There are very few applications or services that have had the transformative impact that Teams has had at Microsoft. Every day, over 200,000 employees all over the world wake up, turn on their PCs, and start to collaborate with Teams. It’s hard to remember what Microsoft was like before Teams, but I know I wouldn’t want to go back!

—Eileen Zhou, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Microsoft Digital was there from the beginning, although at the time we were still known as “End User Services Engineering.” Our role as the company’s IT organization was to serve as Customer Zero of this critical new enterprise capability, deploying and governing the first enterprise-grade Microsoft Teams tenant to validate and improve Teams based on our first-party experience. As Customer Zero, we’ve learned a lot and influenced the Teams experience in the five years since Microsoft Teams was released. A few examples include:

• Shaping more natural and engaging meeting experiences.
• Providing feedback on fundamentals of the experience like performance, governance, and the overall user experience workflow.
• Enabling employees to connect seamlessly with those inside and outside of their organizations. Providing ways to make remote and hybrid meetings more impactful and inclusive, like Together Mode, Teams Speaker Coach, and Live Transcription.
• Creating new ways to collaborate seamlessly, like Microsoft Loop.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we recently shared Five ways Microsoft Teams has transformed Microsoft based on our learnings as Customer Zero.

“There are very few applications or services that have had the transformative impact that Teams has had at Microsoft,” says Eileen Zhou, principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “Every day, over 200,000 employees all over the world wake up, turn on their PCs, and start to collaborate with Teams. It’s hard to remember what Microsoft was like before Teams, but I know I wouldn’t want to go back!”

Three years after the launch of Microsoft Teams, the professional landscape was forever altered by the COVID-19 pandemic. It was Teams that kept Microsoft employees and millions of people globally connected and productive. As our CEO Satya Nadella explained on LinkedIn, “Every organization requires a digital fabric that connects people, places, and processes.”

Microsoft Teams isn’t just our platform for chatting or for making video calls. It’s our hub for teamwork across applications and devices. Teams literally makes hybrid work work at Microsoft.

—Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Digital

Microsoft Teams is the “digital fabric” that keeps Microsoft connected and collaborative across projects, devices, and even different geographies. This blog post describes how.

[Learn how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world. Check out a new Microsoft Teams app that is helping us facilitate employee connectivity in a challenging hybrid work environment.]

The center of Microsoft’s digital fabric

While those unfamiliar with the power of Microsoft Teams may think of it simply as the place they go for meetings or chats, it’s much more. It’s a cross-platform environment enabling seamless collaboration on any device at any time, which is a critical enabler of hybrid work.

“Microsoft Teams isn’t just our platform for chatting or for making video calls,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “It’s our hub for teamwork across applications and devices. Teams literally makes hybrid work work at Microsoft.”

The Microsoft Teams product group has a lot of improvements planned for the collaboration platform.

“The next few years are going to be pretty mind-blowing,” says Jeff Teper, Microsoft president for Collaborative Apps and Platforms, speaking at Microsoft Ignite 2022. “The thing that really matters is creating engaging experiences where people stay connected. Given that distributed work is very much here to stay, we’ve got to innovate and try new experiences beyond just video.”

Staying connected so hybrid teams can collaborate seamlessly is critical for any modern enterprise.

How is Microsoft driving innovation through Microsoft Teams? There’s already a lengthy list of Teams-based experiences that are helping hybrid teams to thrive, including Microsoft Loop for seamless collaboration across Microsoft 365 apps, Microsoft Stream for enterprise video viewing and storage, Power Virtual Agents to easily incorporate intelligent chat bots, and Microsoft Viva: our Employee Experience Platform (EXP) that supports employee connections, insights, purpose, and growth.

Beyond those experiences, there’s more innovation on the horizon with Microsoft Teams Mesh, the metaverse, and additional investments in security, app integration, and the Microsoft Power Platform. We’ll explore each of those further in a little bit.

Keeping connected in a hybrid world

In Microsoft Digital, when we think about Microsoft Teams, we reflect on three phases of product usage and growth.

• The first phase ran from March of 2017, when Microsoft Teams reached general availability and ran until March of 2020. Over those first three years, usage grew rapidly, and Teams rapidly grew beyond being a platform just for synchronous communication and asynchronous chat.
• We’re still in the second phase, which began during the pandemic. Essential before the pandemic, Microsoft Teams is now the critical tool that enables Microsoft employees—and employees, students, and teachers globally—to stay connected.
• The third phase is right around the corner. Microsoft Teams will continue to propel Microsoft into the future as hybrid work becomes the new normal for information workers globally.

This growth and innovation are fueled by our feedback as Customer Zero and that of countless customers who are striving to invest in their employees and improve their hybrid experience.

Hybrid work (the second phase)

While remote and hybrid work existed prior to COVID-19, the pandemic acted as an incredible accelerator of trends we were already observing in the marketplace. As Satya said in May of 2020, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months.”

How did that manifest?

• Microsoft Teams meeting usage increased 148 percent
• Chat usage increased 45 percent
• 6 billion more emails were sent
• Collaboration in Microsoft Office documents increased by 66 percent

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Work Trends Index, an annual survey of 30,000-plus workers across industries, to better understand the changing world of work. Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky shared the result of the updated index in September of 2022. The three key findings were:

1. Leaders need to end “productivity paranoia.”
2. They need to embrace the fact that people come in for each other.
3. Re-recruiting your best employees is possible by offering better learning and development support.

Digging deeper into each of these insights offers an opportunity to think differently about hybrid work:

• While 87 percent of workers indicate that they feel productive in a hybrid work environment, only 12 percent of leaders have confidence that their team is productive.
• Business leaders and managers expressed an overwhelming desire to have people in the office so they could interact with their teams. Seventy-three percent of employees say they need a better reason to go into the office than just company expectations.
• Employees at all levels are looking for companies that support their learning and development needs. Seventy-six percent of employees reported that they would stay at their company longer if they could benefit more from learning and development support.

The workplace of today is dramatically different than the pre-pandemic workplace, and Microsoft Teams is the digital fabric that’s enabling our employees to thrive by:

• Facilitating connection and productivity to keep people productive wherever they are;
• Keeping teams and people connected through chat and video calls;
• Enabling the discovery and consumption of learning opportunities through capabilities like Microsoft Viva Learning;
• Helping our leaders to stop worrying about the productivity of their remote and hybrid teams by ensuring they have all the tools to remain productive and connected on any device and at any time.

When I think of tools that give Microsoft a competitive edge in the marketplace, Teams immediately comes to mind. It’s the one place where our employees go to collaborate, communicate, and to stay connected. And the innovations keep coming to ensure that Microsoft—and our customers—maintain that edge.

—Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

Critically, Microsoft Teams is the enterprise-wide hub for content discovery, collaboration, and document co-editing. At Microsoft, we’ve observed that it can help to end the “productivity paranoia” that so many business leaders are experiencing.

How has Microsoft Teams evolved for hybrid work?

As one of the most important tools to keep teams connected globally, Microsoft continuously innovates with new features and capabilities released monthly. In fact, there were over 450 new features released in 2022 alone! A few recent standouts include:

• Microsoft Polls for quick check-ins. Presenters can now launch a poll without preparing in advance. Simply ask your question aloud and people can answer by selecting one of two answers (yes or no, thumbs up or down, heart or broken heart).
• Together Mode. This feature uses AI segmentation technology to digitally place participants in a shared background, making it feel like you’re sitting in the same room with everyone else in the meeting.
• Background noise suppression. Helps those who have their microphone turned on in a Microsoft Teams meeting or call eliminate any background noises, allowing meeting participants to stay focused and less distracted.
• Your favorite apps. The app store in Microsoft Teams allows you to use tools you’re already familiar with directly inside your collaboration experience. The ability to extend this with custom, developed apps, written by your own organization, minimizes fatigue-inducing context switching.

Accelerating our hybrid work journey with Microsoft Teams

In addition to new features, Microsoft Teams is the digital fabric that brings together many of the most powerful elements of Microsoft 365 into a single canvas focused on collaboration.

“When I think of tools that give Microsoft a competitive edge in the marketplace, Teams immediately comes to mind,” says Sara Bush, principal PM manager in Microsoft Digital. “It’s the one place where our employees go to collaborate, communicate, and to stay connected. And the innovations keep coming to ensure that Microsoft—and our customers—maintain that edge.”

Now, we’ll share more details on some of the most powerful integrations that have accelerated our own hybrid journey and that have helped us to achieve that edge:

• Microsoft Loop. This new app designed for the hybrid workplace enables users to seamlessly collaborate as they move freely across Microsoft 365. Loop components enable hybrid teams to collaborate on things like lists, tables, or notes across any Microsoft 365 app, including Microsoft Teams, and there are more innovative experiences to come. Visit Microsoft Loop: Flexible Canvas App to learn more.
• Microsoft Stream. Video capture and viewing is an essential part of modern hybrid work, enabling asynchronous meetings that support flexible schedules and global teams. Stream makes it simple to capture, share, and measure the impact of video in your enterprise. Visit Microsoft Stream—Enterprise Video Platform to learn more.
• App integration. Microsoft Teams features powerful apps built by Microsoft that enhance user productivity and collaboration as well as a large catalog of third-party apps for many popular and useful services. It’s also easy to integrate Microsoft Power Apps. Visit Know about apps in Microsoft Teams to learn more.
• Shared channels. Does your team collaborate with individuals outside your organization? Microsoft Teams Connect shared channels enable users to seamlessly collaborate across organizational or company boundaries. Visit shared channels in Microsoft Teams to learn more.

We’ll be publishing deep dives into each of these new technologies soon to give you a better view into how these experiences are shaping our employee experience at Microsoft and how they can support yours too.

Upgrading your physical space

One surprising outcome of the move to hybrid work was the fact that satisfaction with the meeting experience increased during the pandemic. Why? The pandemic leveled the playing field for meeting participants. No longer were remote attendees disadvantaged while in-person participants had access to physical whiteboards, could read other’s body language, or more easily participate in discussion or Q&A. It was an eye-opener for all of us in Microsoft Digital and has informed our approach to space planning and Microsoft Teams development since.

That simple insight has led to breakthroughs that enable more immersive and effective hybrid meetings. One such breakthrough is the new Microsoft Teams Rooms front row layout, which is designed to enhance hybrid meetings and foster a greater sense of connection and collaboration for remote attendees and in-room meeting participants alike. Front row moves the video gallery to the bottom of the screen, showing virtual attendees at eye level with people inside the meeting room for a more natural face-to-face interaction—as if everyone were all in the same room.

Meeting chat and a rostered view of participants with raised hands are brought to the front-of-room screen, so people in the room can easily see the conversation and actively participate.

In Microsoft Digital, we’re partnering with our peers in Global Workplace Services and the Microsoft Teams Product Group to explore different physical and virtual layouts in our interactive Hive space. Read How Microsoft is rethinking the hybrid meeting room experience with Microsoft Teams to experience the Hive firsthand. And if you want to have some fun while becoming more skilled with hybrid meetings, read how we’re teaching Microsoft employees healthy hybrid meeting habits with Minecraft.

Hybrid meeting best practices

One area where Microsoft struggled, especially in the early days of the pandemic, was facilitating inclusive and productive hybrid meetings. While there are lots of different ways to ensure your meetings are inclusive, we’ve learned that if you just do these three things, you’re more likely to have meetings that your employees see as inclusive:

• Use a centralized audio device to ensure virtual attendees can hear clearly. Laptop microphones, especially if multiple devices are in use within a single room, can create distracting feedback or echo effects.
• Turn your camera on, even if you’re in the room, so folks can make eye contact and read body language. And if you’re uncomfortable leaving your camera on for the whole meeting, start with your camera on so you can make a connection with other participants if possible.
• Designate a moderator to bridge the digital/physical divide by looking for raised hands, comments or questions in the chat, as well looking for participants who come off mute (who may be trying to ask a question or make a comment).

For more tips, see Driving inclusive and effective meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.

Looking forward—the ‘third phase’

So, what’s ahead in the “third phase” of Microsoft’s Teams’ journey? Many exciting developments are just on the horizon, including a Microsoft Teams Premium option with a host of features to enhance user experience, additional Microsoft Power Platform alignment and integration, more secure meetings, and enhancements to infrastructure to support sustained growth. But perhaps one of the more exciting developments in Microsoft Teams is supporting the metaverse with Microsoft Mesh.

Microsoft Mesh for Teams

On the horizon, Mesh for Microsoft Teams will provide even more spectacular opportunities for collaboration and teamwork in the metaverse.

Here’s how Teper described Microsoft Mesh at Microsoft Ignite: “Mesh is our platform for building immersive experiences. It’s three things. Avatars in Teams, which is fun and a first step to more 3D experiences. Second is putting that avatar in a 3D space with other people and connecting it to 2D meetings to its inclusive and everybody can participate … and then we want people to create completely custom worlds to work and learn.”

The pace of innovation in Teams has been incredible, and it’s a huge point of pride in Microsoft Digital that we’ve been able to partner closely with our product team counterparts to build, test, and deploy so many of those innovative capabilities. And the pace will just continue to accelerate as we build the collaborative features needed to power teams into the future, like the incorporation of AI in Microsoft Teams Premium.

—Claire Sisson, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

The potential for building deep, immersive worlds that enable new and inclusive ways to collaborate in the hybrid workplace is obviously very exciting. And while these are  still the very early days for Microsoft Mesh (which is available currently only as a private preview), perhaps more than just about any other technology, Mesh has the potential of helping Microsoft to achieve its mission of “empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

While our journey with Microsoft Teams started years ago, it’s clear that this is just the beginning, and the best is yet to come.

“The pace of innovation in Teams has been incredible, and it’s a huge point of pride in Microsoft Digital that we’ve been able to partner closely with our product team counterparts to build, test, and deploy so many of those innovative capabilities,” says Claire Sisson, principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “And the pace will just continue to accelerate as we build the collaborative features needed to power teams into the future, like the incorporation of AI in Microsoft Teams Premium.”

Since 2017, the pace of innovation with Microsoft Teams has been blistering, and Teams will continue to innovate to meet the needs of our employees, customers, and partners as the world adjusts to the new normal of hybrid work. We’re excited to be on this journey together, and even more excited to continue to influence the direction of Teams based on our experience as Customer Zero at Microsoft.

• Learn how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world.
• Check out a new Microsoft Teams app that is helping us facilitate employee connectivity in a challenging hybrid work environment.
• Find out how we’re teaching Microsoft employees healthy hybrid meeting habits with Minecraft.
• Learn how we drove the successful adoption of Microsoft Teams internally at Microsoft.
• See how deploying Microsoft Teams across Microsoft hinged on good governance.

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

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The post Transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams: Collaborating seamlessly, teaming up fearlessly appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

Accelerating digital transformation with Microsoft Teams

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

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

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

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

Making adoption happen with change management

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

Making change a more practical reality

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

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

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

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

Establishing structure for change

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

Awareness

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

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

Engagement

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

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

Measurement

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

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

Management

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

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

Recognizing Microsoft Teams adoption as social and behavior change

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

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

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

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

Establishing a communications framework: Spark, ignite, bonfire

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

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

Selecting our sparks

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

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

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

Moving to ignite

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

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

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

Adding to the bonfire

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

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

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

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

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

Here are more Microsoft Teams resources:

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

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

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Fundamentally, employees and teams need to connect their jobs to the top organizational goals, be clear on their contribution, and align cross-functionally. Setting and shaping clear goals is essential for teams and individuals to understand their priorities and impact. According to the 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index Special Report, employees who report having clarity about their work priorities are almost 4 times as likely to stay at the company for more than two years. They’re also more than 7 times as likely to think less about looking for a new job and 4.5 times as likely to say they’re happy at their current company. However, the same research shows that only 13 percent of frontline managers clearly understood how their work contributed to the larger company strategy, and 72 percent of executives couldn’t name their company’s top three goals.

This gap between the pursuit of meaningful and clear sense of purpose and actual employee experiences needs to be repaired as the work environment becomes more complex, uncertain, rapidly changing, and demanding more with less. Employees need to feel energized and empowered to do meaningful work, which requires direct and clear connection with company goals and strategy, cross-functional alignment with peers and teams, and ability to deliver in an increasingly uncertain economic landscape.

[See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Learn more about how we’re using OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals internally at Microsoft. Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Learn how we’re fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning. Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.]

Aligning work and creating clarity with objectives and key results

At Microsoft, we’re using objectives and key results (OKRs) and Microsoft Viva Goals to align team priorities with business goals, helping to create a sense of purpose for our employees, clarify their impact, and connect priorities and achievements in all areas of our business.

OKRs align our entire organization to a common set of strategies, shifting focus to meaningful business outcomes and away from disconnected work priorities and outputs. OKRs enable our employees to focus on the projects and tasks that align to the objectives and key results that matter most to Microsoft and their teams, aligning their everyday work to the big picture of our business. This practice increases employee engagement, sharpens employees’ focus, and creates a shared understanding of how everyone is moving the company forward.

Microsoft Viva Goals provides a platform within which any organization’s employees and managers can use the OKR framework to set and execute goals while establishing clarity, purpose, and alignment. The OKR framework is supported by several components:

• Objectives are clear, inspiring, ambitious goals that define what teams or business groups want to accomplish. There are key questions to ask when establishing objectives: What is the most important area of our business to focus on? Why does that matter for us? How could we write that into a statement that inspires our team? Here’s an example of a good objective: “Deliver a ‘must-have’ product to delight customers and grow our user base.”
• Key results are the team or business group’s measurable outcomes. When establishing key results, ask the following questions. How will we know if we’re successful at achieving our objective? How can we measure the impact of our work? What is our best-case scenario for achieving that measure? Here’s an example of a relevant key result: “Increase our customer satisfaction score from 40 to 50.”
• Initiatives are activities that help the team achieve their key results. This is the work that teams do to execute on their OKRs. The following questions are helpful in determining the initiatives for an OKR: What do we need to do to be successful? What can we get done in this period? Who needs to be involved? Here’s a project that would contribute to the above key result: “Build a dashboard to track user experience in the new app.”

The OKR formula works like this:

Microsoft Viva Goals and the OKR framework is intended to get an entire organization, team, or groupings of employees focused and aligned on strategic priorities. OKRs support and integrate with project and task management solutions, they don’t replace them. OKRs measure business success, they’re not a measure of individual performance or a way to manage business-as-usual tasks. With Viva Goals, teams track aspirational goals that drive the business forward, not the day-to-day work of our employees.

OKRs help connect employees to the mission of an organization. Microsoft Viva Goals makes the OKR framework work in scalable and user-friendly ways. It accelerates the adoption of best practices for building and managing OKRs in one place with guidance and structure to support adoption. Viva Goals enables managers and employees to interact with their goals in the flow of work, surfacing and supporting the OKR framework in the tools they use everyday and enabling focus on what matters.

• Effective decision making: Microsoft Viva Goals provides our employees with a single source of truth so they can make swift, informed decisions. Importantly, they don’t need to manually track their progress when they get work done—Viva Goals automatically makes updates for them as they go.
• Be in the flow: Bringing our employees’ business goals and purpose into the flow of their work is simplifying adoption of our OKRs at scale without disrupting individual work.

Using Microsoft Viva Goals at Microsoft as 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 Microsoft Viva Goals, 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 want challenging but attainable goals at Microsoft—we don’t expect 100 percent of our objectives to be met. If that’s the case, our goals aren’t ambitious enough.

—Scott Blackwell, principal program manager, Microsoft Viva Goals

We collaborate closely with the Microsoft Viva product development team to share employee feedback that improves the experience. As part of our Customer Zero partnership, Microsoft leaders 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 needs. Additionally, it sharpens our focus on skills and learning in the spirit of growth mindset and enables our own experts at Microsoft to provide industry-relevant context and feedback into the Viva Goals development process.

Our Customer Zero journey with Microsoft Viva Goals began before Viva Goals was a product. We’ve been using the OKR framework at Microsoft for two to three years and learned a lot along the way.

Scott Blackwell is Principal Program Manager for Viva Goals at Microsoft. He emphasizes the importance of practice in enabling successful implementation of OKRs and Viva Goals at Microsoft.

“Ultimately, using OKRs at Microsoft isn’t primarily about tooling. It’s more about the practice of goal-setting and what it means to implement OKRs into the mindset of our business,” Blackwell says. “It’s about how we set and drive those objectives and key results through leadership and communication. We want challenging but attainable goals at Microsoft—we don’t expect 100 percent of our objectives to be met. If that’s the case, our goals aren’t ambitious enough.”

To implement OKRs successfully, employee experience and culture need to be at the center. OKRs help accelerate culture change, in a simple and systematic way, employee by employee, organization by organization.

— Don Campbell, senior director, OKR Enterprise Accelerator team, Microsoft Viva Goals

Using OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals to remove roadblocks and help employees work more efficiently is what is driving the company’s success. The internal development of Viva Goals has also helped us improve our employee experience and has increased our employees’ engagement with Microsoft Viva. Our deep experience with OKRs as an organization has provided the Viva Goals development team with a customer that can provide feedback, inform the development process, and help to create a product that supports the OKR framework with an engaging experience for both employees and leadership.

Driving adoption with employee focus and key roles

Our adoption of Microsoft Viva Goals at Microsoft is driven by our culture. Having our executives and leadership teams sponsor and promote OKRs within their business groups was as important—if not more important—than technically implementing the toolset. OKRs are, at their core, outcomes and productivity drivers that impact every employee, aligning each of them to the purpose of the organization.

Don Campbell is the Senior Director of the Microsoft Viva Goals OKR Enterprise Accelerator (OEA) team. “To implement OKRs successfully, employee experience and culture need to be at the center,” Campbell says. “OKRs help accelerate culture change, in a simple and systematic way, employee by employee, organization by organization.”

It’s about helping your employees stay focused on your strategy and vision.

“OKRs underpin the direction and purpose of the organization,” he adds. “It’s not just what you do, but why you do it, and how. If someone comes to me with an idea for some line of work or project, I’m immediately going to ask how it’s aligned to the key results we have in place. I’ll ask questions about the outcome, the timing, whether it’s the right thing. These lead to conversations that enhance clarity and ensure alignment across anything we do.”

Establishing team roles and identifying the people and teams that can accelerate adoption is at the focus of our internal plans for OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals. A shift to greater clarity and better alignment must happen across the organization. We’ve identified several important roles in the adoption process that any company should incorporate into their plans for Viva Goals and OKRs:

• The executive sponsor has a clear vision for OKRs and the benefits of the framework. They work to communicate with leadership and ensure that company leaders have the guidance and encouragement to enable OKRs for their teams and embed a goal-setting culture across the organization.
• OKR champions facilitate the OKR process. They are the OKR experts, acting as a resource for OKR information, answering questions about OKR adoption, and encouraging adoption.
• Team managers are at the forefront of helping employees to achieve their business outcomes in the context of objectives and key results. Team managers have a deep understanding of their team’s OKR and maintain OKR focus across the projects that team members are working on.
• Human resources (HR) leaders support company-wide adoption and alignment to accelerate company culture and employee experience. They also supply access to learning and development planning resources, consistent adoption messaging, and they support team leaders in the practical implementation of the OKR framework.
• Admin and IT teams implement the technology necessary to put Microsoft Viva Goals and the OKR framework in front of every employee in the organization. Meeting employees in the flow of work and creating an engaging employee experience.

Implementing OKRs with Microsoft Viva Goals

Rajesh Jha is Executive Vice President of Experiences and Devices at Microsoft. His team is responsible for building many Microsoft products, including Windows, Microsoft 365, Edge, and Bing. The Experiences + Devices team recently adopted Microsoft Viva Goals for OKRs management as an organization, with Jha’s executive sponsorship leading the way.

The 40,000 global employees on the Experiences and Devices team journeyed through a 12-week adoption of Microsoft Viva Goals, coming from a variety of OKR maturity levels and solutions. Like much of Microsoft, OKRs were not new to Jha and his team, but having Viva Goals available as a universal tool to manage OKRs across the entire organization was.

The OKR Enterprise Accelerator (OEA) team at Microsoft led and managed the Experiences + Devices implementation. They identified the key roles to be filled to support Microsoft Viva Goals rollout, including Jha as the executive sponsor. Internal communications and leadership teams from Experiences and Devices provided leadership and communications to employees, while Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital provided HR and IT support. The enterprise accelerator team provided the initial OKR champions, but also developed local OKR champions within the Enterprise and Devices organization.

The OEA team established a workback schedule and implementation timeline according to the maturity levels and implementation needs of the teams across the department. The extended Experiences + Devices leadership team signed off on the project and messaging plan and the OEA team began a 4-week sprint with OKR champions to get all OKRs established and set in Microsoft Viva Goals across leadership and team managers.

After the initial sprint, leadership and team managers engaged with their employees—more than 40,000 of them—to adopt Microsoft Viva Goals for OKR management. This meant establishing ongoing rhythms, ensuring that Viva Goals in Microsoft Teams was available to and used by employees. From there, they aligned key results and projects with their employees and teams. Some of the most important activities in our rollout to Experiences and Devices team included:

• Defining the criteria for success. We had to establish OKRs to guide our OKR rollout! These OKRs helped define what success meant and focused us on what we wanted to accomplish.
• Establishing program guidance documentation. We drafted a set of resources that provided Q and A style information to answer typical questions and provide a common base for understanding. This documentation was available to all employees.
• Holding weekly community meetings. These meetings informally brought our OKR champions together and helped build connections and best practices that were shared across the team.

As Customer Zero for Microsoft Viva Goals, we’ve learned and grown along our journey with OKRs at Microsoft. In our environment, we’re currently using Viva Goals to manage almost 9,000 objectives, more than 21,000 key results, and approximately 4,000 projects.

Our relationship with the Viva Goals product team as Customer Zero has resulted in more than 160 design and feature change suggestions, removal of more than 140 bugs, and almost 2,000 teams at Microsoft using Viva Goals.

What’s Next

Our journey with Microsoft Viva Goals is ongoing. We’re working towards large-scale adoption of Microsoft Viva Goals in the current fiscal year and, subsequently, broader adoption of the OKR practice at Microsoft. We strongly believe it will increase employee engagement, clarity of goals and impact, sense of meaningful work, and feeling a part of achieving our collective purpose.

The success of our implementation with Experiences and Devices and many other large Microsoft organizations is the beginning of building a broader awareness of the OKR framework and Microsoft Viva Goals at Microsoft. Our OEA team continues to guide Viva Goals adoption throughout the wider Microsoft organization.

We’ve established several must haves for a successful Microsoft Viva Goals rollout.

• You should Identify a committed executive sponsor. Make sure you have enthusiastic leaders accountable for the success of the overall program—not just within individual teams.
• Build a public timeline linked with key planning milestones. Hold your team accountable and create a valuable sense of urgency.
• Build a network of local OKR champions to evangelize the change and provide avenues for average employees to get reactive support while maintaining strong ownership by team leaders.
• Communicate clear expectations and create community. Ensure expectations and asks are clear and concise at all points throughout the process.

The OKR framework and Microsoft Viva Goals is providing real business benefit at Microsoft and to Microsoft customers. Some of our most significant benefits from using Viva Goals include:

• Better alignment. Knowledge sharing and cross-functional visibility highlight collaboration opportunities so teams can identify joint priorities and pull resources together.
• Greater focus. Leaders have a heightened sense of clarity and accountability, and they can relay this to employees at company wide meetings to reinforce focus areas.
• More transparency. Microsoft Viva Goals provides a single source of truth for goals and how daily work contributes. Leaders understand how they are tracking towards goals without having to track down data. Employees understand how the projects they are working on impact team and company goals.
• Increased agility. Healthy business rhythms emerge around goals. Weekly meeting around progress towards OKRs aligns teams on the types of opportunities to target and helps continually refocus team actions on what’s most important, even when what’s most important changes.
• Elevated achievement. The entire organization builds a portfolio of accomplishment and a culture of celebration. The company no longer talks about activities and tasks, but instead celebrates impact within existing celebratory patterns.

• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn more about how we’re using OKRs and Microsoft Viva Goals internally at Microsoft.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re fostering a culture of learning at Microsoft with Viva Learning.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

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.

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Copilot for Microsoft 365 Deployment and Adoption Guide

Read our step-by-step guide on deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at your company. It’s based on our experience deploying it here at Microsoft:

• Full version
• eBook version
• Version for executives
• eBook version for executives

Thanks to our strong relationships with our works councils, we’re receiving valuable feedback that we’re using to improve our products while also deploying them faster and more fully to our employees.

How are we doing this?

By addressing compliance requirements raised by our works councils early in the process and by working with them in more collaborative ways. In fact, our relationship with our works councils has grown so strong that we—Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization—have formalized using their feedback to strengthen our products.

This relationship was particularly helpful when we recently deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365—they agreed to allow it to be used in their countries under certain restrictions while they reviewed it. This allowed us to both quickly deploy it across the company and to give them the time they need to assess the product to see if they want to block certain features or provide suggestions on how we can improve it.

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 Copilot products, this process was in place and ready to help the works councils quickly evaluate it, including in Germany.

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. Our best course of action is to prepare and steer its direction.

— Irina Chemerys, global program manager, Microsoft Digital

Getting to duldungsvereinbarung in Germany

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.”

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

— Carsten Schleicher, Chairman, Microsoft Germany works council

The country’s works council eventually adopted a duldungsvereinbarung, “tolerance agreement” in German, 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.

We didn’t have all the answers regarding what the impact of Copilot would be. 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.

— Juliette Reigner, works council manager, Microsoft France

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.”

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.

— Edith Dubuisson, senior business program manager, Microsoft Digital

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 allow 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 Copilot for Microsoft 365 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 Copilot at your company.

• Get our tips for partnering with your works councils.
• Read our story on how we deployed Copilot for Microsoft 365 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.

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

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

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 Employee Experience

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 Employee Experience.

“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.

“I’m inspired by the transformative power of AI,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “I’ve been impressed with how quickly our employees have put it to work for them.”

She would know—her team just finished deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 to more than 300,000 employees and vendors across the world.

“The contents of this guide are based on the lessons we’ve learned deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at global enterprise scale. The tips and ideas you’ll read here will help you accelerate your own time to value so you can realize the same benefits as our employees.”

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to empower, enable, and transform the company’s digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. We also provide a blueprint for our customers to follow, and so have created this guide for deploying and adopting Copilot for Microsoft 365.

Are you an IT pro?

View the full version of this deployment and adoption guide here.

Download your own copy of our full guide here.

Download a copy of this executive version of this guide here.

 

This executive summary of the complete Adoption and Deployment Guide is broken into four chapters designed to accelerate your time to value with Microsoft 365 Copilot:

Chapter 1: Getting governance right: Responsible AI depends on it

Before you even begin your Copilot for Microsoft 365 implementation, you’ll want to consider how this tool impacts your data. Copilot uses Large Language Models (LLMs) that interact with data and content across your organization and uses  information your employees can access to transform user prompts into personalized, relevant, and actionable responses.

Giving your employees this level of access means proper data hygiene is a priority. At Microsoft Digital, we use sensitivity labeling to empower our employees with access while also protecting our data. Copilot for Microsoft 365 was designed to respect labels, permissions, and rights management service (RMS) protections that block content extraction on relevant file labels. That ensures private or confidential information stays that way.

Note: This chapter outlines the highly robust, best-case scenario we created for Microsoft, but we know not every organization has a fully deployed data governance strategy. If you’re in that position, don’t worry! You can use Restricted SharePoint Search to provide instant value and protection without exposing Copilot to all of your internal SharePoint sites.

Laying the groundwork with proper labeling

We’ve developed four data labeling practices that make up our foundation for appropriate policies and settings.

Responsible self-service
Enable your employees to create new workspaces like SharePoint sites, ensuring your company data is on your Microsoft 365 tenant. That enables your people to take full advantage of Copilot in ways that align with your organizational data hygiene while you keep your company’s information safe.

Top-down defaults
Label containers for data segmentation by default to ensure your information isn’t overexposed. At Microsoft, we default our container labels to “Confidential\Internal Only.” We use Microsoft Purview to manage this process.

Consistency within containers
Derive file labels from their parent containers. Consistency boosts security and reduces the administrative burden on your employees for labeling every file they create. Copilot will reflect file labels in chat responses so employees know the level of confidentiality of each portion of AI-created responses.

Employee awareness
We train our employees to understand how to handle and label sensitive data. By making your employees active participants in your data hygiene strategy, you increase accuracy and improve your security posture.

Self-service with guardrails

The data hygiene practices above form a foundation for compliance and security but backstopping those efforts through Microsoft 365 features adds an extra layer of protection. Here’s how:

Trust, but verify
Empower self-service with sensitivity labels but verify by checking against data loss prevention standards, then use auto-labeling and quarantining when necessary. We’ve configured Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention to detect and control sensitive content automatically.

Expiry and attestation
Put strong lifecycle management protocols in place that require your employees to attest containers to keep them from expiring. We don’t keep items that don’t have an accountable employee, or that might not be necessary for our work.

Controlling the flow
Limit oversharing at the source by enabling company-shareable links instead of forcing employees to grant access to large groups. To enforce these behaviors, you can set default link types based on labels through Purview.

Oversharing detection
Even under the best circumstances, accidents happen. When one of our employees does overshare sensitive data, we use Microsoft Graph Data Connect extraction in conjunction with Microsoft Purview to catch and report oversharing.

International compliance: No size fits all

Europe has extra requirements in the form of EU Data Boundary regulations and works councils, organizations that provide employee co-determination on workers’ rights or regulatory issues. Our Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment meant we needed to partner closely with our Microsoft works councils to address complex data and privacy implications.

Your experience will vary depending on your industry and where you operate, but we’ve learned that it’s best to work closely with local subsidiaries to ensure you have a complete picture of a region’s regulatory situation. Local insiders are poised to liaise with works councils (here’s how we do so internally at Microsoft) or other bodies through direct relationships. Start the process early so you can manage feedback cycles effectively and resolve any concerns through configurations that work for your employees.

Learning from Microsoft’s governance, security, and compliance practices

Bring the right people into the conversation
Don’t keep this conversation in the IT sphere alone. Bring in all the relevant security, legal, and compliance professionals.

Build a foundation for automation
Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention has powerful intelligent detection, but it relies on establishing good defaults.

Think about how your employees will use Copilot
Determine the primary use cases. The kinds of collaboration and access employees need will affect your labeling architecture.

Take this opportunity to train employees
If you’ve been looking for an excuse to refresh employee knowledge around data privacy, let this moment be your milestone.

Don’t overwhelm your employees
Make labeling easy and intuitive, and ensure it isn’t overwhelming.
Employees should have a limited set of choices to keep things simple.

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

At the time of our deployment, we were the first company to do so at scale, and our implementation team had to choose from different licensing strategies. We’ve learned from experience that it makes sense to start with pilot groups who can validate the experience and enable the rest of your organization. At Microsoft, that looked like:

Scaling out your licenses

After you decide on the general shape of your rollout, you can begin building your licensing strategy. In Microsoft Digital, we started with individual licenses at the single-user level. As our implementation scaled, we tied licensing automation to Microsoft 365 groups to implement targeted licensing changes at scale. Those groups could include subsets of employees or entire organizations within Microsoft, and we keyed our automation logic to their expanding and contracting eligibility.

We highly recommend defining a phased rollout strategy and structuring your groups accordingly. That creates accountability and gives your IT admins a crucial point of contact for understanding the licensing needs of different groups within your organization.

There are three primary benefits to using groups:

Optimize licensing costs
Create groups that reflect your business needs and goals that are aligned with your respective business sponsors. Sync your licensing status changes with your group membership changes. That way, you can assign the right licenses to the right users and adjust easily if you require frequent changes (e.g., in your early initial validation phase) and avoid paying for licenses you don’t need or use.

Refine admin costs
Group-based licensing enables your admins to assign one or more product licenses to a group. This depends on your rollout strategy and progress—your admins will be able to streamline your group setup at scale, reducing your admin overhead, which is helpful considering all the licenses you likely need to manage.

Enhance compliance and security
This ensures that only authorized users are licensed and have access to resources, enhancing your security and compliance. Your admins can use audit logs and other Microsoft Entra services to monitor and manage your group-based licensing activities.

Pre-adoption communications

Given the excitement around AI, one of the biggest challenges during our phased implementation was support requests from employees not within our initial pilot groups. Most of our support requests at this stage were essentially asking, “When do I get access?”

You can easily avoid the issue through clear and honest communication. For example, when you alert your initial implementation groups about their Copilot access, you could simultaneously deploy “Coming soon” emails to the rest of your organization. That will help you avoid any confusion while simultaneously generating excitement.

Your IT implementation team can’t work in isolation. Communication, especially with organizational leadership, is a key part of your licensing and implementation strategy.

Learning from Microsoft’s implementation

Design for the “who”
When you determine your initial cohorts, base your decisions on which roles have the largest coverage and will provide the most relevant feedback.

Get your groups in place
Be thoughtful about your Microsoft 365 groups and make sure everyone knows who owns them and who’s responsible.

Engage your support team from the start
This is a new technology, so your support teams will receive requests. Ensure they’re ready by giving them early access.

Manage expectations to minimize blowback
Proactively help users understand why they have licenses or don’t. Note that your rollout strategy might be subject to change.

Bring leadership on board early
Executive sponsorship isn’t just useful for adoption. Leaders will also help you identify the key use cases within their organizations.

Experience feedback at every level
Encourage feedback for employees in your early implementation phases because that will guide your wider adoption efforts.

Chapter 3: Driving adoption to accelerate value

The fact that your employees are excited about trying out Copilot isn’t enough. We found that you need strategic, coordinated change management to drive usage and adoption.

To do this effectively, you will need to empower change agents in your organization. These are not part time roles; they are dedicated resources across your company who are responsible for the change management function, including creation of a deployment and adoption plan, facilitating principled change management practices, communicating and engaging with employees, preparing employee readiness and learning opportunities, then measuring the success of your deployment across the enterprise. At a high level, your strategy should consist of the following five steps.

Focusing on change management is key when you deploy Copilot for Microsoft 365.

How Microsoft Digital drove adoption

At Microsoft, we broke our company-wide adoption efforts into cohorts, for example, subsidiaries or business groups. Depending on the size of your enterprise, you may benefit from this approach as well. We divided our adoption along two vectors: internal organizations like legal or sales and marketing, and regions like North America or Europe. Different cohorts have different focuses, but the strategy is similar. At Microsoft, we did this in four phases:

Get ready

Effective change management requires careful planning. Begin by identifying and then working with company-wide change management leads. Next, identify members of your target cohorts who will support the adoption, including change managers, leadership sponsors, and employee champions.

Champions will be crucial to your adoption by filling several powerful roles:

• Pinpointing key usage scenarios for Copilot based on their cohort’s culture or processes.
• Providing insights that help adoption leaders build out their rollout plans.
• Most importantly, demonstrating the value of Copilot and showing their peers how powerful this tool can be in their day-to-day work.

When champions socialize their tips and tricks, our experience at Microsoft Digital has revealed that it’s best to share specific prompts and the value they provided as a concrete entry point for users. For example, a champion could say, “I saved three hours drafting this sales script in Microsoft Word using this prompt,” then share their Copilot prompt as a place for peers to start.

Works councils also play a key role at this stage. They offer the benefit of local cultural expertise and can help you identify the challenges employees face in their jurisdiction. Even something as simple as understanding proper modes of address helps smooth the road to adoption through effective communication.

Each of these sets of stakeholders has a role to play in leading your own rollout. We recommend using Microsoft Copilot adoption resources to build out your own adoption plan.

Onboard and engage

At Microsoft, we implemented this phase across each adoption cohort. Because every group will have its own champions and leadership sponsors, it’s important to treat each of them as its own organization, with its own unique adoption needs.

In advance of our general rollout, we created “jump-start” communications with links to learning opportunities:

• Localized training took the form of Power Hours in different languages and time zones. These training sessions demonstrated key Copilot scenarios across Microsoft 365 apps.
• Self-learn assets included user quick-start guides, demo videos, and Microsoft Viva Learning modules to accommodate different learning styles and preferences.

Pre-rollout communications fulfill two needs. First, this messaging is a great opportunity to launch your champion communities. Second, these communications build your employee population’s desire and excitement for their incoming Copilot licenses, then prepare them to hit the ground running when they get access.

After your Copilot licenses are live, your launch-day welcome comms are straightforward. Invite employees to access Copilot and to start experimenting with how it can fit into their work. There are many possible vectors for deploying these communications, but a multi-pronged effort that includes Microsoft Viva Amplify will deliver the maximum impact.

For support in building out your own communication plan, our adoption team has created a user onboarding kit for Copilot. These ready-to-send emails and community posts can help you onboard and engage your users.

Deliver impact

After everyone has access, it’s time to promote Copilot usage and ensure all employees are having the best possible experience and gaining the most value. For Microsoft’s cohorts, employee champions and leadership sponsors were essential levers.

It’s important to remember that Copilot isn’t just another tool. It introduces a whole new way of working within employees’ trusted apps. In Microsoft, we took great care to encourage employees to adapt a mindset to see it as part of their daily work—not just something they play with when there’s time.

Microsoft Viva Engage, or a similar employee communication platform, is a helpful forum for peer community support. In our case, it provided an organic space for champions to share their expertise and change managers to provide further recommendations and adoption content. For employees who explore best on their own, Copilot Lab provides in-the-flow learning opportunities to build their prompt skills.

Meanwhile, leadership sponsors diversified our communications strategy by deploying and amplifying messaging through executive channels like org-wide emails or Viva Engage Leadership Corner posts.

Extend and optimize

Understanding overall usage patterns and impact is crucial to optimizing usage. Our Microsoft Digital team used a combination of controlled feature rollout (CFR) technology while tracking usage through Microsoft 365 Admin Center and the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights. Together, these tools gave us the visibility and tracking we needed to establish and communicate adoption patterns. Meanwhile, IT admins and user experience success managers can access simple in-app feedback through Microsoft 365 Admin Center. But to really maximize value, our Microsoft Digital employee experience teams conducted listening sessions and satisfaction surveys.

All these insights are helping us establish a virtuous cycle to drive further value and better adoption for future rollouts, extend usage to new and high-value scenarios, incorporate Copilot into business process transformation, and understand custom line-of-business opportunities.

Driving user enablement with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Digital used Microsoft Viva to help enable our 300,000+ global users. Microsoft Viva is an Employee Experience Platform that brings together communication and feedback, analytics, goals, and learning in one unified solution. Microsoft Digital used Viva across a range of change management scenarios, including building awareness, communicating with our employees, providing access to readiness and learning resources, and measuring the impact of our deployment.

A few specific ways we used Viva to accelerate employee adoption are shown below.

We’re using Microsoft Viva to power employee adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 365 here at Microsoft.

Learning from Microsoft’s adoption efforts

Cascade adoption efforts through localization
Regional differences, priorities, even time zones can all block your centralization efforts. Your adoption leads in each cohort can help.

Empower your employee champions with trust
Monitor your user-led communities at the start. As this community of power users becomes product experts, they’ll take over.

Encourage employees to innovate
You’ll be surprised by what your employees dream up. Provide every opportunity for them to share their favorite tips and usage scenarios.

Create excitement, but set expectations
Encourage a healthy mindset around what Copilot can accomplish and where it fits. Don’t overpromise.

Gamify learning to build engagement and experience
Friendly competitions or cooperative challenges like prompt-a-thons generate excitement and invite creativity.

Understand that AI is emotional for many
Overcome AI hesitancy by encouraging employees to tackle easy tasks with Copilot assistance. That will help minimize reluctance.

Use Microsoft Viva to accelerate time to value
Viva supports user enablement through learning, effective
communication, usage tracking, and employee sentiment.

Chapter 4: Building a foundation for support

Empowering employees means making sure they have access to the right support channels. The fact that Copilot operates across a wide spectrum of Microsoft 365 apps adds complexity to support scenarios. As a result, it’s important to get your support teams early access along with your earliest pilot implementations. For Microsoft Digital, four principles define high-quality support:

Strategizing for support

Building experience and knowledge is one thing, but coming up with your approach to support requires planning and a strong idea of your users’ ideal experience. At Microsoft Digital, we take a “shift-left” approach. That means we save our human support staff time by attempting to create excellent self-service options for our users.

Shift-left principles can apply to many different support contexts, but with Copilot, we’ve found that the most important upfront action is ensuring your employees have accessible self-service support channels and communicating their availability. Work with your adoption teams to ensure they include self-service support options in their rollout communications.

Seven things we learned while preparing to support Copilot for Microsoft 365

Preliminary access
Select your initial support specialists. Include people with different Microsoft 365 app focuses, support tiers, and service audiences.

Communication hub
Establish a community space where your support team can connect and collaborate on issues. Invite non-support professionals as needed.

Knowledge base
Start a collaborative document and add learnings. This will eventually evolve into your knowledge base for internal support.

Widen access
Host information sessions with the wider support team and extend access so all relevant support professionals can ramp up.

Rehearse
Conduct role-playing and shadowing sessions so support teams can build practical knowledge and confidence.

Support go-live
Get your support resources and processes ready and push them live in advance of your Copilot deployment. Consider a dry run.

Track
Determine a tracking cadence and gather data on Copilot issues that arise so support teams can identify trending issues and tickets.

Common questions, issues, and resolutions

We’re getting questions about why particular employees don’t have licenses.

• Use employee change management communication waves to solve for this issue by alerting employees when they’ll have access to licenses.

Users are coming to us with questions that would be better served by adoption and employee material, and that isn’t our role as support.

• Work with your adoption team to preempt these issues with proactive communications. Update your self-help content and provide your support agents with ready access to different employee education resources.

Teams are looking for integration support. Where do I send them?

• Share this list of pre-built connectors to help your users integrate various data sources to Microsoft Graph. This list shares the types of content supported.

Can employees put confidential information into Copilot?

• If employees are signed into Copilot with their Entra ID, they can enter confidential information.

My organization has concerns about who owns the IP that Copilot generates. Does the Microsoft Customer Copyright Commitment apply to Copilot?

• Microsoft does not own the IP generated by Copilot. Our universal terms state “Microsoft does not own customers’ output content.”

What’s the best way to verify the accuracy of the information Copilot provides?

• Copilot is transparent about where it sources responses. It provides linked citations to these answers so the user can verify further.

Applying Microsoft’s lessons to your own Copilot deployment

Embarking on your Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployment journey might seem daunting, but by capitalizing on the lessons that Microsoft Digital has learned from Microsoft’s internal deployment, you can both speed up the process and avoid any pitfalls. By anchoring your work in careful planning and making use of the steps and resources provided in this guide, you can unleash a new era of productivity through Copilot.

“Deploying Microsoft Copilot internally has inspired us to dive deeper into the power of AI assistance, which is enabling us to enhance our employee experience,” says Claire Sisson, principal group product manager at Microsoft. “With the lessons we learned from our deployment, we’re confident that we can support businesses around the world achieve more through the next generation of intelligent experiences.”

 

You’re not in this alone. If you’re looking for support or knowledge on any aspect of your deployment, reach out to our customer success team.

Learn how to get ready for Copilot for Microsoft 365 at your company.

• Deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 at Microsoft
• Getting the Most Out of Generative AI at Microsoft with Good Governance
• Access the Copilot scenario library to understand different user needs and opportunities.
• Gain insights from the Microsoft Copilot dashboard from Viva Insights
• Take part in user Enablement Strategy training or watch the session on demand.
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 technical readiness guide
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 training content map
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 user experience strategy document

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 Copilot for Microsoft 365 for executives: Sharing our internal deployment and adoption journey at Microsoft 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.

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.

While use of apps for Microsoft Teams can be daunting for IT Teams to implement, due to the oversight of such things as security, compliance, access permissions, connectivity, etc., the benefits of the ecosystem greatly outweigh any perceived challenges.

There’s an endless amount of opportunity for organizations that take full advantage of the apps catalog available in Teams. By integrating with other tools and services, Teams apps can help users by automating routine tasks and manual processes and enabling access to the information and resources they need. This can help reduce distractions and interruptions, allowing users to stay focused on their work and be more productive.

—Mykhailo Sydorchuk, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

I sat down with the Microsoft Digital team responsible for managing the Teams apps ecosystem here at Microsoft to find out what customers should be thinking about when it comes to supporting their organizations. The following summarizes what they had to say about accelerating the deployment and management of apps in Microsoft Teams, what users need to know when evaluating Teams apps, and the lessons we’ve learned as Customer Zero for Microsoft.

“There’s an endless amount of opportunity for organizations that take full advantage of the apps catalog available in Teams,” says Mykhailo Sydorchuk, Teams productivity senior product manager with Microsoft Digital. “By integrating with other tools and services, Teams apps can help users by automating routine tasks and manual processes and enabling access to the information and resources they need. This can help reduce distractions and interruptions, allowing users to stay focused on their work and be more productive.”

How does an organization go about deploying and managing their Teams app ecosystem?

It starts with the Microsoft Teams Admin Center, which allows administrators to customize their Teams app store experience to add company-specific branding and to manage which apps are made available to users. In addition, administrators should consider the following controls for creating a guided experience for users.

Four best practices for administrators to manage how users discover and request apps:

1. Only allow approved apps in the catalog. You want users to know they can trust the apps available to them, so make sure you are only enabling apps that have been reviewed and pre-approved by your compliance team. Additionally, the manage requests function can be utilized by tenant users to request any unapproved/blocked apps, or can redirect user requests to your existing app request process outside of Teams.
2. Use app permissions policies to control which apps are available to users in scenarios where only a subset of company users should have access to a specific app or group of apps. This article provides the steps on how to create an app permissions policy for your organization.
3. Proactively direct users to approved apps for your organization. Use this app setup policies article to help install approved apps for users, so such apps are readily available to them. Additionally, you can utilize auto install approved apps feature for an automatic installation of allowed apps for users who already access these apps on the web.
4. Customize your app store. A branded Teams app store gives users more confidence that its admin team has taken the time to make the experience feel more custom and user-friendly. The customize store location in the Teams admin center allows administrators to select:
   • Organization logo
   • Logomark
   • Background image
   • Text color of organization name
   This article provides more information about customizing your store.

Once administrators have had the chance to set up the above guided experience for their organization’s users. It’s now time for the users to better understand how to best evaluate an app for use. To do this, it’s important to understand a bit about an app’s components and features.

1. 1. Understanding app components: Microsoft Teams apps are composed of one or more components defined in an app manifest. Apps by app features are noted in this article that better helps users understand the permissions of and the information accessed. Before adding an app from the app store, a user can see the access an app will have by looking at the app’s features and permissions section in the About tab (example About tab featured below).

      

   2. Understanding app features: In the image above for example, the app features section references Tabs and Messages, these refer to this third-party apps’ features. The following image includes a breakdown of the various app features descriptions, and refers to the components or experiences included in the app.

      

   3. Evaluating app permissions: This is the most important aspect of app evaluation, as this determines what types of data will be shared with the application. Access to M365 data via Microsoft Graph leverage Azure Active Directory (AD) app registrations, which allows access to other services configured in API permissions in Azure AD.
      Teams data sets can also provide access to data with Resource Specific Consent, which provides scoped access to Teams chats, channels and meetings when specified in the app manifest.
      An application can only access the information described and consent is provided. A global administrator can consent on behalf of an organization. The permissions requested by a Teams app can be reviewed in the Teams admin center (Teams RSC permissions) and the Azure AD Portal (other Graph permissions).

      

   4. Microsoft 365 Certification: This certification is designed to show customers that an app has been vetted against controls derived from leading industry standard frameworks, and that strong security and compliance practices are in place to protect customer data. Users and admins can have confidence that if a third-party app has gone through the certification process that it has underwent strict quality controls, further helping to remove any risks.

   With a general understanding of the components, features, and permissions an app has, and with best practices put in place by the IT team to manage the use of apps, a user can feel confident about adding new apps to their Microsoft Teams ecosystem. In addition, if an app has gone through the Microsoft 365 certification process, that is a further layer of protection that users can trust.

   How do Microsoft Teams users know what apps to add to their ecosystem?

   With the wide-ranging apps available to Teams users, it might be overwhelming to know which ones you want to add. There are many that can help increase a user’s productivity or help with team collaboration. For instance, some of the more popular Teams apps include Microsoft first-party apps like Polls, Whiteboard, Power Automate, Praise and the various Viva modules like Learning, Insights, and Engage. While third-party apps like Adobe Acrobat, Trello and Kahoot! can also help make employees more efficient, create a better learning environment, and greatly add to the overall employee experience.

   Consider the following information and additional resources when it comes to making the most out of the Microsoft Teams apps ecosystem.

   1. It’s important to gain a full understanding of the applications and software being used within an organization and identify any parallels that can be used within the Teams ecosystem. Moving those users into Teams could provide additional efficiencies and methods of collaboration.
   2. Have a predetermined compliance process and enforce it in the App Catalog as early as possible. This will help maintain a sufficient security and privacy posture that is consistent with the org norms.
   3. Teams App Store: Accessed through the left rail on Microsoft Teams, the App Store is the best place for users to acquire and get details on the apps available. It shows the full catalog, and the catalog fully respects the admin policies that have been set-up within each environment by the admin team.
   4. Microsoft AppSource: AppSource is Microsoft’s marketplace for all Microsoft apps (not just Teams apps). You can browse through the extensive collection of apps, sorted by categories and popularity. It provides user ratings, reviews, and detailed descriptions of each app to help you make an informed decision.
   5. Peer Recommendations: Ask colleagues, friends and other professionals who use Microsoft Teams about the apps they find most useful. Their insights and experiences can provide valuable recommendations.
   6. Microsoft communities and forums: the Microsoft Tech Community Teams blog is a great place to keep up-to-date on new apps and Teams features, as well as following Microsoft Teams-related social media channels.
   7. Third-party reviews: Look for external reviews and comparisons of Microsoft Teams apps on tech-related web sites. These reviews can often provide an in-depth analysis, feature comparisons and insights into the usability and functionality of different first and third-party apps.

   From Microsoft first party apps to third party apps, to custom apps built by internal and citizen developers, the breadth that’s at our disposal lends to a richer, more integrated user experience. However, administrators and users should carefully consider the benefits of any app and ensure that it meets their organization’s compliance standards. In addition, M365 certification, least privileged access principle, and data classification labels can also help to remove most risks.

   —Dexion Kornegay, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

   Remember to consider specific needs and requirements when evaluating Teams apps. Consider factors such as functionality, integration capabilities, security, and use purposes. It’s also important to check the compatibility and system requirements for the app to ensure it works seamlessly with your organization’s version of Microsoft Teams. As well as making sure it meets your organization’s compliance standards including security, privacy, accessibility, and licensing requirements.

   

   “From Microsoft first party apps to third party apps, to custom apps built by internal and citizen developers, the breadth that’s at our disposal lends to a richer, more integrated user experience,” says Dexion Kornegay, senior product manager with Microsoft Digital. “However, administrators and users should carefully consider the benefits of any app and ensure that it meets their organization’s compliance standards. In addition, M365 certification, least privileged access principle, and data classification labels can also help to remove most risks.”

   The Teams app ecosystem will continue to play a critical role in helping our employees and customers connect, collaborate, and get the best out of their overall Microsoft Teams experience. It’s up to the IT team to make the experience as seamless and user-friendly as possible. In turn, it’s important for users to explore and experiment with the vast catalog of apps that are available to help them increase productivity, efficiency, and innovation.

3. 

   • Having a well-documented process with transparent controls improves app onboarding for everyone and creates a guided experience for users.
   • Only allow approved apps. At Microsoft, we only enable those apps that have successfully completed governance review process.
   • Disabling user-delegated consent and enabling user consent requests in Azure Active Directory helps IT to minimize the risk of exposing sensitive M365 data through Graph.
   • Reliance on M365 Certification can reduce compliance assessment load.
   • Providing users with a self-service app request process that lists already approved apps in the same category can redirect them for quicker resolution.
   • There are significant resources available to help users better understand what apps will help them improve their productivity, collaboration, and efficiency to work smarter in Microsoft Teams.

   

   • New Microsoft Teams app helps facilitate employee connectivity in a challenging hybrid work environment.
   • Enabling hybrid work internally at Microsoft with ‘digital fabric’ Microsoft Teams.
   • Microsoft Teams increases collaboration in the modern workplace at Microsoft.
   • Five ways Microsoft Teams has transformed Microsoft.

The post Work smarter in Microsoft Teams by leveraging the apps ecosystem appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

• A developer may want HR info, stack overflow, other technical info specific to their organization, or technical info from places like Microsoft Azure and Microsoft.com.
• A salesperson may want HR info, customer information from our account management software and support services, or the latest public information about their customers.

This blog explores the challenge of delivering the full scope of content each employee expects to find in search from their subjective view. This is what we call search completeness.

To start on the journey of getting to search completeness, you first must understand your user community:

• How do they search? Do they use smart phones? Do they use Bing’s Work search tool? Do they use a corporate SharePoint portal? For Microsoft employees, it’s a mix of all of these.
• Why are they searching? Are they trying to find another person? Are they researching content? Are they trying to find reference material?
• What are they searching for? What content is most important for your employees to find?

[Read the first blog in our series, making content more accessible and searches more efficient at Microsoft.]

Understanding your user community

Reviewing search term frequency was one of our early steps in understanding our users. Looking at the number of times each search term was used, then looking at a sampling of those search terms made it very clear that the most common searches are for common employee actions, and that less common searches are typically persona specific. The chart below shows this well: high volume search terms that are common across most employees, and low-volume ones that tend to be org- or persona-specific.

Sometimes we could easily identify desired content from these popular search terms such as search terms related to documents. Microsoft.com and Stack overflow were also fairly popular.

Next, we realized there was a lot of content that was impossible to identify from search terms. We needed some other way of identifying desired content and found a way via Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD).

By using its authentication volume, we are able to see the most popular registered apps within the company. Many of these are included in Microsoft Search by default. SharePoint and OneDrive are good examples. Others have their own search capability that meets user expectations and doesn’t need its content included in enterprise search. Outlook is such an example. This left us with a significant volume of highly used apps whose content would be beneficial to add to enterprise search. The chart below gives you a taste of these results.

Gathering the list of popular apps left us with a challenge of identifying popular content that isn’t defined as an app in AAD. We explored various ways of capturing this information but, so far, have not found any better method than user feedback and surveys.

The result of this work has yielded a “Top 100” list of content we want to add to enterprise search. So how do we go about getting this content added into our search results?

Methods of achieving search completeness

Microsoft Search provides a number of different methods with which to bring in all the content. Each method has its own strengths and weaknesses, which we’ve summarized in the table below.

What we are doing

So now the stage is set, we know the content we want to include, we know the methods available for doing it, we just need to implement the right method in each case.

We also use Microsoft Viva Topics and other product capabilities, which will be discussed in a future blog post.

At this point, search indexing encompasses 70 percent of the AAD Top Apps list as weighted by usage volume. We expect to reach 80 percent within the next year.

• The content added through connectors and federated search is receiving 75,000 clicks per month––about 8 percent of our total click volume.
• These connections have added 10 percent to the admin effort. For more detail, see the previous blog post in this series: Generating great results: Administering search at Microsoft.

We’ve also realized there are occasions where content should not be included in enterprise search but should be included in targeted custom search portals. The same methods described above can typically be used to support such custom portals. Our learning thus far will also be described in a future post.

We see some continuing challenges for which we do not yet have answers:

1. At some point the administrative and resource overhead associated with adding additional sources of content will outweigh the benefit because we will be getting down to very seldom used content. We don’t know where that boundary is yet.
2. We need to figure out how to stay in touch with continuing changes across the company, deprecating content when appropriate while adding new content sources when they come up.
3. We haven’t figured out how to tune search relevance in a manner that works well for each persona.

Please return to this space for future stories in our ongoing series on transforming search completeness here at Microsoft.

• Read the first blog in our series, making content more accessible and searches more efficient at Microsoft.
• Unpack how internal search bookmarks boost productivity at Microsoft.
• Explore generating great results: Administering search at Microsoft.

The post Getting to ‘search completeness’ internally at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, hybrid work is a way of life and it’s how our employees and partners will continue to innovate. With more than 220 thousand full-time employees and 100 thousand vendors across 150 geographies, 24 different time zones, over 580 Microsoft office buildings worldwide, and an abundance of additional remote and home office locations—all of which are using a myriad of technological devices and applications—no one is more immersed in the realities of a phygital or hybrid working world than we are.

And while a flexible, hybrid working environment continues to be a competitive advantage for many companies and their employees, it’s critical that their physical environment and workspace experiences adapt and evolve to meet this new norm.

With so many companies, including Microsoft, operating in a hybrid work world, now is the time to reimagine our meeting room experiences and make sure they are optimal and inclusive for all participants, whether they are in person or remote.

— Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Digital

Hybrid is here to stay but the workplace remains the critical place for collaboration

At Microsoft, we’ve dedicated an entire team of designers, engineers, and researchers comprised of folks from Microsoft Digital (Microsoft’s IT organization), Global Workplace Services (GWS), and the Microsoft Teams product group to think through our new phygital reality and ensure that we’re creating work environments for our employees and customers that make sense now and into the future.

“With so many companies, including Microsoft, operating in a hybrid work world, now is the time to reimagine our meeting room experiences and make sure they are optimal and inclusive for all participants, whether they are in person or remote,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital.

Going forward, we know that it’s imperative that companies ensure that every meeting space is enabled for hybrid work success. With that said, no one understands how daunting, expensive, and time-consuming it is to upgrade spaces more than the team here at Microsoft that’s responsible for solving that challenge. That’s why they’re taking out some of the guesswork for our customers and helping them approach the issue head on. Whether they’re optimizing experiences for new construction or remodeling existing spaces with updated capabilities, the team is focused on helping customers figure out the smartest and most efficient ways to invest in their workspaces.

[Check out our suite of content that shows how we’re using Microsoft Teams Rooms internally at Microsoft.]

The Hive affords us the ability to ‘try-storm’ if you will, which is a combination of brainstorming and rapid prototyping to quickly determine if our ideas will work or not. This helps the team get to resolution faster and ensures that we produce workplace solutions that will be a value-add for our employees straight out of the gate. We’re also helping our customers by removing the guess work for them and providing a significant blueprint to save them time and resources.

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

‘Thinking through making’ to help alleviate much of the guesswork

By now, you’ve probably heard about Microsoft’s on-campus workplace innovation laboratory, The Hive. The Hive is a critical space and the think tank for our team to solve for some of these workspace challenges and opportunities. Companies like Boeing have long used warehouses dedicated to mocking up the interiors of aircraft at full scale to better understand how to solve physical space, engineering, and experience design challenges, and The Hive has become that space for Microsoft.

As a design expert who worked in the aerospace industry, Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager with Microsoft Digital, knows all too well the importance of having a space like The Hive to allow the art of “thinking through making,” a process in which making and thinking alternate back and forth constantly, in rapid iterations, and when the making or designing is taking place intuitively. The Hive provides this necessary playground, allowing for a diverse group of thinkers and doers to share ideas and rapid prototype “what if” concepts, and where these ideas often lead to business-critical outcomes.

“The Hive affords us the ability to ‘try-storm’ if you will, which is a combination of brainstorming and rapid prototyping to quickly determine if our ideas will work or not,” Marzynski says. “This helps the team get to resolution faster and ensures that we produce workplace solutions that will be a value-add for our employees straight out of the gate. We’re also helping our customers by removing the guess work for them and providing a significant blueprint to save them time and resources.”

Creating a holistic experience for all participants

So, what’s been the focus in The Hive as of late? The team there is working on ensuring that Microsoft is creating exceptional workspace experiences that put the phygital at the forefront, and make attending meetings worthwhile for all employees, whether they’re working from the office or remotely. This includes redesigning meeting room spaces to be less table-centric (i.e. the generic, large conference table in the middle of the room that everyone is expected to gather around). This traditional setup is a byproduct of pre-pandemic times when most of the workforce attended in-office meetings and there was little thought put into making these spaces feel inclusive.

But we know that it’s not enough to just improve the in-room layout, it’s also imperative that these spaces are more hybrid-friendly, which means incorporating the right mix of technology, spatial audio, and design elements to create a more holistic and enhanced experience.

“A meeting space should have the same ‘feeling’ as a well-engineered movie theatre experience, where participants do not notice the technology, the audio equipment or acoustics, the furniture or theatre’s design while they are in the space. In fact, it’s not until they walk out of the room that perhaps, subconsciously, they might recognize those things in harmony added to the enjoyment of their experience,” Marzynski says.

And it’s this harmony that the team is looking for in concepts in-progress at The Hive. Where their solutions result in true integration and a sense of inclusion, and where all colleagues, whether they’re physically sitting next to each other in the room, or participating from a remote location, are perceived as equals.

We simply cannot redesign and transform every space into a Signature showcase room with new furniture, new technology, etc. Instead, we are innovating and reducing cost and complexity at scale. With the Teams platform and strategic investments, we can still accomplish a powerful, productive hybrid experience with minimal amount of impact to existing, traditional rooms with boring furniture.

— Sam Albert, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

A great example of some of the workspace solutions to come from The Hive, includes the new Microsoft Teams Rooms Signature Boardroom experience, a reimagined executive boardroom that’s now being used by Microsoft’s senior leadership, including CEO Satya Nadella. This new Boardroom experience provides the best possible scenario for in-person and hybrid, by using a specific layout, furniture and finishes, spatial audio, and the latest Teams technology to create a more immersive experience, taking remote attendees from being merely observers of a meeting to engaged, active participants.

We realize that there are certain high value spaces, like Signature Rooms and Boardrooms, where Microsoft and other companies are willing and able to fully optimize for the best hybrid experience and that these projects will come at a higher cost, specifically in a retrofit scenario versus new construction. By aiming to reduce costs and have the highest impact across an entire workspace portfolio, tradeoffs will need to be made.

“We simply cannot redesign and transform every space into a Signature showcase room with new furniture, new technology, etc. Instead, we are innovating and reducing cost and complexity at scale,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “With the Teams platform and strategic investments, we can still accomplish a powerful, productive hybrid experience with minimal amount of impact to existing, traditional rooms with boring furniture.”

We’re helping Microsoft, and our customers, maximize their real estate portfolios by creating agile spaces that can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively to help make the best use of these large spaces.

— Roy Sherry, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

The cost of getting it right

Companies, especially Fortune 50 enterprises, are spending billions of dollars annually on their real estate footprint, with large meeting rooms and event spaces being among the most expensive to build and operate. That’s why The Hive team is looking to reduce the cost of meeting rooms by up to 75 percent over the next year. One of the ways they aim to do this is by creating more flexible and scalable spaces that can be used for different scenarios.

“All-hands meetings, training sessions, senior leadership gatherings, recognition and culture activities all tend to take place in larger spaces but can have very different needs and requirements,” says Roy Sherry, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “We’re helping Microsoft, and our customers, maximize their real estate portfolios by creating agile spaces that can be deployed quickly and cost-effectively to help make the best use of these large spaces.”

That’s why multi-purpose event rooms are part of The Hive’s next order of business. With these types of large-scale spaces costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars to deploy, it’s critical that they’re optimized with the products and solutions that will provide the most amount of flexibility, that align the physical space with the best digital capabilities, and that will stand the test of time.

For customers wanting to get a more detailed understanding and behind-the-scenes look at the work being done in The Hive, in addition to their customer tours of the space.

The bottom line is that many companies need to start rethinking how their real estate is being used, specifically their workspaces and conference rooms, before millions are wasted. And one of the best, most cost-effective ways to do so is by using the Teams Rooms archetypes and specifications that The Hive has created for Microsoft as Customer Zero. These archetypes are agile and adaptable to customers’ spaces, helping to make real estate and technology investments that are durable and tuned to evolving workplace needs.

Microsoft and the team at The Hive are here to lead the way and help customers get the most out of the new phygital workplace reality, ensuring that conference spaces and meeting room experiences are aligned to these new expectations. By making the best use of Microsoft Teams (digital) and combining it with the right hardware, infrastructure, furniture, audio, and finishes (physical), your workplace will be transformed and at its full potential.

Here are some suggestions for rethinking your physical and digital spaces:

• Embrace the phygital reality: You should aim to seamlessly integrate digital experiences with physical ones to adapt to the new norm of hybrid work. This includes ensuring that every meeting space is enabled for hybrid work success and that the physical environment and workspace experiences evolve to meet the needs of a flexible, hybrid working environment.
• Invest in workspace optimization: Upgrading workspaces to meet the demands of hybrid work can be daunting, expensive, and time-consuming. However, it’s imperative for you to invest in your workspaces in the smartest and most efficient ways, whether that means optimizing experiences for new construction or remodeling existing spaces with updated capabilities.
• Innovate through collaboration: You can benefit from bringing together a diverse group of thinkers and doers, such as designers, engineers, and researchers, to collaborate and solve workspace challenges and opportunities. This can be achieved through the creation of dedicated spaces, such as Microsoft’s on-campus workplace innovation laboratory, The Hive, where ideas can be shared, rapid prototyping can take place, and business-critical outcomes can be achieved through the art of thinking through making.

Here’s where you can go to try Microsoft Teams Rooms for free.

Check out our suite of content that shows how we’re using Microsoft Teams Rooms internally at Microsoft.

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

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The post Working in a phygital world: Why businesses need to rethink their workspace experiences now appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The digitally assisted workday is part of a broader vision for providing the most productive employee experience possible as we continue our digital transformation. To learn more about how Microsoft is achieving this vision, refer to Reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.

Establishing a vision for workday productivity

The digitally assisted workday is rooted in a functional vision—our employees have the unified, highly informed, assisted, and automated experiences that they need to be empowered, productive, innovative, and satisfied. Our vision is to help our employees save time during their day so that they can focus on more critical, complex work responsibilities.

The unified employee experience creates an empowering, productive, and personalized workday with consistent tools and a centralized access hub. Great search experiences enable our employees to find relevant information in whatever context they need it, including proactively delivered information and insights that fit their needs and interests. Personalized assistance and automated task completion provide simple, accessible help for routine tasks and the capabilities to automatically complete those tasks when applicable. We envision all these experiences working together to help Microsoft employees get the most out of their day.

Creating the workday of the future

We’re designing the digitally assisted workday to improve the Microsoft employee’s daily work life. We want our employees to have easy access to important tools, to be informed with an unmatched search experience, and to receive assistance on the go. We’ll provide an automated experience to support employees’ workday, enabling them to focus on high-value tasks and innovation. For example, a typical Microsoft employee’s day might resemble something like this:

• When you’re at home, getting ready, you’re briefed with important information about the day ahead.
• You confirm your morning rideshare trip and reserve your return trip for that evening. You also check your wellness benefit account and submit a receipt for workout equipment that you just purchased.
• While you’re commuting, you check your vacation balance and remind yourself to record your time away for an upcoming vacation. You also check your stock options to determine when your next vesting period occurs.
• On campus, you use an employee-focused app on your mobile device to find the building and meeting room where your meeting is taking place. You also browse the café breakfast menu and place an order.
• While you’re walking to the meeting, you use natural language and voice on your mobile device to find the email that your manager sent that contains the updated budget information. When you enter the meeting room, you transfer the budget attachment content from your mobile device to a wall display for meeting attendees to view.
• While you flag your status as busy during the meeting, interruptions via chat or email are suppressed, and an automated response is sent to your colleague suggesting a time to meet when you are both available. After the meeting is finished, you receive a transcription that includes automatically generated follow-up actions based on the conversation.
• When you’re back at your desk, you submit a company-matched request for a recent charitable donation. As you proceed with your workday, you get assistance in context and find work-related information and answers efficiently through any of the Microsoft 365 channels. You can log or approve expenses, check the latest company news, or look up the date for your upcoming training event, without leaving your current experience.
• As you pack up to go home, you’re briefed on your schedule for the next day. You also get suggested follow-up tasks based on email communication, and recommended breaks and focus time are added to your calendar.

Understanding the workday experience at Microsoft

Enabling employees to quickly find information wherever they are and providing an efficient way for them to complete their planned tasks are significant contributors to employee productivity. Companies—including Microsoft—are focusing on giving their users a unified and coherent experience with improved search capabilities and the ability to act on what they find.

Employees want information to get their work done, and it’s essential that they obtain the right information or next action. Within the Microsoft internal search portal, only 52 percent of searches conducted in 2018 were successful and more than 50 percent of monthly queries were new, creating a complex and diverse search set. Internally, Microsoft has more than 7 petabytes of data. Much of that data contains inconsistent metadata, which has made it difficult to obtain relevant results or connect and aggregate information repositories. Our employees commonly cited the following issues in the past year:

• Fragmented user experience. Microsoft employees use multiple apps and tools every day—to find information, schedule commutes, record time away, find a conference room, manage benefits, and more. These experiences are sometimes disconnected and difficult to use.
• Low-quality search results. The search environment doesn’t account for personalized information or context, and search experiences don’t extend into task completion. Search content is out of date or contains irrelevant material, and it isn’t prioritized or sorted effectively.
• Too much time spent on routine tasks. Users often use multiple tools to complete a task or find what they’re seeking. Employees must switch between interfaces and experiences to perform their work. This increases the time spent on mundane and low-value tasks and reduces the time available for innovative, creative, and high-value work.

Our employees need fluidity and consistency throughout the workday, and it was taking them too long to discover and execute tasks. When employees must stop what they‘re doing to try to find information and execute simple tasks, their productivity decreases. Studies show that it takes 25 minutes to return to the original task after being interrupted. This results in an average 40 percent productivity decline when trying to multitask.

Our employees’ sentiments on their workday environment underscore the need for a more unified, informed, assisted, and automated experience:

“I wish I had one central location to manage my life at Microsoft.”

“My ideal work experience would include fewer manual tasks, like tracking expenses and vacation.”

“At times, it’s hard to make connections with people outside my team.”

“I work with teams across the globe. Scheduling meetings is just so tedious and time consuming. I wish there were a bot that could figure out the best time to meet, taking time zones into account. Then, the bot would follow up with each attendee if they don’t respond within a defined period so that we know if they can attend or not.”

“I would love to use fewer internal tools. That would start me off efficiently, save me enormous amounts of time, and give me a great progress boost.”

“At work, it would be nice if our tools and systems were integrated by using the same back-end data, instead of requiring me to navigate through different portals depending on what I need.”

Transforming the digitally assisted workday

The digitally assisted workday will make resources such as information, people, files, and answers easily discoverable and contextually integrated throughout the employee experience. We want to present highly relevant information to our employees before they even know they need it. We believe that the digitally assisted workday facilitates a significant shift toward increased employee productivity. We want to place our employees in an environment where they can find the key person who can answer the question that no one else can, thus creating person-to-person connections.

We’re enabling our employees to locate the document they need quickly, be informed about an app that will double their productivity, or efficiently accomplish frequent and tedious tasks in context. Microsoft Digital is partnering across the Microsoft 365 portfolio with SharePoint, Bing, OneDrive, Office, Teams, and Cortana to make this vision a reality. The goal is to deliver intelligent, personalized, and interconnected experiences to Microsoft employees and our customers. We’re focusing on three major pillars, as depicted in the following figure.

Unified employee experience

Microsoft MyHub will provide a simple, personalized, and mobile experience for employees to quickly navigate employee life, do what they enjoy, and achieve more. MyHub is an app and web portal that unifies the employee experience. It puts common tasks, including commuting, managing benefits and pay, scheduling dining, navigating our campus, and more within a centralized tool. MyHub enables employees and partners to simplify their lives at Microsoft and be more productive. With MyHub, employees can easily discover task-completion options and then personalize their preferred tasks in a single location. This gives employees quick access to information and tasks that matter to them. The unified experience eliminates the need to access fragmented tools and creates one simple, seamless experience.

We’ve designed MyHub to provide personalized experiences for employees in context. By receiving relevant, curated content, each employee is better connected to the Microsoft company, culture, and mission. With MyHub, we’re providing tools for employees to ensure they make the most of their Microsoft benefits, identify career-development opportunities, obtain training, and more. We’re prioritizing and developing several employee-focused scenarios, including the following:

• Taking time away. I want to be able to quickly check and record my time off for vacation, illness, floating days, jury duty, or bereavement. I want to know what holidays are coming up and quickly note these days on my calendar.
• Staying connected. I want to be aware of company news and events so that I can be a valuable contributor.
• Booking transportation and travel. I want to be able to easily find, book, and manage my shuttle and rideshare trips. I want to easily book and track work travel when I need to take a trip.
• Checking dining options and ordering ahead. I want to be able to find the nearest café, get its menu, receive notifications for my favorite food, and order ahead. I also want to know what food truck options are available on Microsoft campuses.
• Tracking and submitting expenses. I want to be able to quickly submit, find, view, and approve or reject expenses, purchase orders, and invoices.
• Getting walking directions. I want to be able to quickly find directions to people’s offices, meeting rooms, cafés, restrooms, copy rooms, and other points.
• Managing and celebrating employees’ careers. I want to acknowledge significant achievements during my Microsoft career, like work anniversaries or promotions. I want to easily find resources to grow my career, understand and broaden my network, and mentor or be mentored. I want to know what required training I need to complete, and what other training opportunities might be available.
• Booking a meeting or conference room. I want to be able to easily find and book an available conference room in Microsoft buildings at a convenient time and place.
• Viewing pay and stock information. I want to conveniently review my paystub and understand my stock options.
• Managing and inspiring my team. I want to know with a glance what actions I must to take to manage and grow my team, find additional resources, and ensure that team members have what they need to do their best work. By submitting kudos on MyHub, I give colleagues feedback on our collaboration, detail how we’ve built upon each other’s successes, and demonstrate how we can improve together.

Great finding experience

Our goal is to enable our employees to find relevant and accurate information quickly and easily, regardless of the search channel or work context they’re in. Microsoft Search provides consistent and coherent experiences across a broad set of search channels in the company, such as SharePoint, Bing, and Microsoft 365 products. We’ve modernized and upgraded our previous enterprise search experience with Microsoft Search to give our employees the context-based environment they need and provide the most relevant information based on their search activity.

The new search experience is personalized for each user, providing the most relevant results for the user’s role and context. Microsoft Search provides intelligent, user-specific recommendations, enabling them to continue where they left off or letting them connect easily to their co-workers within the enterprise by using intelligent Microsoft Graph technology.

We’re developing Microsoft Search to be a single, simple search experience that spans the entire enterprise. It provides an intelligent search experience that results in a coherent, consistent interface across the apps and devices that our employees use most. Microsoft Search is embedded in Microsoft 365, and it’s designed to fulfill search and knowledge retrieval across the web, collaborative workspaces, personal information, and enterprise knowledge sources. It provides high-performance, relevant search sessions that connect to all experiences by using Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph, and customizations. We’re using Microsoft Search to:

• Build a more consistent and contextual search experience across various search channels that employees use, such as Microsoft SharePoint portals, Office, Outlook, Bing, and Teams search.
• Increase search success for users through advanced analytics and failure insights.
• Provide enhanced people-centric and expert-search capabilities that help employees find experts across our organization.
• Supply increasingly relevant results, enabling employees to be more productive quickly.
• Enable voice and natural language support to enhance the search experience.

Going forward, we will develop more personalized and intelligent experiences for employees that deliver answers and insights directly in search and use natural language to determine user intent. Understanding the user from an activity and network perspective is fundamental to a highly personalized, informed, and connected workday and workplace experience.

Personal assistance and automated task completion

More than 50 percent of our employees’ frequent searches are for getting things done. We want our employees to have the tools that they require to efficiently complete common and tedious tasks. Integrated, in-context experiences will provide our employees well-placed, easily discoverable solutions through automated task completion, such as opening a support ticket or approving an expense report. Natural-language capability in the search experience will provide quick access to answers and potential actions, enabling employees to complete tasks.

The new paradigm for work has moved away from the traditional workday and workspace into an anytime, anywhere model. Microsoft employees move around throughout the day and can’t be tied to their computers or offices to be productive. From their morning commute to navigating buildings, to getting home at the end of the day, our employees now use multiple ways to keep up and get things done. Assisting employees wherever they are allows them to get briefed on their day, get caught up while they’re in motion, and gain insights using a variety of devices.

As the digital-assistant realm expands in the consumer environment, users are beginning to expect that the voice and productivity technology that they use in their homes is available at work. We’re investing in personalized and in-context technologies that empower our employees to focus on what matters most and allow them to get work done efficiently and seamlessly across all roles and environments, within a secure, trusted enterprise experience.

Personal assistance and in-context automated task completion focus on enabling employees to continue working in their current context. We want the natural flow of an employee’s work tasks to continue undisrupted. This means providing digital-assistant capabilities that automate routine tasks through contextualized and personalized interactions across the tools and interfaces that employees use daily.

When employees are using their work tools, personal assistance and automation will be at their fingertips. Employees will no longer need to shift focus to complete mundane tasks. We’re creating an environment where employees can get things done in context and get personalized, intelligent, and connected experiences wherever they are. Employees will receive available meeting times and recommended shuttle reservations if they look up a colleague. Travel booking and expense logging will be available from within the Microsoft Teams experience as employees discuss their planned business trip. Our systems will learn from behavior and suggest and complete tasks on behalf of users.

Providing in-context experiences

In addition to MyHub, we’re also building these capabilities into our most commonly used search tools, MSW, our internal company news and information portal, and Microsoft Search in Bing. We recognize that employees have different interaction preferences, so we’re also using Microsoft Teams and Cortana to provide text-based and voice-based digital assistance to our employees on whatever device they’re using. We’re supplying task completion that fits our employees’ personal needs without taking them away from what they’re doing. Some examples include:

• Microsoft Search in MSW and Bing. Task completion built into search results, including vacation, shuttle, dining, and facilities requests and reservations.
• Microsoft Teams. Task completion built into the Teams interface for shuttle, rideshare, dining, help, facilities, and approval requests.
• Cortana. Self-help instant chat with a support agent, to open a support ticket, schedule office cleaning, or make other requests.

We’re creating a seamless workday experience for our employees, enabling them to get things done quickly and easily. With Microsoft Digital’s vision-led approach and strong collaboration with our core product partners, we’re creating a unified, informed, assisted, and automated digitally assisted workday. In the future, we’ll free up employees’ time to do their most innovative work, continually reducing and eliminating delays that reduce productivity. We’ll make it simple and efficient to find the resources, people, and information that employees need to get their work done or to achieve that next big idea or breakthrough. The digitally assisted workday helps employees get things done by assisting and automating routine task completion so that Microsoft employees can go further, faster.

• Learn how we’re reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft.
• Learn more about our Microsoft Graph.
• Learn more about making content more accessible and searches more efficient at Microsoft.

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