At Microsoft, we’re using Microsoft 365 to empower our employees to achieve more by driving better teamwork and collaboration in our teams. We’re using core Microsoft 365 services such as SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, and Viva Engage to support modern work styles and enable continued digital transformation. We’re also deploying Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft and, where appropriate, we’re melding its modules with Microsoft 365 products.

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

Examining collaboration change

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

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

The changing face of collaboration

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

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

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

Focusing on workspace instead of workplace

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

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

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

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

Driving collaboration for our enterprise

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

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

We ask important questions about our teams, including:

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

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

Enabling collaboration and teamwork at Microsoft

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

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

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

Different apps, different collaboration types

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

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

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

Establishing a hub for teamwork in Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing information using SharePoint and OneDrive for Business

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

Using SharePoint to collaborate within a team

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

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

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

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

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

Protecting enterprise files with the cloud

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

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

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

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

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

Collaborating and connecting with Viva Engage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adding intelligence with Microsoft Graph

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

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

Enabling cultural change

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

Making change a practical reality

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

• During morning coffee. Use Outlook to check email and manage your calendar and use Teams to view chats and stay up to date on projects. Use Microsoft 365 apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents.
• From your home office. Use Teams to host or join personal meetings or to chat with voice and text. Use Stream to watch live meetings, and Outlook to connect to a meeting from your email or calendar.
• Meet at the office. Use Teams to host personal meetings with smaller groups and manage notes and actions in Teams channels. Use Teams meetings to host or join conference room meetings using conference room hardware.
• Collaborate with your team. Use Teams for chat, video, screen sharing, and file coauthoring within a team. Use Microsoft 365 apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint to create or review documents and share documents from the cloud. Use Planner or Project to track actions.
• Connect across the company. Use Viva Engage to see for organizational updates, share knowledge, and find answers. Use SharePoint for communication sites and news for broad groups of stakeholders.

Setting up a structure for change

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

• Awareness. The awareness pillar is about landing the message. Before employee training, we knew that we needed to make a good first impression, interest people, and find a message that excited them about Microsoft 365. Our employees needed to understand how Microsoft 365 would help them and why they should give their time to our initiative. Microsoft Viva Insights offers a clear understanding of how work patterns impact wellbeing, productivity, and business performance through data-driven visibility. You can access personal, manager, and leader insights conveniently via the Viva Insights app in Microsoft Teams, on the web, and in Outlook.
• Engagement. The engagement pillar builds on awareness and starts putting Microsoft 365 in the hands of our people along with the training, guidance, and tools to succeed. This includes training, consulting, and a champion community that supports early adopters and leads engagement in their organization.

Viva Engage introduces a fresh employee experience, fostering connections among people throughout the company, regardless of their location or work hours, to ensure inclusivity and engagement for all. The Viva Engage app, integrated into Microsoft Teams, empowers organizations to cultivate a sense of community, ignite engagement with leadership, leverage knowledge and insights, and establish personal networks.

• Measurement. The measurement pillar tracks the steps of the engagement pillar. After we engage people, we need to measure adoption success by tracking against the success metrics we set. Measurement is about getting actionable feedback and using that feedback to improve the implementation and adoption process.
• Management. The management pillar has the longest lifecycle of any of the pillars in the process. Management is about gaining efficiency and ensuring user satisfaction after Microsoft 365 is in place. It means continuing to support established groups and finding user stories and training opportunities that encourage broader collaboration at Microsoft. This pillar serves as a bridge between the initial implementation and the sustained success of Microsoft 365. It involves monitoring and fine-tuning the system to optimize its performance and meet evolving needs. By continuously evaluating and addressing user feedback, the management pillar helps identify areas where further enhancements and improvements can be made.

Enabling behavior and cultural change for collaboration

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

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

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

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

Managing compliance and security in immersive collaboration

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

Using Microsoft 365 identity models

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

Enabling external collaboration while protecting our data

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Want to learn more about Microsoft 365 plans and pricing? Get all the details here.

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

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

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

How works councils work

Our works councils serve as the voice of our employees in some geographies, advocating for their rights and interests within the workplace. As AI technology grows in influence across industries, these internal organizations, and labor in general, are at the forefront of discussions regarding the implications of AI for the modern workplace.

While our relationship with our works councils has always been cooperative and collaborative, how we engaged with our works councils for product reviews has evolved over time from impromptu and inconsistent engagements to more strategic and programmatic opportunities for feedback that can improve our products for the benefit of all our customers.

Irina Chemerys, a global program manager overseeing the intake process for works councils at Microsoft Digital, is among those who sought to streamline the approval process for new technology across works council countries from around the globe.

Chemerys proposed a global approach using a single request form and platform for works councils worldwide to communicate with Microsoft Digital, product groups, legal, HR, and others at the company. This streamlined communication across the board and facilitated collaboration among all works councils, allowing smaller countries to take advantage of resources from larger ones and creating a more cohesive global community. The unified approach significantly improved coordination, collaboration, and, importantly, trust among works councils.

“We built this standardized community, and we were able to discuss Copilot as an AI technology and how we should proceed with this in a globalized setting,” Chemerys says.

When it came time to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot products, this process was in place and ready to help the works councils quickly evaluate it. “This helped us navigate the tolerance phase that Germany introduced not long after,” Chemerys says.

Germany opens tolerance phase for Copilot

Our German works council initially resisted allowing AI technology development and deployment, raising a number of concerns about how Copilot was responding in ways that could be interpreted as evaluating individual employee performance or making impermissible inferences about individual employees without the data to support those inferences. Building trust with the works councils was the first step in alleviating concerns and building a collaborative approach to AI technologies.

“In my conversations with works councils, I would emphasize that AI is akin to a speeding train—the technology is evolving faster than we can review all aspects of it,” Chemerys says. “Our best course of action is to prepare and steer its direction.”

The country’s works council eventually agreed to a tolerance phase for Copilot and other AI tools, with an emphasis on the need for controlled deployment rather than attempting to halt inevitable technological advancement.

“From a legal and ethical perspective, generative AI is a tool that could be used to establish performance and behavior control in a company,” says Carsten Schleicher, chairman of the Microsoft works council in Germany. “But we don’t give resistance or feedback because we don’t want AI—we want to address the potential impact of a tool.”

The Copilot might, if prompted, generate a summary and ranking of employee performance during a meeting. That kind of assessment fell outside the aims of our Microsoft AI principles. Recognizing the importance of getting these issues right, our engineers engaged directly with our works councils to understand their feedback and identify ways to address it in the product.

“Another market-wide concern is the potential for AI tools to hallucinate false information it generates without a clear source,” Schleicher says. “AI represents an exciting evolution in our interaction with computers, yet the ultimate decision-making should always remain in human hands, ensuring thoughtful analysis of the insights provided by AI.”

Some members of works councils were early adopters who took part in the first Copilot deployment wave, and as such, they had time to get to know the tool by trying it out and by asking questions during regular meetings. Their feedback was channeled to the product engineering team. This early access helped the works councils quickly reach an agreement that the deployment of Copilot could continue and led to product improvements that will benefit all our customers.

France agrees to the tolerance phase

Because of how fast our AI products are evolving, France became one of the countries where we had to shift the typical way we work with our works councils.

“We didn’t have all the answers regarding what the impact of Copilot would be,” says Juliette Reigner, a manager of works councils in France. “Usually, in a consultation process, we are required to have all the details—but AI requires us to be more agile and flexible in our approach than ever before.”

Our works council in France decided to also implement a tolerance phase that was more flexible and innovative than usual.

Microsoft France asked the councils to nominate people to be part of a new technology committee. The committee organized weekly sessions to examine new technologies such as Copilot, with council members having deep involvement in testing new technologies.

“We suggested that works council members be part of pre-deployment testing and product planning to be part of innovation, and to better understand the impact of new technologies like Copilot,” says Edith Dubuisson, a senior business program manager in Microsoft Digital who manages our relationship with the Microsoft works council in France. “Copilot is not proactive in what it does—it will not perform tasks that it is not tasked with and has limitations in place to protect workers rights and well-being.”

Final consultations with French works councils happened in February 2024. The consultation results? A green light from the council to continue with Copilot development and deployment.

After Germany and France were able to get to a state of tolerance, other countries followed quickly with the Netherlands being the last to agree to tolerate the rollout after its works council had the time to review its potential impacts on our employees in that country.

In the end, our works councils continue to be a source of invaluable feedback in this new fast-moving AI era; playing a role that transcends mere oversight and instead embraces proactive engagement. For us, works councils serve as trusted partners in product development and innovation, spotting potential issues, and opportunities.

“If the councils raise concerns about a feature or capability, it’s likely our customers will share those concerns,” Chemerys says. “By capturing their feedback in early stages, we can design better products, so we have shifted to thinking about works councils as competitive advantages and co-innovators.”

Here are some tips for working with your works councils as you deploy AI products like Microsoft 365 Copilot at your companies:

• Works councils can play a powerful role in driving digital transformation and representing employees’ interests in the new era of AI. They can be co-innovators, early adopters, champions, and business partners, instead of showstoppers.
• Enabling your works councils to be early adopters can improve your partnership with them, especially if you take their feedback seriously.
• Offer training and education to your works councils members to help them address their concerns and empower them to deeply understand the product or service you want their help to deploy.
• Trust can only be established if you ensure works councils are involved early, and if you are fully transparent with them.

Try out Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company.

• Get our tips for partnering with your works councils.
• Read our story on how we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re getting the most of generative AI with good governance.
• Visit our content suite where we share the story of how we’re deploying AI internally at Microsoft.

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

The post Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI at Microsoft with our works councils appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Mesh addresses those questions head-on, enabling shared experiences from anywhere through mixed reality applications. This truly has the potential to revolutionize the hybrid workplace—and the first step in that revolution? Avatars.

An avatar is a digital representation of yourself. You may have used avatars before for things like gaming profiles or social media, but in a business setting? That’s brand new for all of us.

As members of the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience organization, we’re responsible for the technology experiences of customer zero: people working at Microsoft. We knew people would have many questions about avatars. How do they affect connections between coworkers? How do they impact meeting effectiveness and outcomes? Can an avatar ever truly be seen as “professional”?

Everything we do at Microsoft is backed by data, feedback, and research. To tackle these questions, that’s where we had to start.

[Read our blog post about how Avatars for Microsoft Teams is rolling out to general availability in phases starting this week. Learn how you can get more out of your meetings with our Microsoft Teams Meeting guide. Explore how we’re making Microsoft Teams Premium better for customers. Discover how we’re transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.]

Doing the research

It’s important that the work we do supports the creation of a “responsible metaverse,” an inclusive space that’s designed with people’s wellbeing in mind. With that in mind, we engaged with stakeholders and partners to support research and development on diversity, inclusion, and accessibility. We worked with Microsoft researchers, Microsoft Mesh developers and product engineers, and partners both inside and outside of Microsoft. Together, we spent months gathering survey data and user feedback.

These surveys covered a lot of ground, including:

• Inclusive options for creating an avatar
• Overall experience with avatar movement
• Avatars’ responses to audio cues
• Variety in customization and representation

After poring through literally thousands of pieces of feedback, one fact became crystal clear: personalization is king. People want to be able to represent themselves in accordance with their preferences, in detail.

We also found a lot of diversity in how people respond to avatars. Some people find that avatars offer a new level of inclusivity and comfort; others found them distracting or odd. Both reactions are valid, and we wanted to make sure people had guidance for navigating these new experiences.

Taking business etiquette to virtual spaces

As we sifted through all this research, we realized that—after the initial question of, “How do I customize my avatar?”—the second question on people’s minds was, “How should I use avatars?” This summarizes infinite questions about appropriateness. Are avatars useful in all meetings? When is it okay make an avatar dance, and when is it not? This is a whole new world of business etiquette, something no one had experienced before.

In the past, business etiquette and company culture has been learned in person, often picked up by watching others interact and interpreting subtle queues like body language. Clearly, we couldn’t do that here. We needed avatar etiquette. So, armed with our research and key findings, we created guidance for Microsoft employees that we can use as we entered this new world together.

Avatar etiquette

There are no hard and fast rules about when to use an avatar. Like so many things at work, whether an avatar is appropriate or not depends on context.

Understand how avatars currently work

Today’s avatar movement is based solely on audio and any avatar reaction you may choose. Your avatar’s mouth movement is driven by the sound of your voice, and it can’t mimic your body’s movements.

However, it does move a bit on its own. This could come across as insensitive or inappropriate, depending on the context.

As avatar technology evolves, our best practices and etiquette will evolve too. For now, here are the questions we ask ourselves when deciding whether to use an avatar or not.

What kind of meeting is it? What’s its intent?

Strategic, tactical, social—the meeting type influences if an avatar is appropriate. Think about the intent and hoped-for outcomes.

In general, if you would otherwise have your camera off, it’s great to use an avatar instead. Here are some examples:

• A weekly sync with your immediate team
• A hybrid social event for your organization
• An ideation session
• A lunch-and-learn session where you may be eating

There are some meetings where we recommend not using an avatar:

• A one-on-one meeting—unless, of course, you’ve discussed it and would both like to use them.
• Performance reviews (but you probably knew that, right?).
• If you’re involved in a sensitive conversation where body language and facial expression help with engagement. Using your video is best for that.

Will you be presenting?

Whether or not an avatar is appropriate while presenting depends on your audience and presentation content. Who are you presenting to? What is your content and desired outcome?

For some presentations, you probably won’t want to use an avatar (like a proposal to leadership). But for others (like a learning session), it may actually add to your presentation! Consider your audience, content, and desired outcome. This will help you decide. Avatars can be a great ice breaker!

When in doubt, ask!

Avatars are new for all of us, so it’s important to bring a growth mindset when using them.

• Have a conversation with your coworkers about how your team feels about avatars. Are there specific guidelines you want to set for your team?
• Are there times avatars might feel like a distraction?
• If you’re a presenter in someone else’s meeting, ask them if they have a preference for how you show up.
• What makes you feel the most comfortable? Your preferences matter, too!
• Remember: it can take a while for people to grow comfortable with new technology, especially when it feels personal. If we all treat each other with mutual respect—including our “avatar selves”—we’ll go a long way toward making every meeting inclusive and effective.

When is it okay to bust a move?

Fist bumps, the wave, peace out—there are a lot of super fun avatar reactions to play with. They add a lot of energy and enthusiasm to a meeting, but sometimes, it’s best to stay still.

Think about it this way: if you were in a physical room with the other meeting attendees, would you do that same physical reaction? If the answer is no, then wait until the moment’s right.

And please do remember, an avatar’s movement does not currently mirror the movement of the person behind the avatar. So, if you need to step away during a meeting, remember to tell people. They can’t tell from your avatar!

Representation matters

One key thing to keep in mind: an avatar represents the way that person wants to be represented. This may sometimes mean your avatar doesn’t look the way others expect. That’s okay! The goal is for you to feel accurately represented and fully included. You’re the only one who decides what that means to you.

That said, sometimes we do want an outside opinion. If you feel like you’re having a tough time getting your avatar right, ask a trusted teammate for feedback. It can be fun to hop on a call and do it together.

Please do be aware of and avoid cultural appropriation and remember our commitment to being diverse and inclusive. If you’re not finding the right options for customizing your avatar, let us know by providing feedback through the Teams desktop app. The avatar team is eagerly working to make improvements that allow everyone to be expressive, engaged, represented, and heard.

It’s going to take all of us to create a responsible metaverse. Like all forms of etiquette, our guidance will evolve over time to make sure it meets the needs of a diverse global workforce. We’ll continue to iterate and present new features, customization options, and overall experiences with avatars that support a new and connected way to show up in our world of flexible work.

Read our blog post about how Avatars for Microsoft Teams is rolling out to general availability in phases starting this week, and the latest Mesh product and customer news. Learn how to set up avatars for your organization, and how to join a meeting with a avatar. For more information, visit our Microsoft Mesh website.

• Read our blog post about how Avatars for Microsoft Teams is rolling out to general availability in phases starting this week.
• Learn how you can get more out of your meetings with our Microsoft Teams Meeting guide.
• Explore how we’re making Microsoft Teams Premium better for customers.
• Discover how we’re transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.

The post Avatar etiquette: How Microsoft employees are using avatars for Microsoft Teams in their meetings appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

A profound dining transformation is happening at Microsoft as the company’s employees return to an office that’s evolved into a hybrid workplace.

The pandemic has changed the way we work—and with it, the way we eat. Consumer expectations are evolving as people, including employees at Microsoft, get used to seamless, on-demand ordering through mobile applications and direct-to-you deliveries.

With Microsoft employees returning to the office after two years of working mostly remote, the Dining at Microsoft Operations team for the Puget Sound campus knew they needed to help them feel comfortable, fuel up, and be productive at work. They wanted to integrate new programs and ordering capabilities that would respect changing expectations and incorporate the intuitive nature of the mobile apps employees use at home.

Between Dining Operations and their partners on the Microsoft Digital team, plans were already in place to streamline the mobile ordering experience. The imminent return to work and the transition to a flexible, hybrid environment confirmed the urgency of the transformation. What began as an initiative to provide premium value for employees has become a necessary service consideration.

[See how Microsoft employees navigate their campuses with IoT tech and indoor mapping. Learn about the ways that Microsoft is modernizing the support experience with ServiceNow. Find out about reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.]

A campus-scale challenge

With more than 70 dining locations on the Puget Sound campus and thousands of frequently changing menu items, Dining Operations’ challenge was to provide an experience that would feel intuitive for users and meet the needs of tens of thousands of diners each day. It would need to provide seamless food ordering and reflect the unfolding reality of hybrid work.

We recognize that from an employee experience standpoint, Dining at Microsoft needs to reflect our cultural principles, whether that’s around sustainability, accessibility, diversity and inclusion, or digital transformation. We have a job to do, and that’s to make sure we create a great dining experience for our employees every day and have our food and programming reflect who we are as an organization.

—Jodi Westwater, senior services manager of Dining Operations for the Puget Sound Campus

While online ordering was already available to employees through a browser-based point-of-sale (POS) platform, Dining Operations wanted a modern, intuitive, mobile-first experience to streamline how people browse menus and purchase items. They also wanted to integrate it into the digital environment employees use every day.

It was imperative that any solution should embody Microsoft’s priorities and culture.

“We recognize that from an employee experience standpoint, Dining at Microsoft needs to reflect our cultural principles, whether that’s around sustainability, accessibility, diversity and inclusion, or digital transformation,” says Jodi Westwater, senior services manager of Dining Operations for the Puget Sound Campus. “We have a job to do, and that’s to make sure we create a great dining experience for our employees every day and have our food and programming reflect who we are as an organization.”

Dining transformation, tailored to employees

The teams incorporated a mobile menu and ordering interface into an internal app that employee use to access transportation, explore their benefits, and manage other elements of their day-to-day roles. Incorporating dining into the app would mean that employees could order food in the mobile-friendly, full-service environment they already use.

To make the integration work, the team needed to bridge the gap between the internal mobile app and Dining Operations’ existing POS and menu tool. Since the POS system was originally intended as a standalone touch-screen service, the team used Microsoft Azure API to create the connective tissue between the platforms.

“One of the key focuses early on for building this integration was not only that the information be accurate for Microsoft end users,” says Thomas Po, a product manager on the Microsoft Digital team. “It also had to be relatively easy to use on the back end to minimize room for error and stay in sync with the operations side.”

POS integration was only part of the challenge. To meet Microsoft’s commitment to accessibility, the team worked closely with internal stakeholders to review and implement the Microsoft Accessibility Standards (MAS). They conducted user-group testing with employee resource groups, individuals, and Microsoft Digital’s internal accessibility experts. As a result, the app features inclusive elements like high-visibility contrast settings and read-along technology.

Since the app would be handling financial transactions in conjunction with third-party tools, it needed to be highly secure. So Microsoft Digital worked closely with the Finance Security team to ensure that the app met the strict data-capture and retention requirements built into all Microsoft technology.

Throughout the process, they leveraged tools throughout the Azure stack, including Azure API for integration with the dining POS system and Cosmos DB as a data repository, as well as other third-party tools hosted on Microsoft Azure.

The new ordering experience rolled out as a pilot in April of 2021 for use by essential employees working onsite, and it’s now in place across the entire Puget Sound Campus. The app allows employees to browse menus that feature images of the food at any dining location. They can order their food, pay digitally, and pick it up at the café, food hall, or espresso location of their choice.

From an experience standpoint, everything we do, design, and ideate must be user-centric, which for us means employee-led. What do employees need? What do we anticipate their habits to be? How will preferences change in a hybrid workplace? And how do we meet and exceed those ever-changing expectations?

—Jodi Westwater, senior services manager of Dining Operations for the Puget Sound Campus

The app automatically finds the nearest dining location based on an employee’s current whereabouts. In addition, iOS users can complete their transactions through Apple Pay, adding an extra layer of seamlessness to the mobile experience.

Employees can even browse the week’s menu ahead of time. With an increasing emphasis on hybrid workplaces and flexible in-person attendance, they might decide to make the trip to the office when their favorite food is available!

The mobile app integration doesn’t just reflect the intuitive experience of mobile food ordering that employees have embraced during the pandemic. It provides a way for workers who are understandably anxious about public eating spaces with the opportunity to retrieve their food quickly and eat on their own terms. It’s also a quick and easy solution for employees who have back-to-back meetings and may only have a few moments to grab food.

“From an experience standpoint, everything we do, design, and ideate must be customer-centric, which for us means employee-led,” Westwater says. “What do employees need? What do we anticipate their habits to be? How will preferences change in a hybrid workplace? And how do we meet and exceed those ever-changing expectations?”

The future of fueling up at work

Online ordering has more than tripled since before the pandemic. Previously, employees placed less than two percent of orders at the Puget Sound campus online. Now, approximately ten to twelve percent are placed digitally—at least a quarter of those via the mobile app. To make the feature even more accessible, the team will make dining order-ahead capabilities available on Microsoft Viva Connections, which will enable employees to order food on their mobile or desktop, using the same Microsoft Teams interface that they use throughout their day.

For diners who prefer the in-person experience or who might be anxious about crowding as more people return to work, Dining Operations is exploring a system that provides employees with more information about which cafés are busiest and when. The tool will use a mix of colors and graphics to indicate dining location traffic and occupancy so people can decide where they’d like to eat. This new functionality will also give staff valuable insights into usage patterns so they can use data to accommodate the ebb and flow of diners throughout the day and reduce food waste by ordering stock to reflect usage patterns accurately.

“Everything we’re doing is designed to create the most convenient and intuitive experience for Microsoft employees, visitors, and guests,” Westwater says. “We’re not just making sure we offer great food onsite, but that the ordering and dining process is accessible, that it makes sense, and that it’s easy to access.”

• Meet users where they’re at: There’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all.
• Build the app around the behavior: The app won’t change how users want to interact, so think about how they would use it.
• Put on your user hat: Consider everything from the customer perspective.
• Leverage user-testing: Identify your critical misses.
• Start small: Work with pilots and see what sticks.
• Nothing is sacred: Embrace reprioritization, pivot, and adapt.

• Learn how Microsoft is reinventing its employee experience for a hybrid world.
• Read how Microsoft is modernizing its support experience with ServiceNow.
• Find out how Microsoft is using new IoT technology and indoor mapping to navigate its campuses.

The post Dining transformation at Microsoft eases the transition as employees return to work appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Business transformation is complex, multifaceted, and perpetual. It’s also firmly rooted in an organization’s culture, so it requires change management technology that meets human needs directly.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we have decades of experience leading technological change in search of innovation and better experiences for our employees. To ensure we’re matching transformation to our culture as we adopt new technology and integrate it into our processes, we use a powerful set of tools that meet our employees where they work and how they think.

The toolset at the core of our business transformation work?

Microsoft Viva.

Viva is more than just a collection of employee experience applications. We certainly use these tools to complete important everyday tasks and keep our teams connected. But thanks to Viva’s connected, integrated, human-focused experiences, it’s especially powerful for helping teams, leaders, and employees transform the way they work and how our company functions at a deep level.

In 2024, we were able to put the suite into action supporting the most revolutionary business transformation in decades: AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot. As a result, we learned lessons that can help any organization use Viva to guide change effectively.

Transformation starts with culture

At Microsoft, we have a strong culture built around embracing a growth mindset, achievement, and inclusivity. Whenever we drive transformation and adopt new technologies like Copilot, we build our efforts on those cultural values.

“Everything we do links back to our culture,” says David Laves, director of Business Programs at Microsoft. “What that means is we focus on the people side of change, and we take a human-centered approach that focuses on the user’s experience of the process.”

In practice, human-centered transformation relies on open, bidirectional communication that always ties back to the “why” of any change. It also depends on organizational leaders as the torchbearers of culture.

We continually ask ourselves a set of questions about how to engage and support our employees:

• How do we generate awareness and motivation in scalable ways?
• How do we understand what our people are feeling before, during, and after the transformation, and how can we track that progress effectively?
• How do we build knowledge, skills, and confidence to maximize impact across our workforce?

“Having a learn-it-all rather than a know-it-all culture implies that we need to listen to our users,” says Kirk Gregersen, corporate vice president leading product for Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences. “We understand that we can’t solve everything with technology, and we need to attune transformation to people.”

Human-centric transformation at scale

In an organization as large as Microsoft, our sheer scale amplifies transformation challenges. We operate across so many geographies and so many business units, each with its own priorities, that finding a common thread requires immense effort and thought.

Consider the sheer number of different languages, regulatory frameworks, and even holidays to account for. Then imagine applying changes in all of those different environments.

There’s also the interplay between broad strategic transformation and tactical change management. True transformation requires mind shift, motivation, and cultural buy-in at the individual level.

“It’s about making sure every single employee knows there’s a change, understands why there’s a change, and feels included with where we’re going long-term,” Laves says.

All of this comes alongside the day-to-day demands of helping teams run smoothly and keeping objectives in sight.

“People have their day jobs, and they have other demands on their time than adopting new technologies or frameworks,” says Kevin Wooldridge, senior director with the Office of the Chief Operations Officer at Microsoft. “So we need to provide access to content and experiences that make sense for people where they work, on their timelines.”

Finally, the perpetual nature of business change means strategy needs to be robust and flexible. Otherwise, it risks irrelevancy or causing burnout.

“We know that change is evergreen on the business-wide, team, and personal levels,” says Dee Brake, strategic planning lead and principal program manager for Microsoft Viva Customer Experience. “But change always starts in the mind of individuals before it ever shows up in behavior or organizational transformation.”

Making change with Microsoft Viva

Business transformation relies on creating a vision that provides a durable North Star. From there, it takes collaboration between technical and change management professionals to achieve strategic alignment and create a holistic plan.

It’s the holistic aspect of change management where Microsoft Viva really shines.

“Understanding how an organization behaves and why, then aligning employees’ ambitions with organizational goals is the core discovery,” says Prerna Ajmera, general manager of HR Digital Strategy and Innovation at Microsoft. “Our task is to enable these org shifts with technology. Viva’s focus on comprehending needs and promoting personalized adoption is crucial in achieving this.”

Microsoft adoption framework

Get ready

Identify opportunities, secure sponsorship, and apply insights to the planning process.

Onboard and engage

Drive awareness, provide opportunities for knowledge and skill building, and scale across communities.

Deliver impact

Build communities of practice, highlight wins, and resolve knowledge or skill gaps.

Extend and optimize

Conduct employee listening, measure outcomes, and explore opportunities for further maturity.

Our Microsoft adoption framework helps us assemble business transformation efforts into four key stages.

In early 2024, we initiated our organization-wide adoption initiative for Microsoft 365 Copilot, our first major internal technology transformation using Microsoft Viva. This was more than just a product rollout—it was a way of embracing an AI-first approach to help us reimagine the way we work.

Microsoft Viva operates within employees’ existing workspaces and workflows. That was essential for helping us make a wide-reaching and profound change.

“It’s a natural fit, because awareness, engagement, and insight pieces are baked in,” Wooldridge says. “Instead of getting hit from different directions for each change management goal, employees embark on an orchestrated journey that change management leaders can monitor and modify as it progresses.”

Get ready

The initial stage of transformation is all about measurement, planning, and goal setting. For our internal Copilot rollout, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint were essential for establishing baseline usage and preliminary employee sentiment.

The Copilot Dashboard within Viva Insights delivered crucial usage data. But at this stage, it also provided an opportunity to align our change efforts with who our employees are, where they work, their roles, and other ways to organize usage data. We also had the opportunity to ensure the dashboard provided change leaders and managers with information that would help them guide the transformation.

Meanwhile, team-focused surveys in Viva Pulse and organization-wide questionnaires in Viva Glint gave prospective users a voice. Together, these sources provided transformation leaders with opportunities to understand what employees needed and how they felt. Our internal experience gave us extensive insights into what sentiments are useful for organizations implementing AI transformation, and we’ve packaged them into templates you can use to assess your own organization’s Copilot readiness or sentiment.

During this phase, we established our change charter and set objectives, determined who was essential for our change teams, and built out the components of success. Those involved metrics like percentage of adopters, number of users trained, and number of communications received.

Finally, Viva Amplify helped our change management professionals communicate with leaders and secure executive sponsorship. That high-level support would be crucial for driving ongoing change. Collaborative campaign creation and flexible audiences in Amplify made it easy to both craft and deploy messaging to potential leadership sponsors and their communications teams.

Onboard and engage

Onboarding and engaging employees during our Copilot transformation involved a mix of communication, skilling, and community building.

Viva Amplify was at the center of our communication efforts. Thanks to its ability to deploy campaigns from multiple sources across several channels that include Outlook, Teams, and Viva Engage, this app was instrumental in providing different touchpoints for adoption communications. These largely contained product documentation, tips for quick wins, and skilling opportunities.

To make that skilling a reality, we tailored curriculum in Viva Learning to our employees’ needs. The app’s flexibility allowed for multiple learning formats, from self-directed courses to videos and live sessions, resulting in the Copilot Academy.

As our Copilot implementation has grown alongside the product’s rapid evolution, we’ve been able to modify this learning path to continue meeting our employees’ needs, with significant results. Internally, employees who access the Copilot Academy see twice as many days of Copilot usage, 5% more engagement, and better Copilot adoption within Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft 365 apps.

Because Microsoft is a culturally oriented organization, community-driven adoption was a core part of our Copilot transformation. Viva Engage provided a forum for peer leaders to hone their skills as Copilot leaders in the form of our Copilot Champs Community while also enabling the viral spread of tips, inspiration, and learning content through line-of-business communities and other groups.

As a personalized home feed, Viva Connections complemented both our communications and community-led adoption efforts. It helped us land connected community experiences by surfacing leadership and adoption communications in one place and ensuring employees learned about important engagements like Camp Copilot. This multi-week series of peer-to-peer, hands-on, gamified activations helped employees to engage with AI capabilities in community with likeminded peers.

Deliver impact

Deepening the impact of our Copilot rollout involved collecting employee signals across several vectors.

With the parameters we established during our readiness phase, we tracked our progress against individual and team objectives. Meanwhile, collating analytics and employee sentiment from Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint has provided relevant and powerful insights that we’re using to govern and guide our ongoing transformation.

For example, Pulse surveys alerted our team that employees were feeling saturated with onboarding sessions. Instead, they needed to see example scenarios that were directly applicable to their work. In response, we conducted focus groups that helped us build role-specific scenarios and guidance to demonstrate concrete ways our employees could adopt Copilot in their day-to-day work.

We also conduct regular, organization-wide Glint surveys that include questions about whether employees feel energized and empowered at work—what we call “thriving metrics.” By collating these signals with Copilot usage, our HR team has found that employees who use Copilot at least once every week are more likely to say they’re thriving and take initiative to be productive.

Communications and community apps also have a role to play at this stage of adoption. Our change managers have been careful to monitor Viva Amplify’s and Viva Engage’s built-in consumption metrics to help determine what efforts help employees most.

In a comparative trial that tested adoption communications through email alone versus campaigns using Amplify and Engage, the difference was stark. Over the course of the trial, conventional communications resulted in a 2.9% increase in monthly active usage. Meanwhile, the team that benefited from adoption campaigns flighted through Amplify and Engage saw monthly active usage increase by 6.6%.

Extend and optimize

Extending and optimizing business transformation creates a virtuous cycle where we harvest insights to deepen our change management practices while nurturing greater maturity with our target technology. That relies on visibility and effective measurement.

Once again, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, and Viva Glint worked together to help us understand our Copilot transformation journey. They were particularly useful for comparing sentiment against behavioral data to give our change professionals a more holistic picture.

For example, change leaders noticed a spike in Copilot usage after adoption sessions with our engineering team, but that surge was followed by a drop-off. Thanks to Pulse surveys deployed to the relevant teams, we realized that the dip in Copilot uptake was associated with engineers’ Microsoft 365 usage patterns, and we needed to lead adoption work in that space. Through Microsoft 365 adoption drives, we were able to increase daily active usage of Copilot by 48% on those teams.

Viva Amplify and Viva Engage also provided opportunities to deepen our Copilot maturity. In the case of Amplify, our messaging centered around transformation progress and further opportunities for growth—for example by becoming a peer leader or even taking part in customer-facing engagements.

Engage provided a forum for emergent peer leaders to share their expertise. It also helped our change leaders solidify adoption by building a repository of conversations and knowledge. Using this resource, users can guide their own progress or seek help from trusted colleagues.

Microsoft Viva: Our primary vehicle for business transformation

Real business transformation involves everyone in an organization. Microsoft Viva capabilities accelerate how we meet those diverse needs and deliver value to employees and the organization faster.

“Microsoft Viva is one of the few tools that has different levers to pull across the entire change management framework,” Laves says. “Regardless of the change you’re trying to make, Viva increases the speed to value.”

For our change practitioners, the suite ensures they can connect with users. For our employees, it provides the support they need in the places where they need it—spaces like Microsoft Teams where they work every day.

Managers and directors get the insights and visibility they need to identify behaviors and provide course corrections. And for senior leadership, Viva provides opportunities to enact meaningful sponsorship by connecting directly with employees while they monitor the ROI of an unfolding transformation.

At Microsoft, the results of our Copilot transformation demonstrate the power these apps hold. In one region where we used Viva to support our rollout, daily active usage of Copilot increased by 39.6%. In a similar period and a comparable region that wasn’t able to use Viva during that time, that metric increased by only 4.1%.

Usage is only part of the story.

One of the business impacts that we were measuring involves Copilot-assisted hours. In the region that didn’t use Viva to drive transformation, Copilot-assisted hours increased to 5,090 hours. But in the area where Viva was in play, that metric rose to 9,143 hours, demonstrating real time-savings for employees and value to the organization.

Ultimately, it’s a testament to how Viva is more than the sum of its parts as a suite of communication, community, and analytics tools. It’s a connective, human-centered ecosystem that empowers business transformation for both change leaders and employees.

“Viva’s all about helping people thrive amidst transformation,” Gregersen says. “At the intersection of how people communicate with each other and how companies communicate with employees, at the junction of how people feel at work with how they do their work, that’s where Viva makes an impact.”

Learn how to use Viva as a transformation engine at your company:

• Start with the culture you want to have as an organization, then look at Microsoft Viva’s capabilities to see how they apply.
• Understand that transformation begins with and centers on people—so be open to feedback throughout the transformation process.
• Make sure your goals are clear and keep them firmly in mind.
• Viva Engage is one of the most flexible and powerful apps in the suite. It’s a natural place to build awareness and generate desire. It’s also a great way to activate sponsors.
• Pay attention to measurements and metrics in communications and community tools. They layer nicely on top of other Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Teams to provide greater insights.
• Let your change practitioners dictate how you do things. They’ll see the value where it lies.
• Measurement is key: Determine and monitor key metrics to understand where you’re getting pockets of high traction and then adjust address pockets of resistance or lag.

Curious about what Microsoft Viva can do for your business transformation efforts? Try it free today.

• Find out how we’re driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption with an assist from Microsoft Viva
• Read how we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot in four chapters
• Learn how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva

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

The post How Microsoft Viva became a business transformation engine at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Employee expectations and priorities have shifted in the new hybrid workplace. In Microsoft’s September 2022 Work Trend Index Pulse Report—a study of 20,000 people in 11 countries—48 percent of those surveyed reported that they feel burned out at work. Prior data from Microsoft’s March 2022 Work Trend Index—a study of 31,000 people in 31 countries—revealed that 53 percent of the participants prioritize health and wellbeing over work more than they did 3 years ago.

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

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

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

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

Insights for individuals

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

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

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

Insights for managers and leaders

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

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

Privacy by design

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

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

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

Engaging employees and encouraging wellbeing

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

Creating deeper engagement with Customer Zero

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

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

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

Partnering for successful change

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

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

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

—Steve Reay, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

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

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

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

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

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

Ensuring privacy and compliance with partnership

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Viva Insights to work

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

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

—Microsoft Viva Insights power user, Microsoft Human Resources

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

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

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

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

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

Moving forward

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

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

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

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

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

Hybrid meetings aren’t new. Microsoft is a global company, and even before the COVID-19 pandemic, teammates dialed into conference rooms from all over the world. But when everyone started working remotely in March 2020, all our meetings moved to Microsoft Teams. And the truth is, all the amazing features available in Teams changed how we think about meetings. We’ve come to rely on technology to provide everyone an equal opportunity to be seen and heard.

Microsoft has fully embraced being a flexible workplace, which means that hybrid meetings—where some people join remotely and others join from a Microsoft worksite—are increasingly common.

What does that mean?

From May to November 2022, the number of monthly hybrid meetings we’ve held at Microsoft increased nearly 92 percent. To put that in perspective, during those six months, we held nearly 2 million hybrid meetings here at Microsoft.

With that in mind, how are we making sure our hybrid meetings are inclusive and effective for everyone involved, no matter how they’re joining? In theory, it’s simple:

• Bring remote-meeting etiquette to the meeting room
• Agree on and adopt new best practices that support hybrid

You’ll notice these focus on behavior. We’re not asking people to use new technology; we’re asking them to change how they use existing technology. And as most of us know from personal experience, changing behavior is hard.

In Microsoft Digital, we power, protect, and transform the employee experience and provide the blueprint for customers and partners to follow. We wondered, how could we help people at Microsoft shift habits and change how they think about meetings to build a healthy meeting culture?

Changing behavior is hard. Gamification can help.

Eighty percent of US workers believe game-based learning is more engaging than other types of training. When Avanade (a joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft) gamified sales training, the region with the highest program participation had 33 percent higher sales. There’s science behind the benefits of play-based learning, too. Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, founder of the National Institute for Play, has said, “Nothing lights up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe—the executive portion—helps contextual memory be developed.”

So we teamed up with the Minecraft Education team to explore whether we might develop a Minecraft learning experience about hybrid meetings. Minecraft: Education Edition is a game-based learning platform used by millions of teachers and students. Learners can explore a wide range of subjects in immersive, blocky worlds including computer science, reading and history, and sustainability.

In the past, the Minecraft team has collaborated with partners including Microsoft’s Inclusive Hiring team, Sustainability, and Real Estate & Facilities on Minecraft worlds that illuminate key topics or support company initiatives. We pitched the concept of a hybrid learning map to the Minecraft Education team, and they were immediately supportive.

Having a deep background in gaming, I am very aware of the magic that can happen during gameplay. When Laura came to us with the idea for a game, we wanted to understand if it would resonate with our large and diverse internal audience. After a couple of conversations about the value of gameplay in learning, and the broad appeal of Minecraft, I was all in.

—Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Seamless Teamwork team

“Figuring out how to portray a business setting in Minecraft (with mobs!) sounded like a fun challenge,” says Bryan Bonham, senior business program manager for Minecraft Education.

It was a natural next step to partner with the team at Microsoft that is trying to help employees get more out of the many hybrid meetings that they now attend every day.

“Having a deep background in gaming, I am very aware of the magic that can happen during gameplay,” says Sara Bush, principal PM manager on MDEE’s Seamless Teamwork team. “When Laura came to us with the idea for a game, we wanted to understand if it would resonate with our large and diverse internal audience. After a couple of conversations about the value of gameplay in learning and the broad appeal of Minecraft, I was all in.”

Remote and hybrid work has led to some funny moments for all of us. I think adding some humor helps when learning something new. Best not to take yourself too seriously, we all make mistakes as we learn!

—Bryan Bonham, Senior Business Program Manager, Minecraft Education

This was a first-time collaboration between Microsoft Digital and Minecraft and the first time Minecraft was used within Microsoft to support employee learning.

From idea to execution

The concept we landed on was “Hybrid Hero: The game where the fate of a meeting lies with you!” The player experiences different scenarios and must make the right choices to ensure their meeting is effective and inclusive. We based the game’s script and decision points on the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide, which is full of research-based guidance.

Early on, we decided that humor was key.

“Remote and hybrid work has led to some funny moments for all of us,” Bonham says. “I think adding some humor helps when learning something new. Best not to take yourself too seriously. We all make mistakes as we learn!”

We also wanted to make sure Hybrid Hero was accessible and fun for everyone at Microsoft even if they’ve never played Minecraft before. In every round of testing, we looked at the game from a newbie mindset.

“I’ve never played Minecraft before but figured that if preschoolers are playing it, I can surely play it, too,” says senior program manager Chanda Jensen, who supports meeting technology for Seamless Teamwork. “Most of the game was intuitive and really easy to get the hang of, and it was a fun way to teach hybrid-meeting best practices. As an added bonus, my kids now think my job is ‘cool.’”

In early testing, 93 percent of players responded positively to the game as did 88 percent of first-time players. Making sure the game was beginner-friendly paid off.

Let the games begin

Since it launched in September 2022, Hybrid Hero has been played by Microsoft employees in 40 countries, and we’ve heard from global teams who’ve used it as both a learning opportunity and team morale event. The game’s internal marketing campaign has garnered over 350,000 impressions on Yammer, helping to spread the word about hybrid-meeting best practices.

Hybrid Hero was truly a “One Microsoft” effort, requiring all team members to think outside the box and approach the project with a growth mindset. Employees are eager for innovative learning opportunities, and we’ll continue to do our best to innovate and create exceptional experiences for them.

For more information about teaching and learning with Minecraft: Education Edition, visit education.minecraft.net. Anyone can download a few demos of the game and try lessons like the Minecraft Hour of Code. Microsoft employees can sign in with their corporate email account to access the full game features and content.

• After years of remote-only meetings, employees need to shift habits and change how they think about meetings to create a healthy meeting culture.
• For hybrid meetings to be inclusive and effective, people need to be aware of and follow hybrid-meeting best practices.
• Gamification and play-based learning are often more engaging and effective for employees.
• Employees are eager for innovative learning experiences.

• Check out advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.
• Learn more about education opportunities with Minecraft.
• Discover why employees are buzzing with meeting room excitement in The Hive.

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 Teaching Microsoft employees healthy hybrid meeting habits with Minecraft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When much of the world started working from home and many companies adopted a hybrid work model, we here at Microsoft began rethinking the way we meet and enable quality hybrid meeting experiences in all sizes and types of conference rooms.

When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, Microsoft Digital

One of the most important meeting room scenarios that we tackled and knew we had to get exactly right, was the executive boardroom.

“When you’re upgrading a boardroom, it’s got to look fantastic and you have to get everything just right,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “It’s got to be thought through from every angle—acoustics, aesthetics, etc.”

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T8LdrWaank, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Here at Microsoft, our team in Microsoft Digital worked with our partners in Global Workplace Services (GWS), our real estate organization, and the Microsoft Teams product group to build a new meeting room experience for executives that acknowledges the new post-pandemic world leaders are now working in.

“Every customer was being asked by their CEO, ‘What do we need to do to my boardroom so I can meet in it again,’” Hempey says. “They were telling their IT teams, ‘My old conference room is just not working for me now that I’m used to meeting on Teams. When I was working at home, we all worked on Teams and could see and hear each other. Now that I’ve gone back to the office, I can’t see or hear people who aren’t in the room, and they can’t see or hear people who are here in the room with me.’”

Signature Teams Rooms is our base high value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting. The boardroom takes that one step further because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

A fix was needed, and quickly.

We used our on-campus meeting room laboratory, The Hive, to develop a solution, the Signature boardroom experience in Microsoft Teams Rooms, our Microsoft Teams meeting room product. The Signature boardroom experience is a combination of thoughtful physical design and ground-breaking use of technology. It helps meeting attendees feel connected to the meeting no matter where they join from.

The Signature boardroom experience is unique because of its high profile and its size.

“Signature Teams Rooms is our base high value product—it’s our regular-size conference room where we create a high-quality experience by controlling elements like furniture, finishes, technology, how people are sitting,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “The boardroom takes that one step further because it’s where the stakes are highest. It’s where you have high-value meetings where you can’t afford for stuff to go wrong.”

We spent eight months getting the Signature boardroom experience “just right,” and first deployed it in Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s conference room at the start of this calendar year. Now we’re gradually rolling it out to other executive meeting rooms as we’re able.

Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture. That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.

— Greg Baribault, group product manager, Microsoft Teams

The need for a Signature boardroom experience came from the way work changed after the pandemic.

“Across the entire company, we’re embracing the hybrid work culture,” says Greg Baribault, group product manager for Microsoft Teams and head of product for the team that builds Microsoft Teams meeting room systems. “That’s true of our leadership team, too. It was important to us to make sure our Senior Leadership Team’s meetings were productive by providing them with the best possible hybrid meeting experience.”

Getting technical

Bigger than our typical Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, the Signature boardroom experience is designed for 16 to 30 people. Its size and complexity required that we make a lot of decisions about what technology to put in the room and how it would work. Specifically, the team at the Hive worked closely with top audiovisual partners to evaluate, deploy and program the Microsoft Teams certified cameras, microphones, speakers and display technologies.

For example, bigger rooms also made it more important to make sure everyone can see the Teams meeting on the display, like shared content and the hand raise and chat panels from anywhere.

In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself. We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

And just like in many executive boardrooms, there’s a wall of glass that brings in a lot of natural light, so another important design consideration in choosing a display technology that people can see even when it’s full daylight. “That’s how we landed on a large direct view LED video wall, and it’s only at 30 percent of its potential brightness,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive.

The video wall is an ultra-wide display and measures nearly 12 feet by 5 ½ feet and remote participants appear life-size, as if they’re sitting opposite the in-person participants. This is important because the boardroom experience must be equitable and inclusive for all participants, whether remote or in-person.

“In the boardroom, we want to include everyone—people online, people in the room, the room itself,” Marzynski says. “We want everyone to feel like they can connect with any other person in the meeting.”

That also leads to the unique table shape of our executive boardroom. The Boardroom archetype is ideally designed with a U-shaped table, open on one end to the front of room displays so the remote participants appear there. That said, the Signature boardroom experience is flexible and can support oval and rectangle tables as well, which is important because you can’t aways change out your tables, even for executive boardrooms.

“The circle of inclusion now includes the screen with remote participants at the same height as everybody sitting at the table,” Marzynski says. “It’s almost like they’re virtually in the room with you. Everybody is seated in a way that welcomes in these participants.”

All of the cameras in the room can pan, tilt, and zoom for a cinematic experience, similar to a multi-camera television show.

“The biggest piece of feedback we got from the old version of the room was that we could see everyone—except if they were standing in the front of the room presenting,” Hempey says. “Some in our senior leadership team are mostly remote, and seeing the face of the person standing at the front of the room is really important to their experience.”

The solution was several cameras, which work together with microphones in the ceiling to figure out who’s speaking, and then the appropriate camera can focus on that person.

“You can’t deploy just a single camera in a space of that size,” Albert says. “You need multiple cameras placed strategically around the room to get the best view of every seat at the table and presentation spaces.”

Reading the room

Reading the room is another challenge in a hybrid meeting, as you can’t always tell what body language people are displaying. If there was just one camera view, then you would only see the person who’s currently speaking. But with multiple cameras, one is assigned to provide a view of the room as a whole.

“There’s one camera dedicated to providing the context view, like picture-in-picture, overlaying a picture of the entire room over the people who are talking,” Marzynski says. “That way even if one or two people are talking, you have a chance of seeing how the rest of the room is reacting. And that is really, really powerful.”

You might think all these cameras would be an intrusive presence. And you’d have been right for an earlier iteration of the room, in which the cameras all “woke up” at the same time and created an unnerving feeling of being surveilled for in-person participants. However, the cameras are now much more unobtrusive, thanks to a lot of collaboration with GWS on finishes. The cameras are now in colors that match the ceiling and walls where they’re located, so they provide a great user experience without calling attention to themselves.

Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft. It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting room—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities, yes, it has a much bigger screen, yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super simple user experience.

— Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager, Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team, Microsoft Digital

The speakers are also top-of-the-line and were designed to support the new Teams Rooms spatial audio experience. The Microsoft Digital team installed speakers in the front of the room and just below the video wall, additions complemented by existing overhead speakers. This array of speakers makes it so remote participants are heard as if their voice is coming from where they appear on the screen.

Despite the technological complexity of the boardroom, our team made sure its user experience is comparable with other Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.

“Our boardroom works exactly the same way as every other meeting room at Microsoft,” Hempey says. “It’s just another Teams Rooms meeting—it uses the same kind of computer to run the meeting. Yes, it has additional capabilities, yes, it has a much bigger screen, yes, it has these crazy cameras. But from your perspective as a person joining the meeting, you start the meeting the same way as every other meeting room. It combines incredible power with a super simple user experience.”

All that technology required a lot of collaboration with GWS. Their team helped with making sure the electrical outlets were powerful enough to support all the new components, including the cameras, microphones, and display. They also needed to make sure the HVAC system was strong enough to keep the room comfortable with the huge video wall emanating heat. In addition to that, they handled architecture, permitting, and defining standards for acoustics, lighting, table shapes, and furniture layouts.

Creating the boardroom

Building the Signature boardroom experience was challenging.

“We didn’t start with the Microsoft boardroom,” Albert says. “We started with some functional mockups in found spaces. It was before the campus was fully opened, and we borrowed some spaces that were about the same size.”

After experimenting with those spaces, the Microsoft Digital team found executives to “dogfood” the experimental room setup.

The work started at The Hive, our incubation space on Microsoft campus where life-size prototypes can be built and tested.

“One of the best things about The Hive is the ability to very rapidly prototype and fail fast on space design, the overall design of the experience,” Baribault says. “They [the Microsoft Digital team] like to try a lot of different things, and there’s an experimentation process they go through. That’s a process you can go through in a space purpose-built for that. You can’t really do that in a high-end executive boardroom. The Hive’s been a tremendous asset for us the last few years as we’ve learned about hybrid work.”

It’s a place where we blend software with the physical world.

“We have this unique working area in The Hive that I like to call ‘phygital,’” Marzynski says. “Phygital is about delivering a digitally enhanced experience in a physical location—it’s where we combine meeting furniture, ambiance, and everything you feel in a meeting room with technology.”

The “phygital” concept is about using the power of software to avoid spending lots of money on physically rebuilding your meeting rooms.

“The technology adapts to the physical environment, not the other way around,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for Microsoft Digital. “The technology is flexible enough to work within the constraints of the room to save time and cost, as the cameras can be configured to work with any existing furniture and fixtures.”

Getting to success

The hard, and sometimes nail-biting work of getting the Signature boardroom experience ready has been well worth the effort.

“It took our teams around 10 months to build, test, and iterate to create our Signature boardroom experience,” Sherry says. “We were able to take all our learnings from multiple buildouts and technology solutions and consolidate them in to one archetype that provides a roadmap for creating new hybrid boardrooms that work right out of the box.”

And it’s paying off—it now takes only six weeks to upgrade an executive meeting space. “It went live in February and now it’s been over half a year, and by all accounts it’s been really successful,” Marzynski says. “We got nice kudos from one of our leaders—he was bowled over by it and said, ‘This is awesome!’ It was a really nice feeling.”

We plan to make the specs for building the experience available to customers soon.

We have a replica of the boardroom in our Executive Briefing Center, and it’s very popular with customers who visit us there. Some have even asked for the parts list so they can recreate exactly what Microsoft has done with the boardroom.

“In this case, we shipped software, but we also shipped guidance on how to get started,” Baribault says. “It became a collaboration in not just solving our own problem but creating a solution to help our customers as well. That was a new thing for all of us and I hope it sets a new model for the company.”

In addition to being critical for high-level meetings, an important aspect of boardrooms in general is that they are very expensive, not just to build, but to operate.

“The cost of operating a boardroom is really significant to our customers, because these types of rooms often come with specialized support because of their complexity,” Sherry says. “You’re often not relying on the company’s AV and IT support—you have a white-glove service, and if something goes wrong you pick up the hotline, and they’re there.”

Still, AI reduces the operating costs, because a person isn’t needed to switch cameras manually and check sound levels. That can be done in software.

“We always think of the cost of building a room, but you end up paying a lot more to operate the room than you did to install it,” Sherry says. “And that’s important to our customers.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience:

• Plan your deployment: Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan your deployment. You need to consider your room size, layout, equipment, network, security, and licensing requirements. You can use the Meeting room guidance for Teams article to help you design and optimize your meeting spaces with Microsoft Teams Rooms solutions and devices.
• Get familiar with the features: Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. You can use the touchscreen console to join and manage meetings, share content, adjust audio and video settings, and more. You can also use voice commands to control the room with Cortana. You can learn more about the features and how to use them from the Microsoft Teams Rooms help & learning page.
• Configure and manage your devices: After you’ve deployed your Microsoft Teams Rooms devices, you need to configure and manage them to ensure they work properly and securely. You can use the Microsoft Teams admin center, PowerShell, or third-party tools to configure settings, update firmware, monitor device health, troubleshoot issues, and more. You can find detailed instructions on how to configure and manage your devices from the Microsoft Teams Rooms page.

Learn how to get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms and the Signature boardroom experience.

• Discover how Microsoft uses Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Unpack deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms, generative AI at new Microsoft Canada headquarters.
• Explore why we’re buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally 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 Transforming the executive boardroom meeting experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Fostering a learning culture

At Microsoft, we’re fostering an environment that creates time and space for learning that is flexible, where the desire to learn and grow comes before the need to know. Our learning culture celebrates creativity and ingenuity; our employees learn not only from successes, but also from experiments, mistakes, failures, and especially each other. We want our employees to be free to ask “why not” and “what if,” empowering them to be consistently curious and continuously learning.

We believe deeply in the importance of a growth mindset. Growth mindset is all about continuously learning and being aware. We’re evolving our culture of learning from being know-it-alls to being learn-it-alls.

—Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president, Talent, Learning, and Insights, Microsoft Human Resources

Learning is a celebrated part of Microsoft’s culture, and we treat learning as a core capability. At Microsoft, we reward employees for their growth mindset and curiosity, traits that help drive business outcomes. We want to empower learners who are invested in and motivated to take control of their learning journey—with personalized recommendations, consistent experiences, and relevant, easily discoverable resources. For Microsoft employees, learning is a career-long endeavor, with learners continuously building and sharpening skills and capabilities.

“We believe deeply in the importance of a growth mindset,” says Joe Whittinghill, corporate vice president for Talent, Learning, and Insights in Microsoft Human Resources. “Growth mindset is all about continuously learning and being aware. We’re evolving our culture of learning from being know-it-alls to being learn-it-alls.”

[Read this Customer Zero story on how we’re upgrading our employee learning experience with Viva Learning. | See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. | Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.]

Accelerating learning culture with Viva Learning

Viva Learning is accelerating the transformation of our learning culture and helping us provide employees with high-value learning opportunities within the Microsoft Teams experience.  Positioned as the streamlined learning component of Viva, Microsoft’s employee experience platform (EXP), Viva Learning brings personalized and relevant learning experiences into the flow of work. Viva Learning serves as a front door for employee learning at Microsoft.

We believe that learners should take ownership of their individual growth and development. Viva Learning helps us equip learners with what they, as individuals, need to learn. Our users receive a personalized, adaptive learning experience that provides meaningful, timely, and relevant resources and recommendations natively integrated into the tools they already use throughout the workday. We want learning experiences to be relevant to each person. As such, Viva Learning is designed to understand who each learner is, including needs such as location, goals and ambitions, and learners’ previous experiences and existing skills.

Our employees start their day in Teams and work much of the day within the Teams interface. Viva Learning integrates with multiple Teams features and contributes to learning in the flow of work. We didn’t need to invest in a platform to host the front-end. We simply took advantage of our existing investment in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and Teams.

—Christopher Mead, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

With Viva Learning, learners can easily discover resources through search and browsing. They receive personalized resource recommendations and have access to an abundant set of third-party resources. However, we help guide the learning experience by being intentional about how we curate content and make it discoverable.

Viva Learning is structured as a hub that enables learning in the flow of work. The Viva Learning tab in Teams gives our employees access to all available learning resources in an easily navigable single view. Our learning management teams can surface content from our own internal training catalogs, third-party content providers, and existing learning management systems (LMS) across desktop, mobile, and tablet.

Christopher Mead, principal program manager for Microsoft Digital, summarizes the benefit of Viva Learning’s Teams integration. “Our employees start their day in Teams and work much of the day within the Teams interface. Viva Learning integrates with multiple Teams features and contributes to learning in the flow of work.” Mead adds, “We didn’t need to invest in a platform to host the front-end. We simply took advantage of our existing investment in Microsoft 365 with SharePoint and Teams.”

Learning resources can be delivered through Teams in a one-on-one chat, a group chat, or a meeting. Our employees can infuse learning into the conversations already happening at work by sharing learning content and courses with a single-click. Our employees get the training they need and even the training they didn’t know they needed through a curated and managed experience. Our Learning teams can place easily discoverable learning content within Teams where employees can track completed learning items across training content providers and manage their individual learning journeys. This content includes assigned learning, featured content, and peer recommended learning, all of which contribute to a targeted learner experience and help grow the culture of learning at Microsoft.

Adopting Viva Learning as Customer Zero

A culture of learning centers on our people, so it’s only natural that adopting Viva Learning begins with the most people-centric part of our organization, Microsoft HR, in collaboration with Microsoft Digital. Our deployment and implementation teams have partnered with Microsoft HR from the very beginning of our journey toward Viva Learning. Early on, we invited our HR and Learning teams to ask themselves, “How could Viva Learning enhance the service I deliver?”

Partnering with Microsoft HR and our Learning teams provides our implementation teams with the organizational influence to ensure that employees are encouraged to adopt Viva Learning. With Microsoft HR’s support, we can ensure that employees receive education on the platform’s capabilities and that organization-wide messaging is communicating the importance and value of Viva Learning to our employees’ learning experience.

We’re adopting Viva Learning as our primary learning experience platform in the context of what we call Customer Zero. We all use our own products, and we use them extensively. We obsess over the employee experience to ensure that our products and services don’t just meet our own employees’ needs, but exceed them. The Customer Zero program helps us apply our internal learnings to improve our solutions, ensuring that our products also exceed our customers’ expectations.

Building a better learning experience with Customer Zero

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

As Customer Zero for Viva Learning, we have a unique opportunity to inform product development by aligning closely with product teams and internal stakeholders responsible for deployments, granting us the ability to address challenges other customers may experience through early and extensive feedback.

We collaborate closely with the Viva product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of the Customer Zero partnership, Microsoft HR and our implementation teams get early access to new features and a chance to steer the product roadmap in a direction that best meets real enterprise learning needs. This enables our own learning experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Viva Learning development process.

Improving features based on practical experience

Customer Zero has influenced the development of Viva Learning in many ways. For example, when working with the platform’s ratings and reviews features, our learning management found that the typical star rating system was useful to assess and report the quality of different learning resources. However, management didn’t find the same usefulness in the review capability, which almost never provided value to learners, especially if negative reviews were posted for mandatory courses that our learners were required to take, regardless of the review.

Many other features have been influenced directly by feedback from our Microsoft HR and learning teams, including:

• Automatically assigning informative thumbnails for courses.
• Assigning relative weight to learning content to make certain content (such as corporately sponsored training) easier to discover.
• Providing an option to remove assigned learning from certain regions to comply with local regulations.

As Customer Zero, we’re positioned to ensure that every feature in Viva Learning—right down to the finest detail—meets the need of both our organizations and our customers.

Integrating and consolidating our learning environment

Moving to a new learning-experience platform can be a daunting endeavor. Like many organizations, we have significant investments in learning-management solutions and training platforms. We have created a large catalog of learning resources. Providing unified access to these resources is a big part of how we’re fostering a culture of learning. A critical part of choosing to adopt Viva Learning at Microsoft was the platform-agnostic capabilities of Viva Learning’s APIs. These APIs helped our implementation teams integrate internal learning solutions and third-party providers with Viva Learning. With this approach, we were able to bring our capabilities and content into the broader picture of learning at Microsoft without needing to convert, remove, or otherwise change them. This enabled us to capitalize on existing learning investments and more quickly implement Viva Learning as our primary learning experience platform.

For example, we use LinkedIn Learning across Microsoft for a wide variety of learning capabilities. LinkedIn Learning contains a tremendous catalog of learning resources that we use frequently. We used the Viva Learning APIs not only to make the LinkedIn Learning content available through Viva Learning, but also to send data from LinkedIn Learning back to Viva Learning to track course completion and other important metadata. We can use the APIs in the same way across many learning sources, creating a unified catalog and a unified learner experience.

Viva Learning’s content-discovery capabilities provide easy surfacing of relevant training materials to our learners and ease of access to the learning that they need. We’ve experienced a significant increase in optional learning-resource usage as a result. Today, our learners are finding and using more learning resources that are relevant to them and that facilitate their learning journey.

Moving forward

We’re using Viva Learning to enable a learning experience in the flow of work at Microsoft. As Customer Zero, we anticipate that our employees’ learning experience will continue to align increasingly with our culture of learning. Improvements in efficiency and relevance, especially from AI and peer recommendations, will continue to drive a more relevant and effective learning experience.

Here are some of the top things we learned deploying Viva Learning here at Microsoft:

• The Customer Zero initiative is helping to create better Microsoft products such as Viva Learning for Microsoft and our customers.
• Viva Learning helps us centralize and simplify the learning experience for our employees.
• Viva Learning enables consolidation of learning resources through a set of open APIs and integrations.
• Learning-content discovery and search capabilities in Viva Learning create better opportunities for employees to find the learning resources that apply to them.

• Read this Customer Zero story on how we’re upgrading our employee learning experience with Viva Learning.
• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn more about how we’re accelerating Microsoft’s digital transformation with Microsoft Viva Goals.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

The post Cultivating a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility is the next frontier of enterprise AI at Microsoft. By managing it effectively, we’re giving our employees the power to revolutionize how they access data and accomplish tasks.

But how are we implementing this new framework?

Thanks to our team at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re extending Copilot’s value by taking better advantage of our Microsoft 365 Graph in more connected and efficient ways. As a result, Copilot extensions can connect with widely dispersed organizational information to help our employees find answers more effectively, work more efficiently, and think more creatively.

Taking Copilot to this next level is enabling us to extend its reach into more specific business scenarios. Those include quickly spinning up specialized agents that range from large, companywide experiences—like an agent that’s streamlining how our employees interact with HR and IT—to small, citizen developer-built solutions that solve specific tasks for individual employees or small teams. Using Copilot Studio, organizations from across the company can build agents that provide tailored AI assistance to unlock new experiences for our employees, optimize our core processes, and provide deeper business insights.

Opening new horizons for intelligent assistance

Out of the box, Microsoft 365 Copilot provides powerful access to company data across our Microsoft tenant, discoverable through the Microsoft Graph. But not all information lives in the Microsoft Graph, and our employees do their work using more than just one set of tools.

Many companies have data spread across an expansive digital landscape. Within Microsoft, our employees access a vast quantity of content within Microsoft 365 apps and in other data and systems. That breadth can create issues with discoverability and block our employees from taking action effectively. On top of that, some processes benefit from narrowing search parameters instead of widening them.

Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility is the framework that makes closing those gaps possible. It enables users and developers to customize Copilot’s behavior with additional instructions, grounding, and actions while providing a clear and discoverable entry point in the user interface.

“Organizations have mountains and mountains of data available, with an ever-increasing number of tools and experiences,” says Matthew Marzynski, product manager with Microsoft Digital. “The problem is that our needs as employees don’t conform neatly to the different tools that we use to fulfill them. Copilot extensions are a way to collapse that complexity.”

Through Copilot extensibility, employees no longer need encyclopedic knowledge of each and every app, tool, or repository that pertains to their work, enabling them to avoid time-consuming manual exploration. Instead, users and organizations can configure Copilot extensions to intelligently surface the information they need within a single pane. And at the center of this shift is a new kind of interface: the agent.

Agents enable users and developers to customize Copilot’s behavior with additional instructions, grounding, and actions, and they provide a clear and discoverable entry point through a single, accessible user interface. As a result, it’s now possible to extend the power of Copilot beyond our first-party product portfolio to deliver highly transformative and personalized employee experiences.

Users have enormous flexibility in terms of the kinds of agents they can create, their level of complexity, and how they create them. Creation approaches include Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Builder, Copilot Studio itself, or working with both Copilot Studio and Azure AI.

For the simplest agents, creators can access Microsoft Copilot Studio Agent Builder right in Teams through Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. They can use it to walk through a streamlined process driven by natural language. Simple prompting and configuration panes make this interface accessible to anyone who wants to create agents.

Accessing Copilot Studio directly provides more power and flexibility. Based on Microsoft Power Platform, this tool provides a low-code or pro-code environment for creating and enhancing agents with custom experiences.

By focusing Copilot intelligence on specific repositories and apps, agents created in Copilot Studio provide greater discoverability outside the Microsoft 365 data estate while unlocking custom workflows. Most importantly, they make it possible to explore different information silos and take different kinds of actions from one interface, accessed through Copilot.

“We’re looking at every workflow, process, and interaction to find ways of applying a Copilot-first perspective,” says Nitul Pancholi, a lead on in the Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence. “It’s an opportunity to redefine how we do work and drive greater impact than ever before.”

Whether an employee creates a personal agent tailored to their role or a line of business builds an enterprise tool to support their team’s work, Copilot Studio brings their vision to life. It lets users create agents using two building blocks, connectors and plugins, plus the ability to customize those elements.

Kinds of Copilot agents

“Through extensibility, we’re enabling anyone to create a Copilot-powered solution tailored to their team, suited for their organization, and focused on the right content,” says Dodd Willingham, program manager for internal deployment of search and chat in Microsoft Digital. “Graph connectors and plugins make the right content easily identifiable for their agents so they can target the data they need appropriately.”

Our Copilot extensibility journey

Microsoft is actively building and deploying agents. The Microsoft Digital team has been instrumental in creating and implementing these early scenarios using Copilot Studio through Microsoft Elite Builders, our internal program that encourages Microsoft employees to build and share their custom agents with fellow employees.

Simple retrieval agents are enabling much of this early work. This kind of extension powers scoped, task-specific experiences to accomplish specialized tasks in Copilot by accessing Microsoft Graph data alongside additional semantic ground.

The IDEAS Copilot is one example. It democratizes access to our IDEAS knowledge base’s insights on app usage to empower informed decision-making. Through natural language queries, it enables users to take action on crucial usage data without technical expertise.

“The copilot extensibility concept is really about creating agents that are low-maintenance and high-value for users,” says Aisha Hasan, Power Platform and Copilot Studio product manager for Microsoft Digital. “Anyone on the tenant can create their own agents, while engineering teams can build enterprise-level solutions using Copilot Studio to solve business problems and boost productivity on a wider scale.”

Our most ambitious project so far has been an agent that unlocks scoped, role-specific Copilot experiences we can embed in public and private apps. The Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot grants employees access to HR and IT information and tools through their choice of interface—Copilot or our company sites. It’s now available to customers in private preview.

The agent connects to SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, and other resources that comprise the Microsoft Graph to retrieve the right information. Depending on whether the employee’s query is related to HR or IT, the agent integrates their personalized data from a variety of knowledge bases and third-party apps. From there, it provides the employee with an answer that creates a single, reliable starting point for resolving their query.

Employees are finding HR and IT answers more accurately and faster, without the need for extensive searches across wide-ranging toolsets. In our initial pilot, people who use the Employee Self-Service Agent for HR receive 42% greater accuracy in answering their questions. On the IT side, the overall self-help success rate increased by 36%. But the greatest benefit is the way this agent keeps employee productivity flowing by allowing users to seek out crucial HR and IT information in a single pane within their flow of work.

Learning from early extensibility projects

As one of the first enterprises to explore Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility, developing and implementing these solutions comes with its own challenges and learnings.

“As Customer Zero, we need to balance product innovation with security and operational needs,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Customer Zero lead for Microsoft 365 integrated apps at Microsoft Digital. “We’re balancing the priorities of driving productivity for the business, supporting the product teams in deploying new features, and also maintaining the guardrails to protect employees and our organization.”

Within Microsoft Digital, we have two chief advantages as we address these IT challenges:

• A trustworthy technology ecosystem operating at an incredible scope and scale across a huge product suite, ripe with the kinds of data that empower AI tools.
• A mature IT organization that has decades of experience in adopting and operationalizing new technologies and mitigating risks.

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned has been about adapting our existing governance structures to the framework of Copilot extensibility.

Agents rely on connections with existing tools that have well-established parameters for reasoning over data and governing information. Because Copilot respects Microsoft 365 governance and data loss prevention protocols, it honors all the access controls, security policies, and personally identifiable information (PII) data-handling structures that an organization puts in place across its tenant. As a result, businesses can rely on Microsoft 365’s robust foundation of security even as they forge ahead into new AI capabilities.

But this is a new approach to technology, so we’ve adapted our review process for new agents alongside our implementation to ensure governance and security keep pace with innovation. Those reviews largely revolve around key questions we ask about all our technology, with an added layer around Responsible AI, where we ask ourselves questions like these:

• Security: How does data move from one app to another across the Microsoft 365 tenant boundary, and how does an agent interact with that data?
• Privacy: Where does the agent handle and store PII?
• Accessibility: Does the UI make this technology equally available to all users?
• Responsible AI: Does the agent meet our standards for fairness, reliability and safety, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability?

From a security and governance perspective, it can be daunting to implement internally built extensions that have access to your organizational data and incorporate them into your business workflows. By asking the same questions we’ve embedded into our review framework and relying on the robust security and governance features of Microsoft 365, you can ensure you maintain control over your organizational data.

It’s also important to realize that adopting this new framework will take time. There’s a natural progression from simpler extensions to more complex tooling. It’s all part of accelerating along an adoption maturity curve with the next iteration of AI tools.

The technical aspects of enabling Copilot extensibility require forethought, but they don’t exist in a vacuum. If your team maintains robust governance policies through your Microsoft 365 tenant and they’re experienced with Power Platform, much of the legwork is already done.

But if your organization is new to this space, our internal experience governing Copilot can act as a guide for keeping your data secure. We’ve also created resources tailored to helping first-time users get up to speed with Copilot Studio. We’ve also made the Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot available to customers in private preview to provide a straightforward on-ramp to extensibility.

It starts with considering where Copilot extensions might fit into your workflows and what data it needs to access, starting with simple implementations, then deliberately building from there.

“A cornerstone of Copilot extensibility is understanding your data and the scenarios you think will be most impactful for optimizing processes,” says Amy Rosenkranz, principal product manager for Customer Zero Extensibility in Microsoft Digital. “Then ensure your endpoints are ready to hook into natural language processing and build your instructions.”

A principled approach to employee usage and adoption is also important. Eagerness among IT professionals and early adopters won’t necessarily drive business-wide transformation. As a result, we’re actively working to inform employees about the value of these tools and provide skilling opportunities.

“One of the main things we observed is that there’s a certain level of change management involved,” Pancholi says. “In order to build these habits, we’ve focused on creating simple workflows with tangible impacts so employees can see the value and start building Copilot-first habits.”

Finally, we’ve discovered that keeping agents lean in scope helps them function more easily. It’s important to think about back-end processes as you create extensions. For example, including too many data sources can become a serious tax on processing power. From both a performance and scenario standpoint, it’s a better strategy to keep agents narrowly focused.

Next steps into the era of extensibility

As we continue our Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility journey, we’re looking to our internal experience to guide the product for our customers, especially in IT. Our team is currently exploring ways to further unify the ecosystem until administration and management of extensions can all occur through a single layer. That will reduce operational costs and enable successful adoption on a greater scale.

We’re also exploring ways to shift more aspects of governance to Copilot itself. Since many agents access data and third-party apps outside our tenant, those sources might not benefit from Microsoft 365 data protection policies. Allocating more of the burden of governance to agents themselves may help fill that gap.

For now, we’re still exploring what’s possible. And employee uptake tells a strong story about extensibility’s impact. Since the release of our initial Copilot extensions a few months ago, usage of retrieval agents has shot up by 10x. Initial results from our Employee Self-Service Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout are equally promising.

It’s all coming together to demonstrate the profound value Copilot can provide for businesses.

“The vision around extensibility is that Copilot can be the single place where all tools coalesce into one single pane,” Marzynski says. “It’s a way to make your time much more effective and reduce the cognitive tax of changing channels or swiveling seats, and it’s ultimately a way to make your employee experience more rewarding.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at your company:

• Be curious: Don’t limit your imagination, because it’s a chance to redefine workflows.
• Be patient but continue driving forward. This is the beginning of a more long-term journey, and it’s important to get more comfortable with the technology.
• Hackathons produce amazing results, and it’s important to give people time to experiment together.
• Have a strong change management program. No matter how wonderful the tech is, people need to see helpful use cases and real value.
• Use your existing investment, processes, governance, and management practices for Microsoft 365 and scale it out.
• Build a well-documented review process.
• Start with only allowing approved apps or enable guardrails for self-service to ensure IT maintains control and security, then grow from there. When it comes time for citizen developers, open the door to retrieval agents.
• Think in terms of data—it’s about what data is you have, if it’s properly governed, where it’s being accessed, and what tenant boundaries it crosses.

Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility at your company.

• Find out how our pivot to generative AI is being fueled by our rich IT history.
• See how we’re powering our AI transformation with our 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 Unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

If you’re rolling out a product or initiative, measuring how many employees are using it is likely something you want to watch closely.

But figuring out what caused your daily active usage (DAU) to change on a particular day—that hasn’t always been easy to figure out.

Until now.

When it comes to products like Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva, you can now measure the impact of your user enablement actions using the Microsoft 365 Experience insights dashboard in the Microsoft 365 admin center—that’s exactly what we do here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization responsible for deploying and driving adoption of products like Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 here at Microsoft.

Recently, we used the Microsoft 365 admin center to track the impact of an event promoting employee resource groups at Microsoft using Microsoft Viva Engage. The Experience insights dashboard showed us the event as an overlay on the DAU chart for Viva Engage, correlating the event with an increase of 33,000 users.

“We saw a huge spike in usage of Viva Engage from the whole company having a day where we focused on using it,” says Amy Ceurvorst, a director of business programs for Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization.

The Actions tab in the Experience insights dashboard can show more than just usage: it also tracks how net promoter score (NPS), product feedback, and help article views change in response to actions you’ve taken.

Experience insights dashboard Action tab

Measuring internal communications

Ceurvorst first started working on graphing user enablement events against product usage for MyHub, an internal employee experience application that has now become part of Microsoft Viva Connections.

“For MyHub, I created the first concept of this action overlay—on the DAU graph, I overlaid the date when we did a training or a leader sent a communication,” Ceurvorst says. “That led to us liking the concept so much that we asked the product group to build it into our internal reporting for Viva Connections.”

Employees use Viva Connections to check payroll information; for example, to view their pay stubs and dates of company holidays. Before the action overlay, understanding adoption data for Viva Connections was difficult.

Usage of Viva Connections started out slow but picked up when a mobile version was added. That started “a lot of organic user growth,” but it was hard to tell what was driving that uptick.

“It used to be pretty hard to understand why all of a sudden more people would start using Viva Connections,” says Paul Chantakraiwat, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “I would have to go back to what information was sent through email, or what was in the news, or check if there was a drop in usage because of a holiday. And sometimes I couldn’t find anything.”

That changed when the team started graphically charting user enablement events as they happened for MyHub, and later Viva Connections. This allowed the team to analyze what was happening in real time, which improved the experience for everyone involved.

“The entire Viva Connections adoption team of product managers, program managers, engineers, researchers, and communicators could understand where the traffic was coming from,” Chantakraiwat says. “The communicators could see how effective their campaigns were, and so on.”

Microsoft 365 admin center impact

From Viva Connections, our team brought this adoption event mapping capability to the Microsoft 365 admin center, a function that became the Actions tab in the Experience insights dashboard.

“It allows customers to drive adoption—to understand how the products are faring across the customer base,” says Jonathan Allou, a software engineer in the Amplify product group.

The product group started working with Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, on actions over a year ago.

“Amy Ceurvorst actually started as a customer and it just made sense to onboard her to drive the direction of the product itself,” Allou says. “It was a great partnership, because she’s doing this work every day. It taught me a lesson: oftentimes what you think would be good for the customer is not necessarily what they think would be good for themselves. So having Amy as a user tell us, ‘People in this position would not consider this useful,’ it’s a very good thing to have.”

A new role was created in the Microsoft 365 admin center for success specialists—User Experience Success Manager—which grants users driving adoption of Microsoft 365 applications with access to the Experience insights dashboard. Traditionally the Microsoft 365 admin center was seen as a place for administrators only.

“I got asked, is this the right place to do something like this?” Ceurvorst says. “The Admin Center is the source of truth for your tenant. It’s the one place you go to look at success for your product.”

The Microsoft 365 admin center gives visibility across roles in the product, so success specialists can see the impact of what everyone is doing.

Deeper insights

Although many users are happy just to have one place to go to see product usage, the Actions tab has value beyond that.

“This is great to see that we are going to start enabling customer IT organizations to not just build action plans for adoption but be able to assess the implications on usage,” says Andrew Osten, the general manager of business operations and programs for the Employee Experience Success organization in Microsoft Digital.

And yes, it’s about measuring usage, but that’s just the start.

“What we’re currently measuring is DAU,” says Johan Bosch, a senior director of employee experience success in Microsoft Digital. “But that’s not the only thing that’s in there. Because if you drive action by giving more training or more communication, are there some actions that have a stronger impact than other actions? We can start deriving business value from that. If we drive up DAU, we can start saying to ourselves, ‘What is the business value of getting 10% or 20% more people to use this specific tool or component?’”

In addition to business value, the Actions tab can also lead to insights about user behavior, particularly for new technologies where there isn’t a lot of existing data.

“As we start unpacking some of these actions, creating a higher level of usage and a higher level of value, there’s a reason we want to understand them,” Bosch says. “Using the Actions tab can give deeper insights from users as to why they use the product, in terms of when they use, why they use, and how much they use certain features.”

What’s next

Actions in the Experience insights dashboard was made available for public preview in September. It’s a new concept for the Microsoft 365 admin center to be seen as a workspace. People are used to getting data and reports there, but this is the first feature that asks for data input and the Experience insights team wants to socialize this concept. 

What’s next? The Experience insights dashboard could offer suggested actions to success specialists. Microsoft already provides information about adoption, but to offer that in a success specialist’s flow of work would help them share the best practices they find.

The actions team is also exploring whether people in other roles would find this tool useful.

“I thought of it initially as something we’re doing for communications or training,” Ceurvorst says. “But what if an IT manager put a new patch on a product or enabled a feature in a product? If you tracked that, I think you could potentially see impact on the product usage. So, I’m trying to figure out how to reach additional audiences.”

Here are some tips for getting started with the Microsoft 365 admin center at your company:

• Learn how to get started with the Actions feature in the Experience insights dashboard of Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Start using the Experience insights dashboard. You might have to ask for the “User Experience Success Manager” role to access the dashboard.
• Start logging the actions you’re taking. You don’t know what’s going to be impactful, so log even the small things.
• Do an analysis of the actions you’ve done in the past. Do you see spikes or changes in usage?
• Use your insights to help decide what actions you’ll take going forward. For example, did you find a live training was more helpful than sending out a recording?

Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center with your work or school account to try it out. If you have the necessary permissions, you’ll be able to access the admin center and explore its features. If you don’t have the necessary permissions, ask your IT administrator to grant you access.

• Check out how we’re democratizing usage data in the Microsoft 365 admin center.
• Learn how we’re revolutionizing the way we roll out new products.
• See how we’re using the Microsoft 365 Experience insights dashboard to drive product adoption.

• 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 Measuring employee user enablement at Microsoft with the Microsoft 365 admin center appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

IT organizations—at Microsoft and companies around the world—will never be the same thanks to AI.

For all the benefits that AI and machine learning offer, one element we and companies like ours need to get right is data. After all, data is what’s powering the AI revolution.

Here in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, getting our data to an AI-ready state is a fundamental imperative. As such, we’re focused on four key areas of data management: quality, governance, compliance, and infrastructure.

Understanding AI-ready data

AI-ready data is data that’s available, complete, accurate, and high quality. With AI-ready data, our data scientists and engineers are better equipped to locate, process, and govern the enterprise data that drives our organization.

Our days of assembling, cleaning, and massaging data each time we launch a data-driven project are gone. Using guidance from our Microsoft Digital Data Council, a multi-disciplinary team that’s responsible for defining data quality standards for Microsoft Digital, and our Microsoft Digital AI Center of Excellence (CoE), we enhance our data discoverability and documentation before we launch any new AI-powered product or experience.  

“Our customers understand that data is the fuel that powers IT,” says Patrice Pelland, partner engineering manager for Microsoft Digital. “By ensuring our employees have access to data that is complete and accurate and prioritizing good governance, Microsoft is embracing the generational change brought on by AI.”

AI is already having transformative impact globally. In Microsoft Digital, we’re driving internal adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot in every division of the company to increase productivity, enhance creativity, and improve efficiency. The benefits are already being realized, but the fact remains that Copilot and other AI tools are only as good as the data that supports them. The last thing we want our employees to experience is inaccurate or incomplete answers from AI-generated content. Powering tools like Copilot with AI-ready data allows our employees to work confidently, knowing that they can trust the information they’re working with.

{Learn more about how we’re responding to the AI Revolution with an AI Center of Excellence.}

Enhancing data management with AI

Before we truly realized the benefits of tools like Copilot, we needed to incorporate AI-ready data into the same data management and governance tools that many of you use: Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview. For decades, the challenge of data analysts and engineers was maintaining a consistently reliable “source of truth” despite inconsistent data quality, insufficient governance, and years of collecting data in siloes. Fabric and Purview help to resolve these issues.

Fabric is our unified data and AI platform that combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) solution. Part of our AI-ready data strategy includes embracing data-mesh architecture. By using Fabric’s data lake, OneLake, to connect to data from anywhere and work from the same copy across platforms, our data scientists and engineers are executing that strategy. Fabric’s ability to unify data sources provides data professionals with the AI-ready data they need, all in one SaaS experience.

“There is no good AI without a solid, curated data stack,” says Delphine Clement, a principal product manager for the Microsoft Purview product team. “Democratizing data unlocks the power of enterprise data by cataloging, curating, and certifying it, then making it available to employees.”

Purview is our primary tool for data governance and ensures the security and compliance of Microsoft’s data assets. Purview has been reimagined to provide an integrated SaaS solution to the practice of data governance for enterprise-wide users. Delivering AI-ready data is a priority for maximizing the effectiveness of Purview and tools like it.

In addition to providing a unified data catalog that helps us classify and identify defects in our enterprise data, Purview enables Microsoft Digital to safely manage our data estate by applying data sensitivity labels to all the digital assets that comprise our Microsoft 365 content estate. Copilot uses sensitivity labels, file permissions, and rights management services to ensure that private or sensitive data isn’t reasoned over and overexposed. Purview also helps us maintain an effective chain of custody for our digital assets with strong data loss protection (DLP) capabilities to help us catch the 1% case when sensitive data leaks from our environment. An effective data governance strategy powered by Microsoft Purview is essential to enabling Microsoft Digital to support Responsible AI at Microsoft.

Our everyday corporate functions like Microsoft HR and Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) depend on Purview to provide accurate data to complete projects, whether they’re smaller in scope or large-scale initiatives. For example, the accuracy of legal data required to complete a brief for a court filing is essential. With Purview, our CELA teams know the information they’re working with is high quality, accurate, and complete.

{Learn more on how we’re transforming our data governance at Microsoft with Purview and Fabric.}

Accelerating time to value with powerful AI models

AI-ready data can fast-track value realization by leveraging powerful AI models. On Microsoft platforms, AI data model options for information retrieval and custom engine agents offer varying levels of flexibility and control.

Agents focused on knowledge or information retrieval are built using tools like Microsoft Copilot Studio and operate on Microsoft’s pre-configured AI models and orchestrators, which are the software layers that manage and coordinate the execution of tasks and services across multiple systems. This approach simplifies development by eliminating the need for organizations to manage their own AI infrastructure, as these agents utilize the Copilot engine to handle prompts and leverage foundational models. Additionally, retrieval agents have native access to indexed Microsoft Graph data, such as SharePoint and OneDrive files, enhancing their integration capabilities.

{Find out how we’re unlocking deeper AI value at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility.}

In contrast, custom agents provide organizations with the ability to integrate their own AI models including models from Azure OpenAI or Azure AI Foundry, offering a higher degree of customization. These agents can be tailored to specific domains or workflows and are built using tools like the Teams Toolkit, Azure AI and Microsoft Copilot Studio. This approach allows for the use of custom foundational models and orchestrators, enabling specialized experiences that align closely with their unique requirements. However, this increased flexibility necessitates a greater level of security and compliance oversight, as organizations are responsible for managing and maintaining their custom AI infrastructure. 

{Learn how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.}

AI-ready data + Copilot

Microsoft Dynamics for Sales (MSX) and Microsoft Sales are our principal platforms for managing customer and sales data. MSX is the pipeline through which we manage the sales of Microsoft products. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales is already being used to improve the data quality and hygiene of MSX. Instead of sellers needing to manually update sales each month or clean up duplicate data, Copilot for Sales can do the work automatically, freeing employees to focus their time more strategically.

“There is a great opportunity for AI-ready data to help with data hygiene in tools like MSX and Microsoft Sales. It can quickly organize account data to reflect the correct hierarchies and account parenting,” says Edith Dubuisson, senior business program manager, for Employee Experience Success.

Microsoft Sales is the database of all purchases from Microsoft. The amount of information is massive, and data quality is critical. Thanks to AI-ready data, in the future Copilot will assist with organizing the data associated with thousands of accounts, updating hierarchies, and maintaining account contact information.

{See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.}

Accelerating corporate functions growth

All corporate functions are being asked to do more with less because they can no longer afford to grow operational costs linearly with top-line revenue or employee count. AI tools, powered by AI-ready data, will play a fundamental role in transforming corporate functions’ workflows while improving operational efficiency, user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance, and data-driven decision making.

Human Resources agents will be empowered to summarize support cases, find answers to user inquiries, and craft email responses faster and more effectively using AI tools backed by AI ready data. Legal professionals in CELA will exploit AI-ready data within CELA’s workflows to provide swift access to legal findings by consolidating trusted knowledge assets across diverse data sources. Global Workplace Services (GWS), our facilities management team, will use AI-ready data to forecast occupancy and make real-estate portfolio recommendations based on complete and accurate information.

{Learn how AI is revolutionizing the way we support Corporate Functions at Microsoft.}

Democratizing access to enterprise data, powered by AI, is a strategic imperative for Microsoft. We’re focused on delivering a strong data culture that prioritizes data quality, infrastructure, and governance. Emphasizing AI-ready data to power our data and AI solutions ensures that Microsoft meets the needs of the company, customers, and employees.

Here are some tips for getting started with getting your data AI-ready:

• Identify and assign enterprise data owners to implement and oversee the processes that guarantee data quality.
• Verify and document existing data sources to understand where datasets need to be connected across domains.
• Ensure strategic governance by using tools like Microsoft Purview to focus on the origin, sensitivity, and lifecycle of your enterprise data.
• Enterprise data is one of your most valuable assets. Form a data council to help promote a data culture to ensure your data is AI-ready.

Ready to experience Microsoft 365 Copilot? Get started here.

• Learn more about Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric.
• Read our guide for deploying and driving adoption of 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 Transforming our data culture with AI-ready data appeared first on Inside Track Blog.