Until now.

To address this challenge, the Microsoft Teams product group worked with Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, to create Microsoft Teams Rooms Express Install for compact meeting spaces. This “room-in-a-box” solution quickly transforms small spaces into versatile, modern collaboration hubs.

And now the product group is working with our commercial partners and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to extend this small meeting room solution to all customers.

Express Install is a modular meeting room solution that requires little to no physical modifications to a room, which makes it more affordable. Installation involves putting lightweight hardware into a room, turning it on, and connecting it to our Teams Room technology that comes baked in.

Optimizing for efficiency

The Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms story began in 2019. That’s when the product group and our team here in Microsoft Digital used The Hive, our 20,000 square-foot innovation lab, to engineer, architect, and design all the variations of our Teams Room product that are now available.

We’re now using this solution extensively across Microsoft, and it has made our small meeting room spaces much more useful to our employees.”

Roy Sherry, principal technical program manager, Microsoft Digital

After tackling high-end executive conference rooms, meeting halls used for all-hands and major company gatherings, and large “workhorse” rooms where typical team meetings are held, it was time to take on the plethora of small rooms at Microsoft. These are the rooms where individuals and small groups of people go to collaborate and do the work that powers the company.

However, the huge number of these types of rooms here at Microsoft (and at other enterprises) often made them too expensive to invest in upgrading.

“We knew we needed to find a way to solve this, to come up with an affordable, modular solution that was easy to install,” says Roy Sherry, a principal, technical program manager for AI-Enabled Meetings in Microsoft Digital. “We worked with the product team to build and test a solution that became Express Install. We’re now using this solution extensively across Microsoft, and it has made our small meeting room spaces much more useful to our employees.”

As Customer Zero for the company, the role for Sherry and the rest of our team is to not only be the first to deploy the technology and services that we sell to customers, but in some cases to help our product teams build them—including these Teams Rooms and our Express Install solution.

We initially installed Express Install 70 times as part of a pilot, and after seeing extremely positive results, we expanded to 700 more rooms across the company. Now our plan is to gradually install it in all of our suitable small rooms.

Bringing the solution to customers via OEMs

After we got Express Install working internally here at Microsoft, we shifted to extending it to our customers.

We wanted to give them the same features and benefits we were seeing here at Microsoft, including:

• OEM availability: Customers can now access Express Install through trusted hardware partners, expanding reach and accessibility.
• One-hour deployment: They can get their small rooms up and running quickly with a streamlined process.
• Enhanced, AI-enabled audio visual (AV) rooms: We’re bringing the full Microsoft Teams experience to Express Install, so even the most budget-conscious organizations can outfit small spaces with the latest meeting technology.

Our partnerships with OEMs have produced a range of Microsoft Teams Rooms products, packages, and systems.

“Our customers are excited about the cost savings. They highlight how many more rooms they can refresh with Express Install.”

Raven Vasquez, senior IT service manager, Microsoft Digital

These designs were created by different OEM partners for a variety of scenarios. So, if a customer has a specific preferred hardware partner, they can work with them to build an Express Install room.

Because the rooms are simpler and easier to build, even organizations with fixed budgets can set up more rooms. That sentiment is reflected in the feedback we get from customers.

“Our customers are excited about the cost savings,” says Raven Vasquez, a senior IT service manager in Microsoft Digital. “They highlight how many more rooms they can refresh with Express Install.”

The Microsoft Teams product group began to work with OEMs who specialized in mounting and furniture solutions. Together, they developed stands and housing kits for Teams Room Express Install, giving customers flexible modular options to create intelligent AV and hybrid meeting experiences.

“If a company moves, they can bring the room with them, because it’s so portable. Nothing sticks to the walls, nothing needs to be ripped apart. That’s how easy it is to deploy and maintain.”

Sarika Kesavan, senior program manager, Microsoft Teams

Customers who have started using Express Install are starting to see some of the same efficiency gains that we saw here at Microsoft, which were significant.

“We saw a 40% savings in our cost and time,” says Sarika Kesavan, a senior program manager in the Microsoft Teams product group whose role includes bringing solutions that the company builds at The Hive to customers.

The big wins were that it could be installed in an hour and it wasn’t necessary to pay general contractors to modify rooms or pull cables through walls.

“If a company moves, they can bring the room with them, because it’s so portable,” Kesavan says. “Nothing sticks to the walls, nothing needs to be ripped apart. That’s how easy it is to deploy and maintain.”

Traditional conference room setups and upgrades often require permits, construction, specialized wiring, and weeks (or more) of disruptions. As a result, we and many customers have been hesitant to deploy advanced meeting technology, especially for small spaces.

With Express Install, that complexity disappears.

Deploying Express Install

Each Express Install kit is pre-engineered for fast delivery and setup, with flexible configurations for different scenarios and OEM devices.

 For smaller rooms, the package typically includes:

• Teams-certified compute device and camera, combined into a single unit for compact spaces
• Modular display or monitor, sized to fit the room
• Integrated microphone and speaker-bar system
• Simplified tabletop or freestanding mounting solution (no wall-mounting required)
• Pre-installed, preconfigured Teams Rooms software

“Express Install reduces the complexity of a traditional room setup while providing the same experience as a typical Teams Room scenario, but at reduced cost,” Kesavan says.

Gaining insights with the monitoring portal

There’s nothing more disruptive than discovering the in-room technology isn’t working just minutes before a meeting. That’s why it’s vital to be able to check whether your Teams Room is online at any time.

“The monitoring optimizes productivity. If I can receive an alert and fix the issue before someone else tries to use the room, we’re all saving time.”

Divya Tiwari, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The Microsoft Teams Pro Management Portal allows you to monitor the compute device and all connected peripherals (such as the display and camera) in a meeting space, giving you full visibility into room status.

Instead of discovering issues only when someone tries to use the room, the portal proactively sends alerts—for example, if a display stops working—so problems can be resolved ahead of time.

“The monitoring optimizes productivity,” says Divya Tiwari, senior product manager within Microsoft Digital. “If I can see the alert and fix the issue before someone else tries to use the room, we’re all saving time.”

The portal also provides insights into room usage and component performance, highlighting underused spaces and helping organizations improve meeting room efficiency.

Accelerating the future of meeting spaces

We launched the initial pilot of Express Install after recognizing a clear gap in the market: organizations needed a smarter, faster way to equip small meeting spaces for collaboration. And we continue to innovate as we roll out this solution to all Microsoft customers.

“As technology evolves and our OEM partners introduce new innovations, our room designs will evolve right alongside them. This ensures that organizations always have access to the most modern, efficient, and intelligent meeting room solutions.”

Roy Sherry, principal, technical program manager AI enabled meetings, Microsoft Digital

The simplified Express Install design gives organizations the power to scale quickly. If our customers have meeting rooms that need to be up and running fast, Express Install offers a cost-effective path to a fully AI-enabled Teams Room. Their AV budget goes further without sacrificing the modern, Copilot-powered experience that elevates every meeting.

“When we began working with OEMs to bring channel partners and AV integrators on board, we started with small rooms,” Kesavan says. “The value and the cost savings are even greater in larger spaces, so our next phase is to develop solutions for medium- to large-room setups.”

This is just the beginning.

Express Install is opening the door to a new era of fast, scalable, AI-powered collaboration, and we’re excited for our customers to see what’s possible.

“As technology evolves and our OEM partners introduce new innovations, our room designs will evolve right alongside them,” Sherry says. “This ensures that organizations always have access to the most modern, efficient, and intelligent meeting room solutions.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms:

• Teams Rooms are for everyone: Express Install makes it easy to deploy interactive, hybrid-friendly features at scale. 
• Explore Express Install options through trusted OEM partners: Review room-in-a-box kits from trusted OEMs to find modular setups that fit your needs.
• Standardize small‑room designs with pre‑engineered kits: Adopt Express Install kits as a repeatable blueprint to scale modern meeting experiences quickly across multiple locations.
• Identify underutilized rooms and optimize space planning: Leverage usage analytics from the Microsoft Teams Pro Management Portal to make data‑driven decisions about which rooms to refresh, repurpose, or scale up or down.
• Plan ahead for larger meeting rooms: As OEM partnerships grow, customers can start planning broader deployments that bring the sar.me simplicity and savings to larger spaces.

Try it out

For a closer look at the solution, visit the Microsoft Teams Rooms experience.  

Related links

• Take a virtual meeting room tour.
• Check out Microsoft Teams Rooms: Express Install video.
• Read more about Express Install on the Microsoft Teams blog.
• Watch Microsoft: The Hive 101 video.
• See how we developed the “room-in-a-box” approach of Express Install.
• Explore Microsoft Teams Rooms devices on the Microsoft Showcase site.
• Read about meeting room guidance for Teams on the Microsoft Learn site.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post A one-hour solution: Scaling Microsoft Teams Rooms in small spaces with Express Install appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Five years ago, as a global pandemic shut down offices and commuting ground to a halt, Microsoft took the opportunity to overhaul the technology underpinning its transportation services. The result was a more modernized and integrated system that employees enjoyed as they resumed work at our Puget Sound-based global headquarters.

“Figuring out their commute should not be a pain point for employees. We’re harnessing our advanced technology and the power of AI to do the heavy lifting, so they don’t have to struggle to figure out how they’ll get to work.”

Garima Gaurav, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Today, with flexible work schedules the norm, the investment in these technologies—including improved UIs for employee-facing tools, better data handling and collection on the backend, and a more seamless experience—has paid dividends in terms of flexibility and efficiency.

As rates of in-office attendance creep up, our Commute Services group can quickly adjust and stay on top of demand, leaving us better positioned to meet our company’s ambitious sustainability goals.

And now, we’re embracing the Microsoft vision of an AI-powered future by adding agentic, predictive capabilities to our commuting tools, which makes booking a shuttle, Connector bus, or other transportation option fast and easy for our workers.

“Figuring out their commute should not be a pain point for employees,” says Garima Gaurav, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “We’re harnessing our advanced technology and the power of AI to do the heavy lifting, so they don’t have to struggle to figure out how they’ll get to work or to a meeting in a different building.”

Upgrading the transportation experience

We’ve always had clear goals for the type of transportation program we wanted to bring to our employees.

“The first thing we think about is the rider experience,” says Esther Christoffersen, a senior manager with Puget Sound Commute Operations. “We want to deliver an experience that is centered around ease, flexibility, and choice. We start with the physical world, the environment that we live and work in, and then we think about the digital world that employees interface with.”

But our technology systems didn’t always make it easy to accomplish those goals. So we undertook the overhaul of our commute tools, implementing a modern UI that was more consistent with other Microsoft workplace applications. At the same time, this work allowed our engineers to transform the back-end management of our transportation system, using Microsoft Azure to give them better visibility and clearer ownership of operating data.

Better data and tools meant empowering riders with mobility features like a trip-planning function, push notifications, real-time ETAs, and live vehicle map tracking for our shuttle and Connector bus services.

“We had to think about what really matters,” Gaurav says. “That meant building something modern, real-time, and fast for riders. But we also wanted operational agility for the Commute Services team.”

Getting there with the help of an AI agent

With the right technology in place, these tools are ready for agentic AI—and it’s here. While they can still use our internal desktop or mobile platforms to book a ride to work or a different campus location, employees can now also opt for the Employee Self-Service (ESS) agent we’ve developed.

Jessie Go, a technical program manager in the Real Estate and Facilities group, emphasizes the fluid, end-to-end experience that this AI agent can provide to commuters.

“If I’m a new employee, I want to know my commute options,” Go says. “I go into ESS and ask, ‘What are my options to get to campus?’ The agent gives me a list of commuter choices, and one is the Connector bus. I then ask it to help me book a Connector; the agent pulls up a booking tool and I schedule my Connector ride. It’s so much simpler.”

“The ESS tool is kind of a one-stop-shop Copilot agent, aimed at helping our people with all of their work tasks.”

Becky West, principal group product manager, Microsoft Digital

ESS not only offers a user-friendly Copilot Chat interface, but also the potential to understand the rider’s transportation history and preferences.

“It allows users to have a more contextual, conversational experience,” says Ram Kuppaswamy, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “They can just say, ‘Book me a connector,’ and the agent can suggest options based on their previous ride history. It also offers one-click booking, which is used in 40% of all bookings today. It saves users a ton of time, and they really love it.”

It’s all part of making routine tasks frictionless and more efficient for Microsoft employees.

“We’re bringing the experience right to where the employees live, in the AI chat interface,” Gaurav says. “This way they can get all the information they need in one place, rather than 10 different places.”

Of course, ESS can do more than just help with transportation needs—it’s been rolled out company-wide, with the ability to answer employee questions and solve problems relating to anything from their benefits to IT issues to dining options.

“The ESS tool is kind of a one-stop-shop Copilot agent, aimed at helping our people with all of their work tasks,” says Becky West, a principal group product manager in Microsoft Digital. “In the Real Estate space, that might be help with booking a shuttle or seeing what’s for lunch in the cafeteria. In other areas, it might be getting assistance with questions about vacation policy, or what’s wrong with their computer.”

Keeping sustainable transportation top-of-mind

At Microsoft, we take sustainability seriously. Our transportation program is a key component of that effort.

“We offer shared transportation to employees to reduce single-occupancy vehicles on the road, and we’re transitioning our fleet to electric vehicles,” Christoffersen says. “It’s part of our corporate commitment to be carbon negative by 2030.”

“Our global headquarters in Redmond is the size of a small city, with transportation services that help employees get to, from, and around our campus. We continuously look at the data so that we balance the rider experience with running an efficient operation.”

Esther Christoffersen, senior manager, Puget Sound Commute Operations

Microsoft provides electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at many Puget Sound campus locations for employee use. We also offer transit passes, guaranteed rides home, and other rideshare options, giving commuters maximum flexibility.

The easier it is to access these services, the more single-occupancy vehicles we can remove from the region’s roads, which means less air pollution and traffic congestion for everyone.

Because Microsoft is one of the largest employers in the state of Washington, these efforts can make a real difference.

“Our global headquarters in Redmond is the size of a small city, with transportation services that help employees get to, from, and around our campus,” Christoffersen says. “We continuously look at the data so that we balance the rider experience with running an efficient operation.”

Looking toward the future

As AI-powered tools like the Employee Self-Service agent get even better and more broadly used across the company, our transportation services will continue to improve. We hope these services will eventually be available in other regions as well.

“The overall goal is to expand the discoverability of commute information to our workers around the globe,” Gaurav says. “So, whether an employee is in Silicon Valley, India, or somewhere else, they will be able to ask the AI tool for transportation options where they are located and get assistance. It’s a work in progress for us.”

Key takeaways

If you are looking to improve the transportation experience for employees at your organization, here are some important things to remember:

• Keep your overarching goals front and center. Ease, flexibility, and choice are the three main principles we focus on when aiming to give our employees a first-class transportation experience, and those principles apply to any employee experience we build in Microsoft Digital.
• Think both physically and digitally. Digitally transforming a real-world service starts with the physical experience; finding the intersection between the physical and the digital creates better outcomes for users.
• Meet riders where they are. At Microsoft, this includes offering mobile, desktop, and agentic interfaces, letting our employees choose what works best for them.
• The better the data, the better your service. Gathering relevant data about demand, usage, and satisfaction allows you to produce insights that lead to improved services.
• Use AI to increase personalization. We’re developing an AI agent that knows more about our employees, which allows for easy customization and seamless, pain-free experiences with commute services.

Try it out

• Learn more about the Employee Self-Service agent.
• Explore Microsoft Azure and sign up for a free account.

Related links

• Learn how we’re enhancing flexible work with AI and Microsoft Places.
• Read about our company commitment to sustainability and the role that AI can play in helping meet our goals.
• Discover how Microsoft is transforming the employee experience in the age of AI.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Making transportation seamless and efficient with the power of data and AI at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Digital stories

The 2020s have been a tumultuous decade for employees globally. Starting with the COVID-19 pandemic that upended workplace norms and expectations in 2020, then quickly followed by the generative AI revolution in 2022, we’re living through a time of unprecedented workplace change. From flexible work to the advent of generative AI tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, forward-looking companies are seizing the moment to accelerate digital transformation like never before, with engaged employees using AI-powered tools to create a sustained competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Employee engagement is a global challenge

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the experts at Gallup saw that employee engagement—defined as the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace—was extremely low. In fact, in 2009 only 12% of employees globally indicated that they were engaged at work. While that number steadily improved over the next 15 years, by 2024 only 21% of employees globally indicated they were engaged in their workplace. (Gallup, 2025)

Interestingly, the numbers are not uniform globally. At one end of the spectrum, in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean, 31% of employees indicate they are engaged in work. At the other end of the spectrum, only 13% of European workers indicate they are engaged. (Gallup, 2025)

No matter where a region falls on this spectrum, it’s not very promising for companies who want to attract, retain, and develop the best employees. Data indicates that engaged employees are one of the best predictors of economic success:

In Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and across all of Microsoft, our goal is to ensure our employees feel engaged at work by providing the digital tools, access to information, and personal connections that enable them to live our culture no matter where they are in the world. 

{Read Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report.}

AI is fundamentally changing the world of work

While flexible work created new challenges for employee engagement, generative AI tools have created unprecedented opportunities to increase employee productivity and positively impact engagement in the workplace.

Each year, the team at Microsoft WorkLab generates a report called the “Work Trends Index.” This annual survey of over 20,000 knowledge workers globally illuminates challenges and opportunities as companies pursue strategies to harness the power of AI in the enterprise.

A few data points from past surveys that are particularly resonant:

Aligned to these insights, digital leaders need to consider three things:

Enterprise AI solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot are optimized to help employees discover enterprise knowledge that was previously hidden in various SharePoint libraries, Teams Channels, and OneDrive for business repositories. Copilot can reason across your entire Microsoft 365 estate instantly to help employees find the information, answers, and connections needed to quickly address business opportunities and challenges.

While employees are starting to actively use generative AI at work, if they don’t have access to a solution that’s grounded and secured in your enterprise data, your confidential or proprietary data could be at risk. This is especially true when you consider that most employees are new to this and may not have the training or knowledge necessary to navigate the risks of AI in the enterprise.

Burned out employees are not engaged employees. AI-powered solutions like Microsoft 365 Copilot make it easy for employees to reason across their Outlook inbox, Teams Channels and Groups, Viva Engage posts and more, to quickly identify the information that’s important to them. While the volume of activity in the enterprise will likely only increase, the ability to manage information more effectively is now in the hands of employees – especially those who are trained to effectively harness AI.

How has Microsoft adapted?

Times of change demand strong vision and action, and Microsoft emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than ever. Reflecting on that success, Microsoft Chief Human Resources Officer Amy Coleman enumerated several reasons. Among them:

• A strong corporate culture that helped to counteract chaos.
• A focus on management excellence.
• An inclusive work environment that enables all employees to thrive.
• And critically—a recognition that the digital employee experience is as important as the in-person experience.

Prior to the pandemic, the digital employee experience wouldn’t have been high on the list of key enablers for many executives. After witnessing the power and flexibility of our digital tools during the pandemic to keep our employees connected, productive, and thriving, it became clear to us that a modernized digital employee experience had to become a key tenet of our workplace strategy.

Formula for success

Right as we found our footing post-pandemic, the next big disruptor landed: generative AI and our industry leading productivity tool, Microsoft 365 Copilot. The digital employee experience, enhanced by the power of AI, is now more important than ever. As we in the company’s IT organization look to the next decade of employee productivity and enterprise growth, our formula for success is simple:

1. Create a physical and digital environment where our employees are engaged, energized, empowered, and invested in their work.
2. Continue to give our employees the very best productivity tools in the world, powered by Microsoft 365 and made exponentially more powerful by AI-powered tools like Copilot.
3. Combining these forces leads to facilitate a high-performance work culture, enabling us to achieve sustainable business outcomes while generating a sustained competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Your company can use the same formula to achieve the same competitive advantage. At Microsoft, we make that vision real by focusing on the three critical dimensions of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces and facilities, and culture.

Focusing on our employee experience

Digital capabilities

We keep employees productive and out environment safe and secure, no matter where employees are or how they connect. AI is defragmenting the employee experience.

Physical spaces

We partner with Global Workplace Services to imagine & deploy capabilities that support an inclusive approach to productivity.

Culture

A strong partnership with HR ensures our digital employee experience enables our aspirational culture, regardless of an employee’s physical location.

Digital capabilities

In Microsoft Digital, our mission is to power, protect and transform the digital employee experience across devices, applications, and infrastructure. Simplifying the employee experience has long been a goal of our team. We want Microsoft employees to be the most engaged, efficient, and productive in the industry.

Our vision is to revolutionize the employee experience at Microsoft, using Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to “defragment” the many tools, websites, and applications Microsoft employees need to interact with to complete their jobs. By using Copilot as our “UI for AI”, Microsoft Digital is using Copilot to:

• Providing contextual support in the flow of work.
• Reducing the number of sites and apps an employee must remember.
• Enabling seamless collaboration globally.

In addition to AI, our team here in Microsoft Digital continues to accelerate collaboration through enhancements to Microsoft Teams and Teams Rooms, enables employee innovation with the Power Platform, and delivers a world-class employee experience powered by Microsoft Viva. Read on to learn how.

Accelerating productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your organization’s data to turn your employees’ words into some of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet—all within the flow of work. It works alongside the Microsoft 365 apps people use every day, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, to provide real-time intelligent assistance.

At Microsoft, we began deploying Copilot to our own employees back in November of 2023, and by March of 2024 all our employees and vendors globally had access, making Microsoft the first enterprise to deploy Copilot at global enterprise scale.

A key lesson we’ve learned is that enterprise AI is a significant cultural and technological change that shouldn’t be underestimated. Consider that knowledge workers have been trained to interact with systems and data using the graphical user interface for over 40 years. The magic of Copilot is that it upends that human-computer interaction paradigm, bringing the power of natural language interaction to employees to find information or answers, to augment their creativity, or to accelerate workflows.

But those skills are new for nearly every employee on the planet, which is why you need to focus on skilling and reinforcement to help employees to maximize the potential value of generative AI in the enterprise. Help your employees to jumpstart their skilling journey by carefully selecting training paths—both virtual and instructor-led—to accelerate their productivity journey with Copilot. Microsoft offers some great free training programs to help your employees build the skills necessary to maximize the value of Copilot. 

In Microsoft Digital, we’ve developed a six-step process for unlocking the value of Microsoft 365 Copilot based on these lessons that you can apply in your own enterprise. Being deliberate as you deploy, understanding employee pain points, measuring the before and after, and focusing on the developing of AI skills, you can accelerate and prove the value of Copilot in your environment, as well as recapture value so you can pursue new business opportunities or challenges.

{Read our guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.}

Empowering our employees with agents and Copilot Studio

In Microsoft Digital, we are embracing our agentic future, where agents will make our employees, as well as the millions of employees who rely on Microsoft 365 globally, more productive every day.

For example, our Employee Self-Service (ESS) agents have already demonstrated the power of agents to simplify and improve the employee experience at Microsoft.

• Using ESS, employees were 36% more likely to solve their own IT support issues.
• Similarly, employees were 42% more likely to answer their own HR questions.
• Employees were 18% more satisfied using ESS to address their issues than traditional support methods.

As we continue our journey with AI-powered agents, we’ve adopted a maturity model for AI deployment in the enterprise. Early phases focus on using Microsoft 365 Copilot, grounded in enterprise data, to enhance knowledge discovery and retrieval. Later phases enable employees to act on that knowledge and even fully automate business workflows.

Phases of maturity

Each step on our agentic journey marks a significant leap forward in capability, with both opportunities and risks for our leaders.

Employee learning and skilling are key to unlocking the value in each phase of agentic maturity.  

• Foundational capabilities. The first and most important step is to deploy a secure, enterprise-ready AI-powered like Copilot for Microsoft 365 that’s grounded in your enterprise data. Becoming accustomed to AI in the enterprise and learning how to prompt AI for effective results is the key to unlocking value in later phases.
• Retrieval agents. Employees use low-code solutions like Copilot Studio Agent Builder or ready-made agents in SharePoint to quickly train models and retrieve knowledge for specialized scenarios.
• Knowledge and actions. Powered by built-in connectors in Copilot Studio, agents go beyond simple knowledge retrieval, offering next steps and actions that help employees to defragment their day-to-day employee experience.
• Workflow reinvention. Human-led, agent operated teams perform fully autonomous actions to complete end-to-end workflows, enabling employees to focus on the highest value work while agents take care of repetitive tasks.

Emerging industry standards and open protocols including Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, and NLWeb are enabling an agentic powered future where human-led, agent operated teams will take employee productivity to new heights.

We’re making progress on each type of agent here at Microsoft:

• Microsoft was the first company in the world to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot at enterprise scale. Every employee at Microsoft now has an AI-powered assistant to enhance their productivity.
• Every employee at Microsoft also has the tools and support to build simple Retrieval agents that are trained using knowledge stored in SharePoint, Teams, or OneDrive for Business.
• Our engineering teams are using Copilot Studio to create Agents that can retrieve information then act on it, using built-in connectors in Copilot Studio to enable actions.
• And with the advent of new industry protocols, we’re just beginning to enable fully autonomous end-to-end workflows powered by Agents.

{Learn how we’re governing our use of agents at Microsoft.}

AI-powered meetings with Microsoft Teams

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

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

{Check out our Microsoft Teams Rooms meeting guide.}

Empowering our citizen developers

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

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

The Microsoft Power Platform—as shown in this companion infographic—is comprised of four distinct capabilities that have made Microsoft more agile and productive than ever before. Each tool is easy to learn and allows your team to accelerate digital transformation from the front lines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fueling innovation.

Microsoft Power BI

A collection of software services, apps and connectors that work together to turn your unrelated data into coherent, visually immersive, and interactive insights.

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualize, and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want.

Microsoft Power Apps

A suite of apps, services, and connectors that provides a rapid development environment to build custom apps for your business needs.

With Power Apps, you can quickly build custom business apps that connect to your data stored either in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or in various online and on-premises data sources (such as SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365. or SQL Server)

Microsoft Power Automate

Enables you to automate business processes quickly and easily, with support for over 500 data sources or using any publicly available API.

Microsoft Virtual Agents

Lets you create powerful chatbots that can answer questions posed by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service.

{Learn how we’re empowering our employees with the Microsoft Power Platform at Microsoft.}

Physical spaces and facilities

Having the best digital experiences means very little if you don’t have the right physical space or hardware to maximize potential for your employees to collaborate when they’re in the office.

For us, Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) and our Microsoft Digital team represent the company’s “front door.” The first impression employees and visitors have when they walk into Microsoft is the physical environment and the technology they interact with, and we want their experience to be amazing.

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

• The lobby check-in experience is literally the first impression an employee or visitor has when they visit a Microsoft facility. Working together, we built an amazing new guest management system, with streamlined check-in and optimized check-out procedures to help employees or visitors quickly get to their next destination.
• Through our Microsoft employee mobile app, we’re enabling several new capabilities in conjunction with GWS, including the ability to order ahead at Microsoft cafeterias, find a parking spot, or book a conference room or workspace.
• With Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT connected devices, we’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft.

None of these capabilities would have been possible without a strong partnership with our real estate colleagues in GWS, supported by a shared vision of our employee experience. By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re laying a foundation for innovation that will help our employees thrive.

{Learn how we’re accelerating our global real estate transformation.}

Culture

When Satya Nadella became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he made lasting and powerful changes to our company culture. Our early culture was extremely competitive, and people often succeeded by showcasing their own individual work and achievements. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft has undergone significant change, starting at the top. He instilled in us that, to stay relevant, we needed to find the courage to change our culture and embrace a growth mindset.

“Achieving our mission requires us to evolve our culture and it all starts with a growth mindset—a passion to learn and bring our best every day to make a bigger difference in the world.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Attributes of our aspirational culture include:

• Embracing learning and curiosity. Instead of being “know-it-alls” we need to be “learn-it-alls.”
• Trying new things and not being afraid to fail.
• Obsessing over what matters to our customers.
• Being diverse and inclusive in everything we do.
• Operating as “One Microsoft”.
• Making a difference in the lives of each other, our customers, and the world around us.

Satya made it clear that our aspire-to culture was key to our future business success, and the ensuing decade was one of the most successful in the history of Microsoft.

But how do you bring culture to life digitally, especially in a global company that has embraced flexible work? The answer was to build an employee experience platform that allowed our employees to live our culture, no matter where they were in the world.

Supercharging our culture with Microsoft Viva

The Microsoft Viva Suite delivers an integrated employee experience platform that empowers people and teams to thrive by bringing together communications, knowledge, learning, goals, and insights directly into the flow of work. Built on Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, Viva helps organizations foster a culture of engagement and performance by providing personalized, data-driven experiences that support employee well-being, growth, and productivity. Viva enables leaders to align business outcomes with employee success, making it a strategic investment in both people and performance.

The various modules and capabilities in the Viva Suite enable Microsoft employees to experience and participate in our culture digitally. Each module supports different dimensions of Microsoft’s “aspire-to” culture, with the Viva Suite collectively serving as the underpinning of our shift to growth mindset.

The Viva Suite is comprised of numerous modules, including:

Viva Connections

Delivers a secure, customizable gateway to internal communications and resources, seamlessly integrated into Microsoft Teams to enhance employee engagement without adding new infrastructure.

Viva Insights

Provides privacy-protected, data-driven insights that help improve productivity and well-being while ensuring compliance with organizational and regulatory standards.

Viva Learning

Centralizes learning content from Microsoft, LinkedIn, and third-party providers into Teams, simplifying deployment and governance of upskilling initiatives.

Viva Amplify

Empowers corporate communicators to manage multi-channel campaigns with analytics and targeting, all within the Microsoft 365 compliance boundary.

Viva Engage

Fosters community and connection through social experiences in Teams, with enterprise-grade compliance and identity management built in.

Viva Pulse

Enables managers to gather real-time team feedback securely, with built-in templates and analytics that respect data privacy and organizational policies.

Each of these tools helps to bring our culture to life while simultaneously providing our employees with best-in-class, AI-enhanced tools that foster and enhance collaboration in the enterprise.

{Learn how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.}

Adopting new employee experiences

An often-overlooked aspect of digital transformation is the need for consistent and principled change managementto ensure your employees realize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In Microsoft Digital, we’ve learned that even the most useful, intuitive technologies will not see widespread adoption and usage without a deliberate and sustained change management effort.

Our Microsoft Digital organization is fortunate to have a global team of change management practitioners to help ensure that our employees benefit from the value of our innovations. We’ve learned that effective change management requires careful planning, and localized change efforts are crucial to maximizing the impact of our digital investments. Our change management efforts take inspiration from the Microsoft 365 Adoption Framework as well as Prosci’s ADKAR model, which progresses through awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement.

As you’re considering your approach to change in this era of AI and flexible work, we suggest reviewing our Copilot deployment and adoption guide, which details our learnings in four chapters with useful checklists and best practices you can apply in your own enterprise. Microsoft also publishes free courseware to develop your skills as a service adoption specialist. This is a great way to develop the skills your team will need to unlock the value of AI—or any other digital investment.

{Learn how we’re driving the future of work: How we’re approaching Microsoft 365 Copilot change management at Microsoft.}

Thriving in an AI-powered world

The world of work has changed dramatically with the advent of flexible work and generative AI.

Flexible work is more than a change in technology—it’s a change in mindset, a change in culture, and a change in the way you think about physical and virtual spaces to enable an inclusive and productive environment for all. The change isn’t easy, but it’s worth it. If you make the time to do it right, your employees will be more engaged, more productive, and more connected, even when they’re oceans apart.

Copilot and agentic AI have the potential to unlock creativity, productivity, and effectiveness like never before. Be bold in embracing AI in the workplace, so your employees have the tools they need to stay ahead of your competition. Focus on skilling and learning to ensure your employees are getting value from AI-powered tools.

The future of work will continue to evolve, and we’ll all learn along the way. As we continue our journey, we’ll keep you updated on our progress and learnings in Microsoft Digital as we continue to define the future of work, powered by AI.

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for transforming your employee experience:

• Focusing on the three critical elements of your employee experience—digital capabilities, facilities, and organizational culture—will enable your enterprise to thrive.
• Empowering “citizen developers” with the Microsoft Power Platform can supercharge enterprise productivity.
• Ensuring effective change management will accelerate value from your investments in AI-powered digital transformation.
• Automating tasks with agents will unlock employee productivity, allowing you to expand operations and take on new challenges.

Try it out

• Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how to customize Microsoft 365 Copilot and to create your own agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Related links

• Learn how we’re digitally transforming Microsoft.
• Check out five key things we learned serving as the company’s IT organization for 50 years.
• Find out more about our Zero Trust security model.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post The future of work is here: Transforming our employee experience with AI appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

And for good reason—The Hive is where we in Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s IT organization, create cutting-edge meeting experiences that get rolled into Microsoft Teams Rooms, our video conferencing product in Microsoft Teams.

Until recently, The Hive has been an internal-facing resource where we, with our partners in Global Workplace Services and the Microsoft Teams Product Group, experimented with ways to improve meeting experiences at Microsoft.

“What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.”

Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

However, as the work-from-home movement took off and customer interest in what we were doing in The Hive exploded, we made the decision to invite customers into our lab.

“Our aim is to create innovative, inclusive hybrid meeting experiences for both our employees here at Microsoft and for our Microsoft Teams Rooms customers,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager on our Microsoft Digital team at the Hive. “What better way to show off what we’re doing than to bring customers into a real, live lab setting.”

To this end, our team has built a new customer experience at The Hive that features live demonstrations that show customers how to visualize how Microsoft Teams Rooms function in different settings.

Magic laboratory tours

Tours at The Hive are kind of like a meeting technology “speed dating” experience. Rather than just presenting a slide deck, we take a hands-on approach, spinning up a meeting (complete with realistic bot attendees) across a variety of spaces so customers can experience different room sizes, technologies, and scenarios in one walk through the facility. We can even invite their remote colleagues in for an additional point of view.

“We bring customers into The Hive, tour them through, and demonstrate how Microsoft creates cutting-edge meeting experiences in hybrid work environments,” Marzynski says. “And then we share our processes and know-how to help them create their own inclusive hybrid work meeting experiences at their companies.”

The tours are so popular that interest far exceeds our team’s capacity. We’ve also built virtual room tours, where you can go online to see how actual Teams Rooms look and feel around our campuses. “It’s kind of like teleporting around a house you’re interested in on a real estate site,” Marzynski says.

Microsoft Teams Rooms are represented as about a dozen different archetypes ranging from a Focus room for four people to an executive boardroom for over 30 people. These function as design references to inspire and unblock customers.

“Internally, we go super-deep with room specifications down to the last cable and screw required in the room,” Marzynski says. “While we do share those, it can be confusing when facing down a hybrid-work transformation challenge. Archetype thinking helps customers get out the weeds and imagine how to scale out a common room experience across a whole real estate portfolio.”

Ultimately, our team is focused on using The Hive to empower our customers to build their own experiences using Teams Rooms and other Microsoft technologies.

Building innovative hybrid meeting experiences

Interacting with external customers at The Hive has allowed us to more deeply understand our customers and their pain points. Understandably, we learned that customers want to create a welcoming, inclusive hybrid work environment while controlling costs.

Microsoft Teams Rooms archetypes

We’re not just working with expensive, experimental, showy new technologies at The Hive. We have three points of view through which we evaluate our work there: Capability, collaboration, and cost.

Capability refers to what people can accomplish in a meeting space with the right technology. Collaboration alludes to how we take advantage of moments that matter to make collective effort in meetings as seamless and productive as possible, and cost translates as ensuring that we’re driving value and recommending the most durable investments in hybrid work experiences.

With these central ideas in mind, The Hive created an entirely reimagined meeting room that we’re now using across the company—the Signature Teams Room.

Signature is the most evolved embodiment of Microsoft Teams Rooms. It’s designed to provide a fully inclusive and collaborative meeting experience for all attendees, whether they’re joining remotely or in-person. It includes specialized furniture, displays, cameras, and audio devices that are arranged in a way that makes it easier for all attendees to engage with each other.

 “It’s where the engineering of the technology and the design of the furniture and physical environment are fully integrated to create the most hybrid-friendly, inclusive experience possible,” Marzynski says.

One of the key features of a Signature Teams Room is a relocated central focal point for meeting attendees.

In a traditionally laid-out meeting room, the focal point of the meeting tends to be the center of a table, as it has been since meetings were invented. Remote participants tend to be off to the side of the room on a monitor, away from this focal point.

“Remote attendees can feel like observers, rather than participants, in a poorly thought-out traditional design,” Marzynski says. “You’re looking through what feels like a security camera, at a room of people that are sitting around a table, often facing away from you. And the in-room experience suffers as well, since everyone is forced to pay a cognitive tax to simultaneously balance two different types of interactions in two different parts of the room.”

By altering the room’s layout and selecting complementing hardware, Signature Teams Rooms have what is called a “circle of inclusion,” which welcomes in remote attendees and places them at natural eye-gaze points. The result is that hybrid meetings feel more organic than in a traditionally designed room, like sitting around a half-digital, half-physical conversation circle.

“Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable.”

Margie Strite, product marketing manager, Microsoft Teams

All Signature Teams Rooms have the following properties:

• In-person and remote attendees face each other
• Camera is at eye level
• Spatial audio can match a person’s voice to their location
• Remote participants have a clear view of everyone in the room

These seemingly small changes have a huge impact on how meetings are experienced.

“Changes, such as shifting the meeting camera to be in between remote and in-person participants, make hybrid meetings more equitable,” says Margie Strite, a product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams. “Employees are more likely to feel included and valued.”

“Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.”

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

Other small shifts, such as including a content camera aimed at an analog whiteboard for meetings or including digital collaboration devices like the Surface Hub, offer ways to increase engagement between in-person and remote participants.

The exact methods used and specifications for each Signature Teams Room built can vary for each customer and are based on their unique scenarios.

“Our solutions are very individualized,” says Matt Hempey, lead principal group product manager on the Digital Workplace Productivity and Collaboration team at The Hive. “Signature Teams Rooms show customers how to optimize their spaces for hybrid work, so all employees have great meetings regardless of where they join from.”

The Hive also concentrates on resourcefulness, deploying meeting rooms that provide excellent hybrid meeting experiences while limiting costs.

Reducing costs while upgrading meeting rooms

The reduction of cost in this work is vital, particularly when building a new meeting room experience can cost as much as building a new house.

“At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible.”

Sam Albert, principal product manager, The Hive

While some organizations might be comfortable spending large amounts of their budget to update and improve meeting rooms, many want to strike a balance between experience and cost-efficiency. This is largely why The Hive focuses on creating individualized solutions with its Signature Teams Rooms.

Most of the time, a lot of energy is put into making the most of what already exists within a room, rather than remodeling everything. There are also new, modular solutions being built within Microsoft.

“At The Hive, we aim to design experiences that are as easy to deploy as possible,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager at The Hive. “We’re introducing new features and innovations with our internal product teams and key industry partners to create a playbook that enhances meeting experiences across all of our room archetypes—while driving down cost and complexity.”

A new low-cost, modular approach to deploying room solutions that our experts designed at The Hive bypasses the usual built-in technology and keeps costs down, even when the technology needs to be updated in the future.

“We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.”

Danielle Chelles-Blair, senior designer, Microsoft Digital

For example, in a large multi-purpose room, this solution features a mobile pod that works with Microsoft Teams Rooms and is equipped with audience-facing cameras, a presenter-tracking camera, and scalable audio. During a meeting room refresh at Microsoft, this modular solution helped cut our cost by 75 percent as compared to how we would traditionally upgrade the same meeting room.

Despite being more cost-effective and less intensive than traditional solutions, the modular solution is still designed to create inclusive hybrid meeting experiences.

“We designed the modular solution so that in-person presenters and remote participants can all view raised hands, the person speaking, and the content being presented,” says Danielle Chelles-Blair, a senior designer in Microsoft Digital. “We wanted employees to feel heard, seen, and valued with this solution.”

In addition to inclusivity and cost savings, for many organizations, the reduced trial-and-error to find effective meeting experience solutions is a marked benefit of turning to The Hive.

“Customers don’t necessarily want to be their own guinea pigs,” Strite says. “The experimentation that The Hive does, and shares insights from, really saves other organizations time, money, and effort spent on finding the best meeting experience solutions.”

Key takeaways

If you’re thinking about getting started with Microsoft Teams Rooms, here are some tips to guide you:

• Plan your deployment. Before you start deploying Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to plan. This includes identifying the rooms where you want to deploy Microsoft Teams Rooms, selecting the right hardware, and ensuring that your network infrastructure is ready for video conferencing.
• Get familiar with the features. Microsoft Teams Rooms comes with a range of features that can help you make the most of your video conferencing experience. Some of these features include one-touch join, proximity detection, and content sharing. It’s important to get familiar with these features so that you can use them effectively during your meetings.
• Ensure that your devices are up-to-date. To ensure that you have the best possible experience with Microsoft Teams Rooms, it’s important to keep your devices up-to-date. This includes updating the firmware on your cameras, displays, and audio devices.
• Train your users. It’s important to train your users on how to use Microsoft Teams Rooms effectively. This includes teaching them how to join meetings, how to share content, and how to troubleshoot common issues.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft Teams Rooms.

Related links

• Go here to see and virtually experience a Signature Teams Room for yourself.
• Read more about signature Microsoft Teams Rooms: A more inclusive and collaborative vision for hybrid meeting rooms.
• Discover how we’re upgrading our small meeting rooms with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Learn how we’re transforming the experience of large hybrid meetings at Microsoft.
• Check out this video interview on deploying signature Microsoft Teams Rooms in our Canadian headquarters.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Buzzing on Microsoft Teams Rooms technology internally at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Currently available to some of our employees as part of a ringed-deployment, Facilitator does the stuff none of us want to do in meetings, including taking and sharing notes in real-time, managing the meeting clock and reminding colleagues to wrap up, tracking your goals for the meeting, including highlighting when key points and decisions are made, and answering questions without interrupting the flow of the meeting.

Facilitator keeps up with your conversation and creates AI-generated notes for everyone within a single workspace. The notes are shown in the full meeting in the meeting notes windowpane, which frees meeting attendees from having to take their own notes and allows attendees to make updates and correct meeting notes in the same meeting notes windowpane. This allows them to stay present, focused, and more productive in meetings.

“It’s one of those rare features that comes along and immediately increases our productivity. Facilitator takes notes for everyone, which allows me to sit back, listen, and be more engaged.”

Chanda Jensen, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

It’s important to note that Facilitator updates your meeting notes as your conversations unfold, and your group’s collective viewpoints change. It uses the AI Notes feature to keep track of the topics, action items, and tasks shared in the conversation (please note that there is a delay in adding new and updated information as the meeting progresses).

The effective result is you no longer need to comb through your notes to see what the outcome was, Facilitator captures it for you.

“It’s one of those rare features that comes along and immediately increases our productivity,” says Chanda Jensen, a senior product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “Facilitator takes notes for everyone, which allows me to sit back, listen, and be more engaged.”

We have deployed Facilitator to some employees internally here at Microsoft and will soon deploy it to the full company. You can learn more about Teams public previews here.

Delivering immediate value

Running late to a meeting? You can ask Copilot what you missed, or you can review Facilitator’s live AI Notes for a quick review and update.

“So many times when we come into a meeting, we’re a little bit late because we’re jumping from meeting to meeting,” says Sara Bush, a principal PM manager and leader of the Microsoft Teams deployment team here in Microsoft Digital. “Now we can use Facilitator to catch up without disrupting anyone.”

Need to catch up on the group chat? You can @Facilitator to get a summary.

Trying to remember a point without writing it down and taking your focus off the meeting? Facilitator has got you covered.

“Facilitator is there to be your champion, to be your collaborator. It’s the part of AI that has the tools and humans working together.”

Lesley Montgomery, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

You can ask a question in your meeting’s group chat, and Facilitator’s answer will be shared with all the meeting participants, or you can open your private Copilot view, and ask a question where you are the only one who sees the response in your private windowpane.

After the meeting is over, Facilitator notes are shared in the post meeting group chat in a Loop Component and via the meet’s Teams Activity icon. If people were assigned work in the meeting, you can go to either location to see what each person was asked to do.

Facilitator has become our employees’ advocate in the room that always keeps track of things for them.

“Facilitator is there to be your champion, to be your collaborator,” says Lesley Montgomery, a principal product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital. “It’s the part of AI that has the tools and humans working together.”

Internal feedback leads to a better product

While they love the new capabilities, our employees wanted to make sure they can still talk securely in meetings.

“We had to show that we were using their meeting data appropriately and that Copilot and Facilitator are secure on our tenant,” Jensen says. “They wanted to know that private chats with Copilot could stay private when needed, and they can.”

Recognizing that there are times when sensitive matters need to be discussed, our team worked with the product engineering team to ensure that controls are available to allow meeting organizers and attendees to turn off Copilot and features like Facilitator when they want privacy in a meeting.

The team continues to receive and adjust to feedback it receives from employees.

“We’re continuously innovating and improving,” Jensen says. “Our users are always asking for more innovative ways to use Teams.”

“It’s amazing the response we’re getting from employees. They feel great about having more real, genuine time to focus on brainstorming, on being creative, on having time to come up with higher-value solutions that can move the company forward.”

Eileen Zhou, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Endless possibilities

The effects of deploying Facilitator are being felt throughout the company as the benefits of employees having higher-caliber meetings are passed upward through the organization in a compounding way.

“It’s amazing the response we’re getting from employees,” says Eileen Zhou, a principal product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital. “They feel great about having more real, genuine time to focus on brainstorming, on being creative, on having time to come up with higher-value solutions that can move the company forward.”

“The possibilities are endless. It’s already changing how we work, and we’ve barely scratched the surface as to what our employees are going to be able to do with this.”

Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

A great way Facilitator helps groups stay on task is by monitoring the meeting time with or without an agenda.

You can tell Facilitator to keep track of time for certain agenda items to keep meetings running efficiently. Facilitator can also send post-meeting tasks directly to the assigned owner(s) that include action items and requested deliverables. Those are just a few of the ways we’re using Facilitator to help employees save time and be more productive.

“The possibilities are endless,” Bush says. “It’s already changing how we work, and we’ve barely scratched the surface as to what our employees are going to be able to do with this.”

Facilitator is one of many new AI-infused capabilities that we’ve gradually been folding into Teams, including Copilot analyze content shared onscreen during meetings. It can answer questions based on the shared content, such as slides, documents, spreadsheets, and websites. It also suggests follow-up questions to keep the conversation going and combines screenshare with transcript and chat data to provide comprehensive answers.

Copilot works well with Facilitator as it focuses on content analysis and follow-up questions, while Facilitator manages real-time meeting dynamics, including notetaking, time management, and goal tracking.

“Copilot works like a personal assistant for users, while Facilitator helps out the whole group,” Jensen says.  

These new features build on the personal AI assistant capabilities we added to Copilot in Teams last year, including the Intelligent Recap feature. These features capture what was said and decided at the end of a meeting, create lists of action items for attendees, answer questions in real time, and provide a transcript and notes. Learn more about what it was like for us to deploy the Intelligent Recap feature here.

We’ve expanded Copilot’s personal AI assistant capabilities a step further—instead of helping one employee at a time, Facilitator serves all the people who attend a meeting together, collaboratively.

“It really can help you stay on task as a group,” Montgomery says. “Traditionally, when people take notes, they take them from their perspective; with Facilitator that’s no longer an issue, as Facilitator doesn’t bring any partialities.”

Deployment journey

We deployed early versions of Facilitator to some of our engineering teams in the summer of 2024, and as they provided feedback, the product group made improvements to the feature. In the fall, we deployed the improved version to 18,000 employees in our Microsoft Elite program.

The Elite program is made up of employees who volunteer to test new products and experiences at Microsoft. They help us in Microsoft Digital serve as the company’s Customer Zero, which refers to how we gather and send employee feedback to the product group. That feedback is then used to make improvements to the experience before shipping it to customers.

We plan to fully roll out Facilitator to all employees and vendors, with a target date of April 30, 2025.

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Facilitator in Teams at your company:

• Enable AI-generated notes: A transcript is required to ensure that AI-generated notes are captured for your meetings and chats. Select the AI notes icon in the chat header or during a meeting.
• Use voice recognition: For meetings that include Microsoft Teams Rooms, turn on voice recognition to ensure speakers are correctly identified in the notes and action items.
• Speak clearly and concisely: Facilitator works best when there is a clear and substantive volume of content. Make sure to speak or chat in supported languages and provide detailed information.
• Collaborate in real-time: Use Facilitator to co-author and collaborate on notes during the meeting. This helps keep everyone on the same page and ensures that important points are captured.
• Review and edit notes: After the meeting, review the AI-generated notes and make any necessary edits.

Try it out

Try out the public preview of Facilitator in Teams.

Related links

• Set up Facilitator in Teams for collaborative AI-generated notes.
• Review frequently asked questions about Facilitator in Teams.
• Get early access to new features in Teams.
• Learn how we’re recapping our meetings at Microsoft with AI and Teams.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Transforming meetings: How we’re using the new Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered Facilitator feature at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Places, now generally available with Teams Premium, is our new AI-powered flexible workplace offering that our internal IT organization, Microsoft Digital, helped build and has been piloting internally at the company as Customer Zero.

Our employees are using Places to ensure that there are spaces available to achieve their purpose for the day, and to understand who might be in the office to help them do it. This means that they can more easily book flexible workspaces, have more meetings in person, and boost their in-person collaboration. Our managers are also using it to optimize where work happens and to get key insights that they can use for long-range planning.

“We believe in flexible work at Microsoft,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Employee Experience. “Places is helping our employees work effectively when and where they choose to work.”

Integrating Microsoft Places into our AI-powered workplaces

According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, more than 70% of employees at companies like ours want flexible remote work options to continue, and 66% of business decision-makers are considering redesigning physical spaces to better accommodate these options.

This shift highlights a growing expectation among employees for flexible work schedules and locations, a trend that’s reshaping traditional workplace norms.

“Flexible work has changed the way many people come to the office and use space. Understanding more about our colleagues’ presence in the flexible workplace is critical to understanding and fostering connection.”

Jason McWreath, director of business programs, Microsoft Digital

Maintaining connection in the flexible work environment can be challenging, however. Employees told us that finding the right days to work in the office and coordinating in-person meeting times were some of the areas that needed improvement.

Remote work can lead to feelings of disconnection among employees, as they miss spontaneous interactions and informal conversations that often happen in a physical office. Microsoft research supports this, indicating that a significant percentage of employees feel isolated and disconnected from their teams, which negatively impacts morale and productivity.

The traditional office setup, where employees had designated desks and predictable schedules, has given way to a more fluid and dynamic environment. This shift has brought about several challenges, including the need for better space management, efficient scheduling, and enhanced collaboration tools.

“Flexible work has changed the way many people come to the office and use space,” says Jason McWreath, director of business programs with Microsoft Digital. “Understanding more about our colleagues’ presence in the flexible workplace is critical to understanding and fostering connection. We want to build tools and strategies to help our employees make decisions about when to come in and where to go. This is about meeting our employees’ needs and the needs of the organization in a flexible environment.”

McWreath understands that the shift to flexible work isn’t a temporary adjustment but a fundamental change. It also demands change for the processes and technology that Microsoft is using to support a productive workplace, wherever that place might be.

Part of that transformation is why we developed and implemented Places, which our team in Microsoft Digital helped build and that we’ve been testing for eight months across the company.

Improving presence and connection with Places

Places is part of the Microsoft 365 suite of solutions, but that isn’t how it began.

Microsoft is a large company, and, like other enterprises, we have challenges and needs that are unique to our culture and organizational dynamics. To solve these challenges and fulfill these needs, we develop internal solutions. Places was initially one of these.

“Places started as a solution to improve the employee experience here at Microsoft,” says Daniel Yuan, a senior product manager at Microsoft Digital. Yuan and his team have been working with Places from the beginning. “We developed the solution that eventually became Places to address the evolving needs of the flexible workplace—we wanted to enhance the experience our employees have when they physically go into work after many employees had shifted to working from home much of the time.”

Today, our employees need to do things like figure out how to get the most from their days in the office. When they go in, they want to know the best way to move from building to building so they can meet up with as many of their colleagues as feasible.

We didn’t get there overnight—our need was huge. We manage 36 million square feet of office space in more than 600 global locations across 110 countries, with a total workforce of more than 200,000 employees. Juggling who was working where was a big task, and we needed a solution that would meet our needs at our scale.

Our internal development team created capabilities such as seeing who will be in the office, booking spaces, and eventually reserving places to work. Scaling these capabilities to meet our room booking and mapping needs involved significant knowledge sharing and collaboration between different teams within Microsoft, and as the functionality grew, so did the opportunity to meld these efforts together, which we did. The result was the creation of Places.

Capturing the value of Places in a flexible workplace

From its beginnings as an internally developed solution, Places has evolved into an AI-powered workplace app designed to support flexible work environments. Places enables more confident decision making about with who, how, and where people want to work. It helps provide context around the flexible work patterns of colleagues’ calendars, enables AI-assisted space booking, and updates people’s locations to share presence with others, fostering connection and collaboration. Here’s a summary of the key things that Places does for our employees from within Microsoft 365 apps they use every day, like Teams and Outlook:

• Workplace presence. Our employees use it to update their status to show that they’re in the office, working remotely, or at another location, providing transparency and improving communication within teams.
• Work plans. Employees use it to share their schedules and, conversely, see who else has shared when they will be in the office, making it easier to plan face-to-face interactions and collaborations.
• Places cards. Employees can see who is coming into the office and adjust their plans accordingly, directly from their Outlook Calendar, enhancing coordination and reducing scheduling conflicts.
• Team guidance. This feature assists managers in setting and communicating office attendance expectations and finding effective work patterns, helping teams balance remote and in-office work.

To find and book the right space for the right work, employees use:

• Places finder. This feature helps users book desks, rooms, or workspaces with additional information like images and floorplans, making it easier to find and reserve the right space for their needs.
• Desk booking. Users can book individual desks for their office days, ensuring that they have a designated workspace when they come into the office.
• Managed booking with Microsoft 365 Copilot. This AI-driven feature manages room or desk bookings, handling changes, updates, and conflicts, streamlining the booking process and reducing administrative overhead.

To manage and understand space utilization, our IT and real estate teams use:

• Auto release. This feature automatically frees up unused rooms and desks for others to reserve, optimizing space usage and reducing wasted resources.
• Space analytics. This functionality provides data on space usage to help track trends and optimize workspace management, enabling organizations to make informed decisions about their office layouts and capacities.

McWreath says there is immense value in our employees being able to see who will be in the office.

“It makes it easier for them to plan in-person meetings and collaborate more effectively,” he says. “Teams can coordinate their schedules and maximize face-to-face interactions, which can be more productive than virtual meetings.”

It’s about empowering our employees to better set up their work plans, whether they’re working in the office, remotely, or a combination of both.

“We value this flexibility at Microsoft, and Places helps us cater to diverse work styles and preferences, promoting inclusivity,” McWreath says.

With features like space booking and seat reservation, Places helps us optimize the use of physical office spaces. Employees can book the rooms and desks that are best suited for their needs, ensuring efficient use of available resources. This is particularly valuable in a work environment where office attendance can vary.

Places integration with Outlook and Teams is particularly helpful.

“This integration ensures that employees can easily access Places features within the tools they already use every day,” McWreath says. “It also enables them to move smoothly between their digital and physical workspace.”

For example, when employees check in at various office spaces, the system updates their presence and makes this information available to their colleagues. For instance, if an employee checks into a physical office location, their presence is updated in real-time in Teams and Outlook. This information is visible to their team members.

“By using the presence information provided by Places, employees can make more informed decisions about when and where to work, enhancing their connection with colleagues and improving overall team dynamics.”

Jason McWreath, director of business programs, Microsoft Digital

Knowing that the employee is in the office, a coworker can schedule an impromptu face-to-face meeting to discuss ongoing projects, which might be more effective than a virtual meeting. Similarly, another employee, who might be working remotely, can decide to visit the office on the same day to collaborate with them in person, fostering a stronger team connection and improving collaboration.

By suggesting nearby colleagues who are also in the office, Places helps facilitate social interactions.

“This can encourage spontaneous coffee breaks or lunch meetings, helping to build stronger interpersonal relationships and a sense of community within the flexible workplace,” McWreath says. “By using the presence information provided by Places, employees can make more informed decisions about when and where to work, enhancing their connection with colleagues and improving overall team dynamics.”

Partnering with the facilities team as Customer Zero

Microsoft Digital is Customer Zero for Microsoft products. We use them first, test them first, and provide feedback that helps our product groups improve Microsoft products for our customers.

The Places product team has worked closely with Microsoft Global Workplace Services, the company’s facilities team, to continually improve and evolve the employee experience using Places. Global Workplace Services manages and enhances the workplace environment at Microsoft, ensuring that it’s safe, efficient, and conducive to productivity.

“Our collaboration with the Places product team has greatly enhanced the efficiency of space usage in our buildings already,” says Mike Messer, director and technical program lead for Microsoft Global Workplace Services.

Messer’s team is using Places to enable more efficient office space usage.

“Flexible work has changed the way many people come to the office and use space,” Messer says. “Places gives us the capability to understand how our physical spaces are being used and make these spaces more discoverable to employees.”

For example, Places allows Microsoft employees to book rooms that are more targeted to the in-person size of the meeting. This helps Messer’s team ensure that the right facilities are available to the right people at the right time.

Messer sees big opportunities for Places at Global Workplace Services in the future.

“The primary use of Places within Global Workplace Services is currently focused on the employee experience,” Messer says. “There’s also huge potential for us to use the analytics provided by Places to complement our existing reporting with richer insights into the usage data around building usage, from conference rooms to meeting spaces and individual desks.”

Considering compliance, security, and governance as Customer Zero

Our journey as Customer Zero means ensuring that compliance, security, and governance are primary considerations from the beginning of any solution we develop or implement. This initiative involves a comprehensive review and adhering to stringent security and privacy standards, including tenant trust and works council approvals. We’ve worked with our Customer Zero users and internal teams to ensure that Places protects employee information while fostering a secure and compliant flexible work environment.

Tenant trust reviews are an essential part of the company’s process to ensure that first-party apps and features are secure, manageable, and compliant before they are deployed on our corporate tenant.

“Works council reviews are an essential part of ensuring that new IT capabilities, including Places, comply with local regulations and protect employee interests. Feedback from works councils has been invaluable for refining Places functionality.”

Daniel Yuan, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The primary goal of tenant trust reviews is to conduct an independent assessment of first-party apps and features from the perspective of a data controller. This helps us ensure that the product is internally manageable and doesn’t pose unnecessary risks to the company in any of the countries where Microsoft operates.

All products are evaluated against the Microsoft Tenant Minimum Bar Standards. This includes checking for compliance with security and privacy standards and ensuring that the product is manageable by tenant administrators. The review process involves several steps:

1. The product team shares details about the features and how they work.
2. The tenant trust team evaluates the product’s security, privacy, and manageability.
3. Feedback is provided to the product team for any necessary enhancements.

By putting apps like Places through the tenant trust review process, we can ensure the product is ready for deployment within Microsoft, with all necessary security, privacy, and manageability measures in place.

Places also went through a works council review, a process applied to all solutions and apps deployed at Microsoft. The works council review process ensures that new features aren’t available to employees in specific countries until the works councils in those countries have granted approval.

“Works council reviews are an essential part of ensuring that new IT capabilities, including Places, comply with local regulations and protect employee interests,” Yuan says. “Feedback from works councils has been invaluable for refining Places functionality.”

Works council reviews ensure that new features in apps respect employee privacy and provide adequate control over their data. Collaboration between the product team and works councils led to the implementation of specific settings in Places that allow users to determine the level of information they want to share – ensuring users always maintain full control over how their location information is shared. The Places product team also added admin controls to turn specific features on or off for certain countries, ensuring compliance with local regulations.

What’s next

We will be expanding the scope of how we use Places internally here at Microsoft, adding more early adopter sites globally, focusing on diverse locations and space constraints.

“Our journey with Places is just beginning. We’re very pleased that we were able to help develop Places, and we’re eager to continue partnering with the product group to make it better and better.”

Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president, Microsoft Employee Experience

As our adoption grows by phases with 20,000 employees in the pilot and 50,000 targeted for early adoption, we expect the insights provided by Places to generate significant benefits for our building usage and occupancy efficiency across Microsoft global office locations.

We’re looking forward to exploring more ways that Places will help our employees modernize the way they connect, make the most of in-office days, and provide an optimized and productive flexible work experience.

“Our journey with Places is just beginning,” D’Hers says. “We’re very pleased that we were able to help develop Places, and we’re eager to continue partnering with the product group to make it better and better.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips on how you can use Microsoft Places to transform your own organization’s approach to flexible work:

• Create intentional connections: Use location insights to help employees plan in-person collaboration and strengthen team bonds.
• Optimize space usage: Leverage occupancy data to make informed decisions about office layouts and resource allocation.
• Empower flexibility: Provide tools that let employees choose when and where to work while maintaining a high level of productivity.
• Enhance the employee experience: Use AI-driven recommendations to simplify schedules and reduce potential friction that comes with hybrid work.
• Plan for the future: Continuously evaluate workplace trends and adapt your strategy to support evolving employee needs.

Try it out

Try Places with a Teams Premium trial.

Related links

• Check out our guide to the deployment and adoption of Microsoft Places.
• Read about how we deployed Places at Microsoft with the help of our works councils.
• Explore how Microsoft Digital serves at Customer Zero for the company in the age of AI.
• Dive into the Microsoft Learn documentation about Places.
• See our Microsoft Places Partner Directory.

We’d like to hear from you!

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

The post Enhancing flexible work with AI: How we’re using Microsoft Places to empower our employees appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

It’s a new era, and even meeting rooms must reinvent themselves.

“In 2024, meeting rooms are reinterviewing for their jobs,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager for Microsoft Digital, our IT organization here at Microsoft.

And just like any job candidate, a meeting room must now demonstrate its adaptability, technological proficiency, and ability to foster collaboration in the modern work environment, says Marzynski. He’s part of the team at The Hive, our meeting room incubation lab, where we invent the way modern meeting and collaboration feels.

Our journey of reinterviewing our Microsoft Teams-based meeting rooms is more than just a metaphor—it’s a crucial step toward creating workspaces that flex, adjust, and adapt to meet the demands of today’s world.

As is the case with most large companies, our shift to remote work happened suddenly with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic, of course, upended the way the work world operates, thinks, and interacts. Its impact on our company culture, infrastructure, and processes has been long-lasting.

Before the pandemic, meeting rooms were primarily used for in-person gatherings, with virtual participation as an afterthought. Now that we’re deep into the era of flexible work, powered by our Microsoft Teams Rooms platform, we understand that remote participants are equally important and should be treated as such. When we work in a culture that emphasizes freedom of location, technology shouldn’t limit that choice.

Small shifts weren’t enough

At Microsoft, we’ve already made improvements to smaller rooms and executive boardrooms, adding high-quality speakers and intelligent cameras that pan, tilt, and zoom automatically. We’ve also transformed our meeting spaces digitally and evolved the physical layout of our meeting rooms to better accommodate hybrid meetings and to promote collaboration. This includes more welcoming seating layouts, interactive displays, and top-tier acoustics, ensuring all participants, in-person or remote, have a good experience.

Our biggest challenge yet has been creating a top-notch remote experience for our very large spaces. Picture the kind of venues that host all-staff meetings, events, and large-scale training sessions. Historically, such gatherings—those with dozens or even a hundred people in the room and the same number online—haven’t given remote attendees a good experience, primarily because they weren’t designed with remote employees in mind. They tend to show only the presenter and leave out important context.

“If you’re a remote participant, the only thing you see is a really small window where there’s a presenter somewhere in the front,” says Sam Albert, product manager for the Digital Workplace and Meeting Experiences team at Microsoft Digital. “The presenter looks about two inches tall, and you can’t tell anything. You feel like you’re on a bad public broadcast channel.”

It’s difficult for presenters as well.

“Getting the feel of the entire digital and physical audience, getting the combined energy of the venue, that doesn’t really happen well in these spaces,” Marzynski says.

Compounding the challenge, the people in the room don’t have a sense of what’s going on online, and online participants aren’t able to interact with either the people in the room or their fellow remote participants.

Identifying problems like these is one thing; devising solutions is quite another. That’s what The Hive is for—it’s a laboratory for dreaming up new ideas and bringing them to fruition.

Addressing the complexities of large gatherings

When the team at The Hive took on the large spaces challenge, they quickly realized that layering on minor fixes wouldn’t do. A venue is not simply a scaled-up conference room because the dynamics of participation are different. Big, bold solutions were needed that required reexamining, reimagining, and redesigning both how Microsoft adapts existing tech and builds it fresh.

Unique challenges

Since 2020, Microsoft has been refreshing and retrofitting its 13,000-plus meeting rooms worldwide, equipping them with advanced new cameras, improved audio, and front-of-room screens. Of these, only around 400 are venues, or as we call them at Microsoft, multipurpose rooms.

But, as Marzynski puts it, “They’re an important 400 to get right, because of the number of impressions an event generates plus the stakes involved. When something goes wrong, you can’t just move to another space.”

As The Hive team invented solutions for such rooms, they identified several unique challenges, including scale, cost, inclusion, and the technology itself.

Technological complexities

Our team at The Hive has had many direct engagements with our customers. And just like Microsoft, they’re evaluating their real-estate footprints and squeezing more value out of their square footage. They are also ”re-interviewing” some of these expensive and dedicated venues to ensure a fit for purpose.

This common opportunity led to one of our team’s first technical hurdles: figuring out how to build video and audio for spaces that weren’t designed for hybrid meetings and weren’t built with AV capability from the ground up. Success would mean bringing better group experiences, at a lower cost, to more employees.

“Even before COVID, it was a challenge to build any kind of AV hybrid experience, because these big rooms are just very complicated,” Albert says. “They require a lot of planning and expensive equipment.”

Marzynski cites the inherent flexibility needed for large spaces.

“You might set it up differently depending on the event,” he says. “You might have worktables. You might have desks like in a classroom, or you might have a banquet style with clusters of tables.”

Our team hypothesized that there were three things they had to address: the entire audience’s relation to content, the remote and physical audience’s relationship with each other, and the presenter’s relationship with both groups.

“Rather than inheriting a physical space and working our way in, we asked, ‘What if we separate these three streams? What do each of these stakeholder groups need?’” Marzynski says. “Then we took that and said, ‘All right, now what technology do we need to make that happen?’”

Marzynski says that from there, the team built a prototype without a room in mind, “out in open air. We tested it. We prototyped it. We broke it to make sure that it was working. And then we asked ourselves, ‘Can we build a room around this? And does it have to be a specific room, or can it be kind of a range of spaces? Can it be flexible? Can it adapt? And importantly, ‘How much will it cost?’”

Balancing cost and scale

Imagine a venue: a spacious training room, or a group of modular rooms that can be doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled in size. Because they’re large and designed for a high degree of flexibility, equipping such enormous spaces properly is expensive, mostly because of the custom technology required. They’re among the most expensive square footage that an office building can have, they cost a lot to operate, and they generate the highest percentage of service tickets in our AV estate.

The Hive’s success with hybrid-enabling and value-engineering smaller meeting rooms, and the positive feedback they received, buoyed their enthusiasm for their attempt to solve large spaces.

The smaller conference rooms were one thing, but costs are higher for large venues with the extra technology needed to support them.

“Everything we do, scale is at the forefront of our strategy,” Albert says. “It’s one thing to come up with a really creative and awesome experience within The Hive. But if it can’t live outside of The Hive with one of our specialty experts operating it, then it’s dead on arrival.”

Customer Zero: Iterating through feedback

To redesign venues, The Hive team used its lab to stress-test AI-driven presenter cameras, dedicated displays for remote attendees, a dedicated camera to capture the live audience, and enhanced Microsoft Teams features, among other tech.

After they had a working prototype, they were able to try it out internally with real events and get feedback via our Customer Zero program, in which we test and improve our own tech to help make our products better and more engaging. This allows us to offer our customers the best product we can.

“We brought our very rough early prototype into one of our all-hands meetings. It went reasonably well, Marzynski says. “It was a friendly audience, and we got some fantastic feedback.”

They put that feedback into action and prepared to show off new features at the following all-hands. It wasn’t quite smooth sailing.

“We did a dozen or so test events and many of them went well, but a couple were awful. We attempted to integrate some new technology into the older, existing AV and it just failed. Mic feedback, people couldn’t hear each other, that kind of stuff. Everyone was frustrated.”

But that’s all part of the innovation process.

“The feedback we received was blunt but actually encouraging. Our test users saw the potential and were cheering us on,” Marzynski says. “It was ‘Let’s keep making this better.’ So we kept testing it over and over again and it actually helped us make some important design choices.”

At every stage, the team sat down with their Microsoft Digital colleagues to refine their approach.

“We had workshops with our design teams,” Albert says. “We met with our research teams. We interviewed instructors and presenters who do Azure trainings every day. We talked to participants. That gave us a chance to really understand and dig deep into a lot of the challenges that are faced by people who are using these spaces.”

Designing for an equitable experience

The feedback from their Microsoft Digital colleagues underscored one unequivocal principle: Anything The Hive team developed had to be inclusive, equitable, and accessible to both in-person and remote employees.

Why?

Doing so creates an even playing field. It builds company culture. It’s empowering. It’s collaborative. It’s also good for business: When remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage to their in-person peers, everyone feels more invested in the discussion and outcomes.

Meetings that are natural and engaging help everyone feel like they’re in the same room.

“They’re part of the discussion and they’re not ignored,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for hybrid meetings and workplace productivity at Microsoft Digital. “The larger the space, the harder it is to make everyone feel included. We added multiple cameras so remote employees can see the dynamic of the room.”

It’s about making remote attendees feel fully included. “They can be avatars,” Sherry says. “They can be themselves. Whatever makes them comfortable.”

The important thing is that their cameras show them on the participant display.

“That reminds people in the room that many of the attendees are remote,” Sherry says. “It improves the experience for both, and remote employees are less likely to be forgotten.”

That said, there’s no doubt that the experiences will never be exactly the same for those in the room and those calling in remotely.

“There’s a certain energy that we’re not able to—or even trying to—replicate for remote participants,” Albert says. “We’re not trying to make it equal, really. We’re trying to make it the best it can be for each group.”

Taking advantage of internal and external insights

As Customer Zero, Microsoft provides The Hive with a fertile environment for a virtuous circle of improvements and feedback. The team has been working closely with different product groups to drive new features and priorities, which they pour back into subsequent improvements.

For example, The Hive team has partnered with our Continuous Learning team that, owing to its numerous trainings, are heavy users of larger venues.

And externally, they’ve involved a few trusted customers to help them get even more actionable feedback, adding to the iterative cycle.

“We have conversations with customers and event planners to try to make sure we’re not leaving any big holes in our experience and capabilities,” Albert says. “We’re now trying to cover all these different scenarios that we might not have been expecting when we were originally designing the space.”

The team anticipates getting a manufacturing partner involved and piloting a handful of solutions with different partners in the US, India, and Asia. The key going forward is making the tech for these large spaces modular by design, so they’re easier and quicker to install—and easier to support.

Lessening the complexity is a key concern. Initially, installing the large venue solution that they built took 30 days and a lot of technical work. But working closely with the installers to streamline the process has cut time that down considerably.  

“We’re not ripping out walls. We’re not asking people to stand on tall ladders to change projectors and ceiling mics. We’re not running cables to server rooms,” Albert says. “We’re using very simplistic AV designs that still provide all the experiences of enabling a team’s hybrid event.”

Our new large venue solution has had another major benefit—it has substantially reduced our operating costs. “In our pilot, we’re seeing our cost of deploying these large rooms go down by more than 50 percent,” Sherry says.

The reason is the new solution is so much simpler than the old one.

“We’re saving money because we need fewer AV devices and because our install time is significantly reduced,” Sherry says. “A room that took 30 days to deploy can now be deployed in 2 days.” 

In addition, we anticipate that our total cost of ownership will go down over time because our room designs are easier to support and manage.

Building on success

As The Hive team continues to gather feedback and address the many complex aspects of creating hybrid capabilities in venues, they’re focused on solutions that please every participant, whether in person or remote, and keeping the barriers for entry, such as cost, as low as possible. 

Their work has netted what they call “drop-in” solutions, which are less complex technology lifts that can be quickly deployed in existing spaces without a lot of infrastructure investment. Such spaces receive an upgraded technology kit that includes projectors and audience-framing cameras, among other goodies.

Albert reports that customers who have visited the demo at The Hive have shown great interest in piloting venue solutions in their own spaces. Working with the tech that The Hive team has created lowers the barriers that customers face in testing and discovering new solutions on their own and burnishes Microsoft Digital’s reputation as an IT innovation center.

Our work to reinvent our large multipurpose venues has just begun and will continue. So far, these ultra-important rooms are absolutely acing reinterviewing for their jobs. 

Here are some tips on how you can improve your large meeting experience at your company:

• To meet your business needs in a flexible-work world, rethink your employee experience across all digital capabilities and physical spaces.
• Historically, venue spaces haven’t given remote attendees an equal experience compared to those in the room physically, but doing so benefits all parties and is good for business: Hybrid multipurpose venues boost inclusivity, productivity, and accessibility for both in-person and remote attendees.
• Venues aren’t just scaled-up meeting rooms. The dynamics of large, hybrid events demand a different AV engineering approach.
• You positively impact your company culture when remote participants aren’t at a disadvantage compared to their in-person peers because everyone feels more invested in the discussion and the meeting’s outcomes.
• Companies spend a lot of money on real estate, but the priority needs to be on creating value without having to structurally redesign; that’s how you get maximum impact with minimum effort.

Try Microsoft Teams Rooms.

• Learn how we’re designing a new hybrid meeting experience for everyone.
• Explore the development of Microsoft Teams Rooms technology.
• Explore how we collaborate at Microsoft today using Microsoft Teams and AI.

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

The post How we’re transforming large meetings at Microsoft in the age of flexible work appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In this Inside Track Spotlight video, we dive into how our leaders are using Microsoft Viva to improve the way our employees engage and communicate.

Watch as Poly Palaiogeorgou, director of business programs in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, interviews Kristina Tikhonova, general manager of sales and marketing in Southeast Europe, on how teams in her region use Viva.

Tikhonova says that the Microsoft Viva platform is valuable because it enhances the communication of the very diverse workforce in her region.

Tikhonova talks about Viva Insights, Viva Connections and Viva Learning as helpful tools for dealing with difficulties in her daily working life. She describes Viva Connections as her ‘real copilot’ and appreciates its personalized style and ability to connect her to all the tools she needs.

Tikhonova also mentions how Viva Insights, with data-driven insights, helps her use data to understand her interactions and the well-being of her team. It also assists her optimize how she manages her time and communications within her team.

She also refers to Viva Engage as a module designed to help communicate more effectively with employees and appreciates its ability to handle all aspects of communication in one place.

“We use Viva to bring people with different cultural backgrounds together,” she says, explaining that Microsoft Viva Engage is particularly helpful. “Viva Engage is very different in terms of communications because, unlike email or Teams, you can do everything in one place. It connects me to all the tools I need.”

Viva Engage has streamlined the communication processes for her team, and as a bonus, it has fostered higher levels of employee engagement.

In the end, Tikhonova believes that leadership modeling is key for the technology adoption aspect of employee engagement within an organization.

“If you’d like your company, your leadership team, your people to use certain technology, whether it’s Viva or something else, I think the best way is just to model it for them and to use it yourself,” she says.

Try Microsoft Viva at your company.

• Discover how we’re transforming employee engagement with Microsoft Viva Engage.
• Learn how we deployed Viva Engage at Microsoft as Customer Zero.
• Unpack evolving the Microsoft culture with Microsoft Viva.

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

The post Enabling collaboration at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5T8LdrWaank.

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

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

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

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

A fix was needed, and quickly.

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

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

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

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

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

— Greg Baribault, group product manager, Microsoft Teams

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

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

Getting technical

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

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

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

— Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

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

The video wall is an ultra-wide display, measuring nearly 12 feet by 5.5 feet. Remote participants appear life-size, as if they’re sitting opposite the in-person participants. This is important to make the boardroom experience equitable and inclusive for all participants, whether remote or in-person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading the room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creating the boardroom

Building the Signature boardroom experience was challenging.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting to success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Discover how Microsoft uses Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Read about how we’re deploying Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms and generative AI at the new Microsoft Canada headquarters.
• Explore why we’re buzzing about Microsoft Teams Rooms technology at Microsoft.

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

The post Transforming the executive boardroom meeting experience at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams Rooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

—Chris Owen, Microsoft Viva program manager, Human Resources

Keeping connected in the modern work world

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

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

—Melissa Cafiero, communications and readiness lead, Microsoft Digital

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

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

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

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

Building a strategy for success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building groundswell for Microsoft Viva Engage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A roadmap for adoption success

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

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

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

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

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

• Learn how Viva Amplify and Viva Engage are transforming internal communications at Microsoft.
• See how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday.
• Find out how we’re boosting employee engagement at Microsoft with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

The post Transforming employee engagement at Microsoft with Microsoft Viva Engage 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 flexible 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 our 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.

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.

Learn how to set up avatars for your organization, and how to join a meeting with an avatar.

• Check out the Microsoft Mesh website.
• Read our blog post about how Avatars for Microsoft Teams is transforming the ways teams come together.
• Discover how we collaborate today at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams and AI.

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

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

In the most recent episode of our Inside Track “Spotlight” video series, Microsoft Inside Track leader Keith Boyd talks to Claire Sisson, a principal group program manager in Microsoft Digital, as well as Sara Bush, a principal program manager and member of her team, about the different ways that Microsoft Teams is digitally transforming the employee experience at Microsoft.

In the video, you’ll discover how Microsoft Teams is more than platform for video-based meetings—it’s Microsoft’s “digital fabric.” Teams enables our employees to collaborate seamlessly, regardless of where they are. You’ll also learn about Microsoft Teams Premium and Microsoft Teams Mesh, get some tips for more effective and inclusive hybrid meetings, and learn about some of the features in Teams that you perhaps weren’t aware of but will be glad you discovered, thanks to some helpful tips from Claire and Sara.

• Read about how Microsoft Teams has transformed the way we work at Microsoft.
• Explore the ways that Microsoft Digital improves its own employee experience—and yours—as Customer Zero.
• Here are some tips for driving inclusive and effective meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.

The post Enabling hybrid work internally at Microsoft with ‘digital fabric’ Microsoft Teams appeared first on Inside Track Blog.