensation to ensure users do not feel the need to seek out additional resources on other sites and tools.
4. Consider surfacing contextual data: We needed to think critically about the contextual data that is brought in to TRP and use data that will only enhance understanding the value of the Microsoft compensation and benefits packages. By focusing on common scenarios such as managers’ rewards conversations with directs, hiring, and modeling future rewards, this would help to provide a clearer path to what data should be included.

Phase 2—Develop common TRP scenarios

The next phase was designed to build on the learnings from phase one, leveraging common TRP scenarios to help understand what is working and what is not. Exploring these scenarios uncovered opportunities for consideration and started to light up themes around the need to get to overall rewards understanding faster, drive meaning through contextual data, and seamlessly connect related tools and sites. The three key themes that came out of this phase were:

1. Clearly communicate value of total rewards opportunity: We wanted to display total rewards clearly, succinctly, and comprehensively, indicating relevant timeframes and breaking out cash base and bonus. We looked at utilizing data visualizations (i.e., charts) more strategically to help give a clearer view of changes and trends; otherwise, more detailed data in a table was considered to increase usability.
2. Empower rewards conversations: We needed to provide more conversation starters or pointers within the tool that can help managers be prepared and have more meaningful rewards conversations with their teams.
3. Optimize rewards workflows: Better access to related content and sites to enable task completion across the tools in the HR ecosystem was evaluated. Helping managers traverse the fragmented manager-tool ecosystem by providing relevant links, on-ramps, and off-ramps to related tools and information for a more seamless experience that improves workflow.

It was abundantly clear of the immediate appeal the new TRP design had on employees and managers alike. The clean, welcoming visuals and the ability to see more detail on each page in an easy-to-understand layout were all enhancements that were very well-received.

—Jennifer Hugill, principal program manager, Rewards and Compensation team, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Phase 3—Optimize TRP design

Building on the learnings captured from the first two phases, a redesigned user experience was developed including a high-fidelity prototype. The goal of phase three was to assess the usability of the new site and ultimately ensure that user needs and pain points were addressed with the new design.

“It was abundantly clear of the immediate appeal the new TRP design had on employees and managers alike,” says Jennifer Hugill, a principal program manager on the Rewards and Compensation team. “The clean, welcoming visuals and the ability to see more detail on each page in an easy-to-understand layout were all enhancements that were very well-received.”

Key benefits of the newly configured site include:

1. Seamless task completion and delightful moments: Core tasks were easily completed, with participants noting the ability to see multiple pieces of information in a single view. Calculations that had real impact were already done for the user, and thoughtful additions like talking points and personal notes are considered both helpful and delightful.
2. Continued focus on aggregation of information as a key value-add: Bringing together information from disparate systems and tools is important to users. For individual contributor (IC) views, it means showing all compensation-related information in TRP, including hourly wages for hourly workers and revenue and/or commitment-based incentives for sales employees. For managers, it’s bringing together information on direct reports into a single table.
3. System “insights” that help fulfill business and user goals: Providing system-derived “insights” in both manager and IC views allows employees to spend less time connecting the dots between pieces of information and more time making decisions and taking action. For managers, it provides team insights to ensure fair compensation and talent retention. In an IC view, it showcases opportunities to take advantage of additional benefits left on the table.

“The Total Rewards Portal provides seamless access to information about my team’s comprehensive rewards and compensation, allowing me to have meaningful discussions with my employees and leadership during Connect season and beyond,” says Michelle Huenink, a Microsoft manager and global enablement leader in Customer Service and Support.

Ultimately, the goal of the TRP is to show the value of an employee’s individual rewards, while empowering rewards conversations for managers and providing a complete data set to inform decisions. Keeping these core objectives at the heart of our future enhancements enables us to continue to have a tool that provides a consistent experience that our employees will use and enjoy as part of their overall Microsoft employee experience journey.

—Nur Sheikhassan, principal group engineering manager, Rewards and Compensation, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

Vision and Future State

Putting all the user research findings together leads to clear business objectives and user experience goals for the future state of the TRP solution. These foundational elements ensure the right principles are in place for the product team providing the guideposts to stay true to the product objectives and goals.

“Ultimately, the goal of the TRP is to show the value of an employee’s individual rewards, while empowering rewards conversations for managers and providing a complete data set to inform decisions,” Sheikhassan says. “Keeping these core objectives at the heart of our future enhancements enables us to continue to have a tool that provides a consistent experience that our employees will use and enjoy as part of their overall Microsoft employee experience journey.”

• In a competitive talent market, having a tool like the TRP really helps represent the value of Microsoft compensation and benefits and reminds employees of the company’s investment in them.
• By using multiple micro-services, we can build a better experience to represent employee compensation at various stages of an employee’s journey with Microsoft.
• Developing and using the Total Rewards Portal is providing us a strong return on our investment (ROI) over time, especially since it is now hosted on Microsoft Azure and because it was developed in-house.
• Our sensitive compensation information for 220,000-plus employees stays within the control of Microsoft while informing our employees.

• Reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World
• Upgrading Microsoft’s core Human Resources system with SAP SuccessFactors
• Powering hybrid work at Microsoft: A conversation with Andrew Wilson and Nathalie D’Hers

The post Helping Microsoft employees understand their value with the Total Rewards Portal appeared first on Inside Track Blog.