If you’re on a sales team, you know that there are all kinds of distracting tasks that eat away at your time and get in the way of what you do best—building relationships with and solving problems for customers.

There’s no doubt that modern salespeople need to rely on too many tools and services to get their jobs done. We in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, see firsthand the stress this puts on our sales teams.

“We wanted to alleviate as much of that pain as we could,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “We realized that the AI and automation that comes baked into Copilot for Sales could make the lives of our sellers much better.”

Microsoft is Customer Zero for our own products, which means we typically try them first, put them through their paces, and send our feedback to the product group. Usage has steadily increased since we adopted Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales internally.

“We’ve had a great Customer Zero experience with Copilot for Sales,” D’Hers says. “We’ve been very pleased with how much it has simplified the lives of our sellers and enabled them to focus more on selling.”

{Check out our full content suite on how we use Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva. Learn about our journey as the company’s Customer Zero.}

Unlocking human potential with AI and automation

It’s hard to overstate how complicated selling is—there seems to be no end to the countless small tasks that sellers need to accomplish to keep their day-to-day moving. From managing communications to pulling in relevant stakeholders to inputting information into customer relationship management (CRM) software, sales professionals are constantly allocating and reallocating their attention across different apps and work modes.

During internal simplification research at Microsoft, we discovered that our sellers were using as many as 40 tools per day. Flipping back and forth between those different workspaces results in a lot of wasted time.

“Sixty-eight percent of sellers’ time gets spent on critical but tedious sales tasks,” says Cory Newton-Smith, head of product management for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. “If we can identify what they’re doing in this non-selling space and recover time from that, they can spend more of their day where humans excel.”

We wanted to design a way for salespeople to keep essential tasks within the flow of work, then introduce powerful features to speed up their efforts. It’s especially important to minimize the time they spend in CRM programs like Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. Although those solutions are essential to modern sales and contain many powerful features, they add steps into a seller’s workflow.

“You have the CRM space and then you have the productivity space,” says Smita Shrivastava, product strategy and growth lead for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. “Sellers mostly work in Microsoft Outlook and Teams, so juggling apps to work within the CRM is a constant drain on productivity.”

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales maximizes sales teams’ productivity with AI-assisted content creation and meeting summaries across Microsoft 365 apps. It seamlessly connects data to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRMs from the apps where salespeople get their work done—within Microsoft Outlook and Teams.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales saves sellers time through three main functionalities:

• Automating and simplifying tasks with AI-generated emails, meeting summaries, data collection, and data entry
• Getting actionable insights in the flow of work by bringing together data from Microsoft 365 apps and CRM systems
• Maintaining momentum with AI-powered analytics that provide recommendations and reminders

“It’s really all about seller productivity,” says Peter Macy, technical specialist within our SaaS organization and pilot program participant for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. “It helps maintain that focus and streamlines your work so you don’t have to jump back and forth and lose attention.”

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

To deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales thoughtfully internally here at Microsoft, we engaged our team of change management professionals, product specialists, and internal early adopters to make sure the tool landed just right. Fortunately, we’ve built out a robust deployment and adoption framework that we’ve iterated over several large-scale product rollouts.

“We have a repeatable process for landing changes,” says Alexandra Jones, senior business program and change manager in Microsoft Digital. “We can take advantage of a framework that’s already in place, including local adoption teams in each subsidiary and well-structured pilot programs.”

Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

We built a five-step plan to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales to around 60,000 employees worldwide.

01

Build a change management plan

02

Provide landing toolkit

03

Build a change management plan

04

Build a change management plan

05

Build a change management plan

We’ve developed a tried and tested method for deployment that was instrumental in our Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales deployment.

Through conversations with salespeople across Microsoft, our change management team focused on identifying how the tool would interact with different roles, then built communications around value propositions for each of those use cases. That helped produce readiness toolkits that demonstrated Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales’ value.

From there, it was time to begin a phased deployment—starting with a pilot. Generative AI drove a lot of uptake thanks to its popularity in the public imagination.

“The second I put out a post asking who wanted to be involved in a pilot, I had virtual hands up all over the world,” Jones says.

Real-world usage by our early adopters in the pilot helped guide our wider deployment of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales. One thing we determined was that as a companion app designed to function intuitively, the training burden for Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales was much lower than for standalone programs. As a result, change managers simply dropped into existing monthly team trainings and town halls to get the message out.

The value of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales was immediately apparent. That helped drive adoption across Microsoft.

“The moment sellers launch Copilot for Sales, they see CRM data infused into emails and Teams conversations,” Shrivastava says. “They can see the power of Copilot for Sales very quickly.”

Clearly, Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales has struck a chord with our sellers. Since general availability in October 2022, we deployed it to nearly all of the company.

We have since moved on to listening and gathering customer feedback. That feedback helps inform both our future deployment efforts and the month-over-month rollouts for new Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales features. In the meantime, sellers are saving time every day.

Putting time back in salespeople’s days

For sellers like Macy, the most substantial benefit of Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales is the newfound efficiency that comes from automation. It’s the result of powerful features like the sales pane in Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 Copilot responses, and automated data connections that pull information out of CRMs and prompt you to input new contacts and opportunities.

Research has shown that sellers spend upwards of 60 percent of their time managing their inbox. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales helps lighten some of this burden through AI-generated email summaries and responses. According to Macy, this tool can help sellers recapture 20% to 30% of their time.

But it’s more than just time savings. Those Copilot features help sellers reclaim cognitive space that’s better spent on building relationships.

“What I find is that it frees you up to be present in the conversation,” Macy says. “There’s no more going silent or pausing to take hurried notes in the midst of a chat because the technology captures that value for you.”

And perhaps most powerfully, there’s no more broken focus or juggling apps from jumping between Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and CRM systems. Contact and opportunity management happen within the flow of work, where sellers spend their time.

As Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales continues to evolve, our product team has its eye on features that extend its value even further across the Microsoft 365 productivity suite. Those features include intelligent contract authoring in Microsoft Word and automated collaboration space creation with partner channels in Microsoft Teams.

“Our productivity suite is so powerful, but up until now it’s remained relatively generic to suit many different tasks,” Newton-Smith says. “Our new concept is that apps like Copilot for Sales can show up and make these tools more powerful because they’re more contextually relevant to specific jobs.”

For our sellers, the bottom line is that Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales is saving time and cognitive effort to help them be their fullest selves at work.

“The tool isn’t there to do your job,” Macy says. “It’s there to learn how to work alongside you and accelerate your productivity.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales at your company.

• Leverage the easiest-to-use features first: email summary and conversation intelligence.
• Start with adding new contacts from Outlook to gain easy wins as you familiarize your team with the app.
• Use Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales as an introduction to generative AI and intelligent co-pilots.
• Get your CRM admins, senior decision makers, and core IT onboard by demonstrating the most useful features.
• Pilot with your all-stars to gain insights and build groundswell for your deployment.
• Connect with your users to see where they’re finding value, then promote those features.
• Sellers like to hear from their peers. Be sure to leverage the champions that develop out of your pilots.

Click here to try or learn more about Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales.

• Check out our full content suite on how we use Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.
• Learn about our journey as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

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

The post See how we’re simplifying our sales with AI-powered Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Viva is a digital employee-experience platform that brings together essential capabilities such as communications, knowledge, learning, and workplace insights in the flow of work to empower people and teams to be their best. Powered by Microsoft 365, Viva enables our employees—and anyone who uses it—to hone their skills and acquire new ones. It gives our managers data-driven insights that help them make better decisions. Ultimately, Viva helps us—and organizations like yours—build inclusive, thriving cultures where people can achieve their full potential.

How does Viva work?

It centralizes resources to support the hybrid workplace, increasing employee engagement. Viva provides an integrated experience, using existing Microsoft 365 tools in an easily customizable and extensible platform that’s accessible from anywhere.

Our team, Microsoft Digital, in partnership with Microsoft Human Resources (HR) and our leadership, deployed Viva across Microsoft to accelerate our evolving growth-mindset culture and help ensure that our employees thrive.

Supporting employee engagement

Our mission in Microsoft Digital is to power, protect, and transform Microsoft. Part of that responsibility is ensuring that Microsoft employees can thrive in a flexible hybrid work environment. Our team obsesses over every dimension of an employee’s experience, from early on when they are a candidate for employment to when they become an alumnus of the company. We steward employees’ digital experience through many dimensions, ensuring that they have the devices, applications, services, and infrastructure they need to be productive on the job, regardless of what they do or where they do it.

Improving employee experience with Viva requires a company-wide effort to build awareness and drive adoption. It’s an effort that’s both technical and cultural, driven by Microsoft HR in partnership with our team and the Viva product group.

Evolving our culture

To support our mission, Microsoft Digital works in close partnership with Microsoft HR to manage and support employee-related activities across the entire Microsoft organization. Microsoft HR is an important driver of organizational culture at Microsoft, helping our employees thrive in a growth mindset culture with a focus on being customer obsessed, diverse and inclusive, and unified as One Microsoft.

Microsoft leadership and the HR team collectively focus on embracing our company’s mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Technology can accelerate our culture and improve our employee experience. Our leaders and HR team sponsor and advocate for Viva as our internal experience platform.

Our Microsoft HR centers of excellence are groups of experts and leaders in areas such as culture, talent management, people analytics, learning and other people practices. They help drive cross-company HR programs and processes using evidence-based research and external benchmarks. Microsoft HR teams serve as experts in the employee life cycle, providing HR-related insights such as onboarding, wellbeing, recruiting, and career growth. This collective expertise was a key influence on Viva’s development and implementation.

From the start, Microsoft HR have been Viva advocates, looking for opportunities to streamline work using Viva for existing HR programs and processes and recommending new HR employee-experience scenarios that shape the future of Viva product design. As Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR deployed and implemented Viva internally, we found new opportunities for product features and improvements.

Adopting Viva as Customer Zero

At Microsoft, we are early adopters of our own technology. We believe in our products, and we obsess over making them better for our customers. This all happens within a culture and practice called Customer Zero.

Customer Zero is Microsoft’s journey to make our products better using our own business experience. Across our company, we respect employee privacy, data-access regulations, and the laws of the countries and regions where we operate while using powerful tools to understand how work gets done. By acting as Customer Zero for Viva, Microsoft Digital provides valuable employee feedback that enables the product team to develop features and experiences that further benefit not only Microsoft employees, but our global customers.

Throughout the Viva adoption process, the Customer Zero relationship includes the Viva product team as they develop new modules and features, using Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR as their first customers. Our role as Customer Zero extends beyond the scope of Microsoft’s business. While Microsoft is like many large, global enterprises, our Customer Zero leadership recognizes that there are a wide variety of business needs and corporate structures that Microsoft products must account for and support. Customer Zero includes data-centric research, common enterprise practices, and industry trends in tandem with internal Microsoft feedback to create the most accurate and comprehensive picture of enterprise needs.

Embracing Customer Zero practically

In practice, our Customer Zero approach requires involvement from all three contributors—Microsoft Digital, Microsoft HR, and the Viva product team. This involvement creates dependency among the three contributors for successful deployment, adoption, and testing. It also creates a cycle of benefits that positively affects all three contributors and, ultimately, Microsoft’s customers:

• Microsoft Digital. As the team responsible for implementing and supporting Viva within Microsoft, our team has direct access to the product group. This provides us with:
  • Access to preview features and capabilities at a controlled rollout schedule.
  • Direct support from the Viva product team for software updates and testing.
  • Support from Microsoft HR for driving cultural change and adoption and encouraging feedback from Microsoft employees.
• Microsoft HR. Microsoft HR and Microsoft Digital technology teams have been partnering to drive Viva adoption to accelerate culture and business outcomes. This gives us:
  • The ability to guide feature development in Viva for specific use cases and scenarios within Microsoft.
  • The ability to contribute thought leadership in Viva’s product roadmap and overall design.
  • Assurance that the Viva product team is building a platform designed to meet business needs and evolve culture.
• Viva product group. The Viva product team has an in-place test and feedback environment, from both technical and cultural perspectives. Practically, the team receives:
  • Enterprise testing in real-life scenarios within the global Microsoft context. Our Microsoft Digital team conducts this testing.
  • Input from Microsoft subject matter experts in crucial Viva subject areas such as employee experience, HR processes, learning, and knowledge management.
  • Access to existing tools and capabilities across Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR tools that are already in place. We’ve developed a wide variety of apps and tools used for HR processes. The code and capabilities in these tools can be used in Viva modules and components.
  • Controlled feedback loop. As Customer Zero, Microsoft Digital and Microsoft HR directly communicate with the product group.

Customer Zero is our way of improving our products and services before we release them to our customers, and it reflects our commitment to making Viva—and all our enterprise apps and services—the best they can be, based on our own internal usage at Microsoft.

Accelerating the employee experience with Viva

We’ve had great success driving usage and adoption of Viva across Microsoft through structured, globally relevant change-management activities. Enabling employees to thrive and be their best from anywhere by bringing knowledge, learning, resources, and insights together in the flow of work is always the central focus of our larger Viva adoption. At the same time, much of the practical implementation happened at the individual Viva module level, where each module supports culture evolution and employee experience at Microsoft.

Viva Topics

Viva Topics is helping us change our knowledge-management principle from knowledge is power to knowledge is empowering. Viva Topics provides information to our employees when and where they need it.  For example, our new employees must ingest a lot of information quickly, and they’ll encounter terms and acronyms unique to Microsoft. Viva Topics provides this type of information for users, in context. In the following figure, a Viva Topics card presents people, resources, and related topics based on a subject search.

Viva Topics uses AI to automatically search for and identify topics in our organization. It compiles information about the topics, such as a brief description, people working on the topic, and sites, files, and pages related to the topic. A knowledge manager or contributor can choose to update the topic information as needed, creating a partnership between human and AI–driven knowledge management. Topics are available to users, which means that for every instance of the topic that appears in a modern Microsoft SharePoint site in news and pages, the text will be highlighted. Users can choose to select the topic to learn more about it through the topic details. Topics can also be found in the flow of work in other Microsoft 365 applications, such as Microsoft Search, Bing, Outlook on the web, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams.

At Microsoft, Viva Topics is helping us unify our knowledge-management approach, consolidating many disconnected knowledge sources that account for more than nine petabytes of content into a central repository. We’re democratizing knowledge management through Viva Topics’ curation capabilities, and Microsoft Digital is empowering and encouraging volunteer knowledge managers and subject matter experts across the company to share their expertise with everyone.

Viva Insights

Viva Insights is designed to guide individuals and teams toward better work habits and norms to improve wellbeing and productivity. Viva Insights respects employee privacy while leveraging Microsoft 365 data to measure the day-to-day actions that contribute to our culture and success, like how employees use their time, their collaboration habits, and how they operate across team, business, and geographic boundaries.

Organizational insights help leaders understand how teams and groups are managing their work-life balance. At Microsoft, we use Viva Insights to promote a more productive workplace culture across all levels of the company using capabilities like Personal insights, Teamwork habits, and Organization trends:

Personal insights. Provides personal insights that only the employee can access. These insights help employees prioritize wellbeing with recommendations such as scheduling time for focused work, taking regular breaks, and practicing mindfulness.

Teamwork habits. Teamwork habits use team-level insights to help managers maintain regular 1:1 personal interaction and keep up with outstanding tasks to unblock the team and recognize strengths and accomplishments. They also help to establish team norms through shared plans that help build better work habits.

Organization trends. Provides insights that help managers and business leaders track leading indicators of employee wellbeing and engagement. These insights show how work culture is affecting organizational resiliency, including areas such as meeting effectiveness, overall employee wellbeing, and process efficiency.

By aggregating and evaluating this kind of data at the highest levels of the company, we’re able to use organizational trends to make changes that help us improve the employee experience.

Viva Learning

We’re using Viva Learning for high-value learning experiences, a part of which is creating a single front door for the wide variety of learning experiences available to Microsoft employees. Viva Learning is a centralized learning hub in Microsoft Teams that lets our employees seamlessly integrate learning and skill building into their day. With Viva Learning, our teams can discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries provided by the organization and content recommended by peers. They can do all of this without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Viva Learning reduces learning-resource isolation, providing employees with a single portal to discover opportunities to build their skills or manage required training. Consolidating these experiences into a single environment, where learning can be discovered and shared within the flow of work, is a significant value of Viva Learning at Microsoft. AI-based content recommendations and peer-recommended learning enable our culture of learning, encouraging our employees to be full-time, lifelong learners in whatever areas they choose to pursue.

Viva Connections

Viva Connections is the gateway for our employees to connect with Microsoft culture and to stay engaged and informed. Viva Connections provides a branded app experience in Microsoft Teams, both mobile and desktop, to give our employees a personalized and curated destination to discover the relevant news, conversations, and tools they need to succeed.

Our employees interact with Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams. Connections creates the opportunity to present specific content and resources by combining information from Microsoft 365 apps such as SharePoint, Yammer, Microsoft Stream, and Teams.

We’re using the Viva Connections Dashboard to provide a curated experience using Adaptive Card Extensions that give employees access to their most critical content and tools. Cards are easily built and provide an extensibility mechanism that enables quick task completion directly in the card or by opening a quick view in the Dashboard.

Viva Connections is an excellent example of the power of our Customer Zero approach. Viva Connections was inspired by and based on Microsoft MyHub, an internal Microsoft employee mobile app built by our Microsoft Digital team that connects our employees to our corporate culture.

Viva Goals

Viva Goals is designed to help give employees a sense of purpose at work. A goal-setting and management solution, Viva Goals helps align our teams to our organizational strategic priorities, which helps us drive results.

When employees can align their daily work with a greater purpose, whether that’s tied to social good or the progress of their organization, they are more likely to find intrinsic value in their work. Because Viva Goals is a part of Microsoft Viva, it integrates into our employee experience, empowering employees and teams to be productive and feel inspired by their work.

At Microsoft, we’re using Viva Goals to define objectives and key results (OKRs) for our teams. We’re also using it to connect our employees’ daily work to broader business outcomes.

At Microsoft, we’ve achieved over 97 percent employee usage across Viva as a suite, and our adoption continues to grow. As we continue to drive additional usage, we’re continuously directing insights back to the Viva product team that help improve the experience for our customers. Based on our own usage and feedback from our customers and partners, we continue to help the product team build out new capabilities. These capabilities deliver additional value and help ensure that Viva is the centralized, digital platform to stay productive, connected, and supported in the hybrid workplace.

Our employee-experience evolution with Viva has been underway now for over two years, but we aren’t finished. We’re continuing to refine the capabilities of currently deployed modules and features based on our insights as Customer Zero. We’re committed to improving Viva for our customers and for our employees, and we look forward to sharing our future innovations with you.

• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Learn more about how we’re accelerating Microsoft’s digital transformation with Microsoft Viva Goals.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

Try using Microsoft Viva.

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

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

The post Evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

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

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

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

Insights for individuals

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

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

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

Insights for managers and leaders

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

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

Privacy by design

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

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

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

Engaging employees and encouraging wellbeing

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

Creating deeper engagement with Customer Zero

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

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

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

Partnering for successful change

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

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

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

—Steve Reay, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital Employee Experience

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

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

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

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

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

Ensuring privacy and compliance with partnership

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putting Viva Insights to work

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

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

—Microsoft Viva Insights power user, Microsoft Human Resources

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

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

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

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

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

Moving forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you an IT pro?

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

Download your own copy of our full guide here.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

Laying the groundwork with proper labeling

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

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

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

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

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

Self-service with guardrails

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

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

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

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

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

International compliance: No size fits all

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 2: Implementation with intention

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

Scaling out your licenses

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

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

There are three primary benefits to using groups:

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

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

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

Pre-adoption communications

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

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

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

Learning from Microsoft’s implementation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 3: Driving adoption to accelerate value

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

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

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

How Microsoft Digital drove adoption

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

Get ready

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

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

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

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

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

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

Onboard and engage

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deliver impact

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

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

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

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

Extend and optimize

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

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

Driving user enablement with Microsoft Viva

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

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

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

Learning from Microsoft’s adoption efforts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 4: Building a foundation for support

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

Strategizing for support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common questions, issues, and resolutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can employees put confidential information into Copilot?

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

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

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

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

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

Applying Microsoft’s lessons to your own Copilot deployment

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

The post Copilot for Microsoft 365 for executives: Sharing our internal deployment and adoption journey at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

We need to let our employees know about new product rollouts, important system updates, new policies, and much more.

Viva Amplify is really exciting because it fills that need. It’s the first internal communications platform that’s intentionally designed for internal communicators to do their best work.

—Diana McCarty, principal group content program manager, Microsoft Digital

But for the people sending those internal communications, it was difficult to find tools that served the purpose. That’s because there are lots of tools designed for external marketing, but not so much when it came to internal comms.

That changed with the advent of Microsoft Viva Amplify, one of the first communications platforms designed for internal communicators.

“Viva Amplify is really exciting because it fills that need—it’s intentionally designed to help internal communicators do their best work,” says Diana McCarty, a principal group content program manager in MSD and the leader of Microsoft’s IT Communications team.

Before Viva Amplify, internal communicators used multiple tools that didn’t fit quite right. In an audit, McCarty’s team found that they used more than 25 tools to strategize, execute communications strategies, collect metrics, and create reports—and all those functions required different tools that were not well connected with each other.

The IT Communications team has been using an early version of Viva Amplify as Customer Zero since last year. Their role was to provide business requirements and feedback on its features to help create the best internal communications platform possible.

The huge superpower of Viva Amplify, at least here in V1, is that it allows you to create a communication once and publish it in many places without having to rewrite it. You can send it to email, 10 different SharePoint site collections, and up to five different Teams channels.

—Sam Crewdson, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

“We adopt as much of the feature set as we can,” McCarty says. “As new features come out, we incorporate them into our workflows.”

[Explore Viva la Vida! How work life is better at Microsoft with Viva. Discover getting our internal IT communications right with Microsoft Viva Amplify. Unpack how Microsoft Digital improves its own Employee Experience—and yours—as Customer Zero.]

The power of an internal communications platform

Viva Amplify has two key features that help internal communicators do their jobs. The first is that it allows you to write a message once and publish it to multiple endpoints, called distribution channels. This saves time and provides consistency.

“The huge superpower of Viva Amplify, at least here in V1, is that it allows you to create a communication once and publish it in many places without having to rewrite it,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager in MSD and the MSD lead for Viva Amplify. “You can send it to email, 10 different SharePoint site collections, and up to five different Teams channels.”

The second important feature is that it gives you a consolidated view of your metrics, which Crewdson calls “a second superpower.” In the past, it wasn’t easy for communicators to access rich metrics for SharePoint sites, Viva Engage, and email. There were no metrics for Microsoft Teams.

“You had to go four places to get four metrics that didn’t overlap and had to manually stitch them together,” Crewdson says.

But now, Viva Amplify gives you a one-stop shop to understand the effectiveness of your communications by seeing open rates, read rates, sharing, and sentiment analysis for a campaign.

“No matter which distribution channels you use, you get a consolidated set of analytics,” Crewdson says. “You can get per-application metrics if you want to see whether email or SharePoint was more effective for your communication.”

You also you get what communicators care about most—the total number of eyeballs that have seen your content. You can also track social gestures like thumbs-up, comments, and whether people forward or re-share the message.

Helping all communicators

Viva Amplify helps many types of internal communicators, not just people with “communications” in their job title.

During the dogfooding stage of deploying Viva Amplify, three main types of communicators were identified: Executive communicators (executives and those who write for them); corporate communicators who explain our company-wide impact, mission, and culture; and functional communicators who send messages about new processes or tools for a function such as HR or IT.

The great thing about GEEC is we can scale these tools [including Viva Amplify] to a whole function at one time. Through a partnership with MSD, we’re able to onboard people at the same time, proactively test these things out and pilot certain scenarios.

—John Cirone, senior director of communications, GEEC community

We have a large group of executive communicators who are helping us test Viva Amplify through an early adopters program: our Global Employee and Executive Communications (GEEC) community. It includes more than 1,000 communicators, including senior leaders and their chiefs of staff, executive assistants, communications directors, social media managers, and others.

“The great thing about GEEC is we can scale these tools [including Viva Amplify] to a whole function at one time,” says John Cirone, a senior director of communications who manages the GEEC community. “Through a partnership with MSD, we’re able to onboard people at the same time, proactively test these things out, and pilot certain scenarios.”

Another powerful Amplify feature that’s important to communicators is the ability to manage the review cycle for communications. The GEEC community has a number of corporate and executive communicators who need to review messages before they’re sent out. Having a centralized tool where they can review, edit, and publish in one place will reduce the time for review cycles.

“Today, we do a lot of it in Word, and we have people with varying levels of how deep they want to edit, or how much they want to skim and copy-paste into an email,” says Amy Morris, a senior communications manager on the GEEC team. “Some executives send from their own inbox, and others provide delegate permissions to their communications lead. Amplify supports both the exec who wants to be the one to press the Publish button and the comms lead who publishes with delegate permissions.”

The road forward

Shifting communications work to Viva Amplify will simplify things for our internal communicators, but they’re only getting started—most have only had access to it since it became generally available in October.

I’ve got high hopes for Viva Amplify because it directly targets people like me. It’s meant to bring together campaign management into one single solution where you can publish to multiple outlets through one tool. It promises to provide all those metrics in one dashboard, which has been the Holy Grail of employee communications for years.

—John Cirone, senior director of communications, GEEC community

“Right now, we’re focused on getting our first round of adopters to not only keep using the product, but also to provide us with feedback that we can use to improve it,” Crewdson says.

As promising as the beginning of Viva Amplify has been, teams are looking forward to more features in the future.

“I’ve got high hopes for Viva Amplify because it directly targets people like me,” Cirone says. “It’s meant to bring together campaign management into one single solution where you can publish to multiple outlets through one tool. It promises to provide all those metrics in one dashboard, which has been the Holy Grail of employee communications for years.”

Support for more distribution channels is one of the features that the IT Communications team is looking forward to. While working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, people came to rely on Viva Engage to connect with each other at work.

“Viva Engage is now our primary channel in a lot of ways; we use email for more specific reasons. When we’re able to publish from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage, it’s going to unlock a whole new world of possibilities,” McCarty says.

With such a strong demand for it, adding Viva Engage is on the radar for the product team.

“Today, Viva Amplify can send messages to email, SharePoint, and Teams. In the first half of 2024, we expect to be able to publish to Viva Engage as well. Viva Engage has been a huge success for us in IT, and we see that as an important future milestone for communicators,” Crewdson says.

Viva Amplify early adopters are also looking forward to improved Outlook formatting, both for the templates that the GEEC team distributes and for sending newsletters.

Being able to share templates through the Amplify tool would be an awesome feature because it would be right there in the Amplify campaign when we communicate about key company news, learning programs, or events.

—Amy Morris, senior communications manager, GEEC community

“I’m super interested in its usefulness as a place to send newsletters from,” Cirone says. “We send a lot of newsletters now and currently use a third-party tool. This is something every Microsoft communications lead will be leveraging and celebrating.”

Another valuable feature is support for communications toolkits. The team supporting the GEEC community sends out guidance across the company to help others tell a connected story and speak from the same narrative in their own communications. To do this, the team creates templatized toolkits for communicators to use with different audiences.

“Being able to share templates through the Amplify tool would be an awesome feature because it would be right there in the Amplify campaign when we communicate about key company news, learning programs, or events,” Morris says.

These features are on the roadmap.

Based on my team’s experience so far, I would say Amplify is one of those technologies that is good to adopt early. It’s based on SharePoint, so there isn’t a huge learning curve if you’re familiar with SharePoint. So far, we’ve only seen upside to being involved early.

—Diana McCarty, principal group content program manager, Microsoft Digital

“Our future vision is that we continue to extend Viva Amplify to include more distribution channels, to enrich it with the power of AI and Copilot, to bring other aspects of Viva and M365 to bear in creating the best communications tool possible,” Crewdson says.

If your team is considering using Viva Amplify, there’s no need to wait for all these features to be deployed.

“Based on my team’s experience so far, I would say Amplify is one of those technologies that is good to adopt early,” McCarty says. “It’s based on SharePoint, so there isn’t a huge learning curve if you’re familiar with SharePoint and the value and feature set is only growing. So far, we’ve only seen upside to being involved early.”

Consider how utilizing Microsoft Viva Amplify could improve your team’s communications:

• Viva Amplify saves time because you author a communication just once; then you can use Amplify to publish it to multiple places, known as distribution channels.
• Organization is easy. A campaign in Viva Amplify is a container, so you can group communications as part of the same campaign.
• Viva Amplify helps team members coordinate authoring by providing a place for notes about the goals for a campaign, key messages, taglines, key phrases to re-use, and information about tone of voice.
• Viva Amplify also supports approval workflows, which is useful if someone is ghostwriting and wants the executive to approve a message before it goes out. You can also route a message to someone to check grammar, tone, and spelling. You can combine that with scheduling, like “Send this out at 8:00 AM.”
• Viva Amplify provides a centralized location for all your analytics about the campaign’s performance.

Give Microsoft Viva Amplify a try.

• Explore Viva la Vida! How work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.
• Discover getting our internal IT communications right with Microsoft Viva Amplify.
• Unpack how Microsoft Digital improves its own Employee Experience—and yours—as Customer Zero.

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

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

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Microsoft Viva Connections is our gateway to our employee experience. It’s a hub from which our employees can move through the many different parts of their work experience throughout their day. It’s their single place to connect with news, conversations, and resources from across the organization, personalized for each employee through AI and organizational information.

With Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what’s happening in our organization, at every level that applies to them.

—Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Human Resources

A unified experience is at the core of Microsoft Viva Connections. We use it to consolidate resource access across a huge array of company resources and touchpoints, including SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Graph, and other Microsoft 365 apps like Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft Stream.

We want it to be the first place our employees go to get informed about the company and their work at Microsoft.

“Microsoft Viva provides an experience for our employees that goes where they go; it’s like their mobile office—everything is right there in Viva, whether they’re learning at work, communicating with others or getting insights about how their team is doing,” says Rich Kaplan, general manager for Microsoft Viva in Microsoft Human Resources. “With Microsoft Viva Connections, our employees have an entry point into the entire Microsoft Viva experience and a genuine feel for what’s happening in our organization at every level that applies to them.”

Kaplan highlights the way Microsoft Viva Connections has ingrained itself into the everyday employee experience at Microsoft.

“Viva Connections puts the employee at the center and provides the information and tools that are most important to them. It has access to building location information, and I can see which food trucks are nearby for lunch,” Kaplan says. “I can start a maintenance request for something like the air conditioning not working correctly. I can contact TechLink to troubleshoot a technical issue I’m having. It’s all right there, accessible from the Viva Connections Dashboard.”

The Microsoft Viva Connections dashboard is the primary portal into what’s happening in an employee’s day and in the organization. It provides a centralized location to find and act on company tasks and specific action items for their job. The dashboard uses dynamic cards that employees can interact with to do things like complete simple tasks or review critical data. It’s authored in SharePoint and published to the Viva Connections app within the Teams mobile experience or to the employee’s desktop.

The feed aggregates news and conversations into a single place where they can stay on top of everything they need to know. It delivers updates with powerful targeting and scheduling capabilities. The feed enables you to efficiently reuse and aggregate existing news items and posts from SharePoint, Microsoft Viva Engage, and Microsoft Stream resources.

The resources page consolidates resources for users across the digital workplace, including resources on other platforms and sites using a familiar SharePoint-like navigation.

[Visit our content suite: Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva. See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft. Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.]

Building on our history of employee focus

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

Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) has been deeply invested in employee experience for years. Our involvement in Microsoft Viva Connections began several years ago when we developed MyHub, an internal app for Microsoft employees that enabled them to connect to the Microsoft company, culture, and mission.

We wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company.

—Kirkland Barrett, principal group product manager, Unified Employee Experience

Kirkland Barrett is the principal group product manager for Unified Employee Experience in MDEE. His team was responsible for the creation and deployment of MyHub to Microsoft employees more than four years ago. A team was created with members who tackled the project from their various perspectives—program management, engineering, design, and research.

“When we began, our leadership was championing this employee-focused approach to how we do things as an organization,” Barrett says. “So we set out to deeply understand and invest in improving the employee experience.”

The vision for MyHub was bringing everything that our employees want and need to do.

“We wanted to empower employees to simplify their life, to have this personalized, connected, and intuitive experience where they could access all those previously fragmented experiences with things like taking time off, viewing pay information, tracking expenses, or understanding what was happening in the company,” Barrett says.

There were many different apps and touchpoints for those experiences before MyHub. Barett’s team wanted to put them in a single, employee focused app. They put employees at the center. A big part of that was reevaluating the many design teams, delivery channels, and interaction methods that were used to create interaction with Microsoft employees.

“We had a fragmented and disconnected set of tools and interfaces before MyHub,” Barrett says. “The experience was inconsistent for our employees, and it was often hard to find them in the first place.”

Out of this vision for a connected and unified employee experience came MyHub, a mobile app that Microsoft employees adopted rapidly and used extensively across the organization. As MyHub grew and matured and added functionality, momentum for the app grew, and it became a mainstay for Microsoft employees to interact with each other and the organization in dozens of ways.

Microsoft Viva Connections has become the next evolution of MyHub but extended for the rest of the world. As Customer Zero for Viva Connections, we have a unique opportunity to not only inform product development but to contribute to the evolution of one of our key projects, MyHub, as it transforms to fulfill the needs of Microsoft’s external customers. It’s a perfect example of how our own internal challenges and innovative responses are directly relevant to our customers and lead to Microsoft creating better products.

The co-development process between the Microsoft Viva Connections product team and our MyHub engineers at MDEE is one of the most integrated and cooperative examples of Customer Zero engineering at Microsoft. When MDEE designed MyHub, it was built for Microsoft, so many of the features and capabilities were created specifically for the Microsoft context.

How we do business, what’s important to our organization, how we treat our employees––all of these went into the design and development of MyHub, which meant that we could precisely focus in on feature design and how we wanted the app to provide a unified experience at Microsoft. Microsoft Human Resources (HR) was a big partner in helping us to understand the employee experience and what we wanted to accomplish holistically.

While these factors helped us design a product unique to Microsoft, it also helped our engineering and HR teams understand what made Microsoft unique. When the Microsoft Viva Connections team began development, using MyHub as a starting point, we had a clear idea of which parts of the MyHub experience would work well for the general public and which parts didn’t need to make the jump from MyHub into Viva Connections.

MDEE, the MyHub team, and Microsoft HR have provided feedback and assistance based on the four years of experience working in the employee experience space. Our collaborative effort with the Microsoft Viva Connections design team helped us adopt design features like notifications, naming, organization, taxonomy, and adoption. We’ve also contributed to many improvements and created new features in Viva Connections, including these:

• Performance improvements
• Best practices such as domain isolation, caching, and shared library features
• Accessibility and reliability improvements
• Camera integration and image upload capability
• Locations support
• Feedback mechanisms and enhanced metadata

As development continues, our MyHub engineering team is providing important feedback to the product group on the experiences our employees have with Microsoft Viva Connections. We have moved all the MyHub employee experiences we had planned to move, and our Microsoft employees are using Viva Connections for their daily needs.

Implementing Microsoft Viva Connections

Microsoft Viva Connections empowers and engages Microsoft employees at the frontline of their hybrid work experience, connecting them to the mission of the organization, each other, and the tools they need most. Here are a few examples of how Viva Connections is practically influencing the employee experience at Microsoft:

• In Viva Connections, we have an adaptive card for training. Learning is core to our culture and the primary component of our growth mindset. The training card surfaces training opportunities and obligations for each employee, encouraging them to learn, build skills, and improve their capability.
• We use Viva Connections to provide basic but valuable information to our employees, like details about their compensation and benefits. Our employees can access a card that provides current and historical information about their pay stubs, deductions, and other pay details. These are provided within the context of the cards, rather than forcing employees to sign in to a separate payroll system and use another interface to get that information.
• Our employees can connect directly to Digital TechLink, our integrated technical support system. In Viva Connections, employees can initiate a help request, communicate with support, and track the progress of any requests they have in process.

Moving from a custom solution to a commercially available product has simplified the way we support the employee experience at Microsoft. Working with a custom app that we had to manage and deploy to hundreds of thousands of employees across the globe created an entire level of process for design, development, source control, and deployment. This included tasks like maintaining versioning, publishing to app stores, and managing access for employees. With Microsoft Viva Connections, we no longer need to manage the app, just use it. It’s already available across the app stores our employees use, and that entire level of process and effort has been removed from our teams, allowing us to focus on the employee experience and implementing Viva Connections in the best way possible for Microsoft.

We realize many benefits from using Microsoft Viva Connections to unify our employee experience. Some of the most important implementation benefits include the following:

• The organization can tailor the experience for targeted employee groups—like frontline workers or people in specific regions or roles.
• We can add custom components that enrich the employee experience, using no-code configurations or powerful developer frameworks.
• We can integrate investments you’ve already made in partner solutions from leaders like Workday and ServiceNow.
• Microsoft Viva Connections and its experiences leverage the investments we’ve already made in Microsoft 365, including SharePoint, Microsoft Viva Engage, Microsoft Stream, and Microsoft Teams. It’s backed by security, compliance, and identity controls that enable us to build an employee experience you can trust.

We’re continuing to engage our employees with Microsoft Viva Connections, providing them with a unified employee experience at Microsoft. We’re also working as Customer Zero with the Viva Connections design team to build experiences into Viva Connections that benefit Microsoft customers, including day planning, compensation and benefits tools, more approval workflows for invoices, expenses, and vacation time, and many other scenarios.

We’re also working with the design team to include new capabilities, including dynamic language support, additional Microsoft 365 sources for the Feed, allowing multiple instances per tenant, and adding additional interactivity for dashboard cards.

As Customer Zero, we’re sharing our employee experiences with customers to accelerate their adoption of Microsoft Viva Connections. We’re working with the Microsoft Viva development teams to innovate, influence, and pressure test the Microsoft Viva platform, moving it forward to create employee experiences that empower our customers.

The user experience framework that we’ve built and loaded into our Microsoft Viva Connections experience is open source and now available in Git Hub so customers can use it to help them develop similar experiences for their employees.

We’re enhancing the accessibility of both Microsoft Viva Connections the product and our deployment of it. We’re also adding employee and customer listening capabilities to the product, which will allow us to use their feedback to improve the experience for everyone.

• Click here to learn more about Microsoft Viva Connections.
• Visit our content suite: Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.
• See how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Check out the lessons we’ve learned from our adoption of Microsoft Viva internally at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re improving our own Employee Experience—and yours—as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.

The post Deploying Microsoft Viva Connections internally at Microsoft 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.

• Viva la Vida! Explore how work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.
• Discover transforming employee engagement with Microsoft Viva Engage.
• 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.

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

Adopting Microsoft Viva was, and continues to be, an enormous effort that requires the thoughtful coordination of multiple teams across Microsoft to be successful.

“The change management plan that we implemented was a collaboration between IT, HR, and partners from each business unit,” says Keith Boyd, senior director of business programs in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience. “We found that the relationship between IT and HR throughout this deployment was key.”

In the early stages of Microsoft Viva deployment we paid particular attention to highlighting the platform’s value for employees, while simultaneously listening for their feedback on the experience. Executive sponsors and internal product champions were key to driving usage and awareness.

“By shining a spotlight on the utility of each Viva module, listening and acting on employee and customer feedback about the experience, then building a strong network of global champions, we were able to accelerate adoption of the suite, which is propelling our culture globally,” says David Laves, director of business programs in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience.

If you are considering adding Microsoft Viva to your company’s employee experience, we recommend you have a look at our complete guide to Driving Adoption of Microsoft Viva, where we share our approach to driving Viva adoption and usage at Microsoft. The guide highlights many voices from across the company in different roles, who share their perspective and best practices on how we ensured Viva became a critical tool that’s helping our employees to thrive in the hybrid workplace.

• Viva la Vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva

The post Best practices and tips from Microsoft’s own internal adoption of Microsoft Viva appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Viva was developed based on research showing:

• Employees want to feel strongly connected to their company mission. They want to grow, make an impact, and balance professional and personal life.
• Leaders need a modern way to engage with and develop their employees and to nurture overall wellbeing.
• IT needs to quickly enable experiences that delight while ensuring privacy and accessibility.

During the last year, we’ve had the opportunity to lead the adoption program for Microsoft’s 220,000-plus global employees.  Each of us focused on an assigned set of business units within the company, where our goals were to activate sponsorship of Microsoft Viva, drive employee awareness of its benefits, and collect feedback for the product and IT teams to make the experience even better. Here’s what we learned.

Activating sponsors

We know from experience that visible sponsorship from senior leaders is one of the most important factors enabling successful change management. Employees look to their leaders for direction and are pretty good at sensing their level of genuine commitment. When sponsors are active and visible, it sends a clear message that they are committed to the change, and when sponsors go even further and lead by example, their teams adopt the change at an accelerated pace. For these reasons, we start with senior leaders when we mobilize a new adoption program.

Our approach was to understand the leader’s goals, then help them learn where Microsoft Viva could support their goals. There are two themes that were commonly shared: Employees felt they had too many meetings and not enough time for learning. Hearing these challenges, we shared how Viva can support employees with time management. For example, the Microsoft Viva Insights “Wellbeing” feature helps individuals make more time for focused work, and manager insights help managers understand how employees are working so they can better support and coach them. Similarly, to address the desire to foster their employees’ time for learning, we illustrated the benefits of Microsoft Viva Learning, like intelligently creating calendar blocks to complete specific courses.

Once we obtained buy-in, we asked leaders to nominate someone on their team we could work with on a regular basis as a primary point of contact. This made it easier to tee up activities in the business unit since these individuals had a pulse on their team’s rhythm, including all-hands meetings, team newsletters, manager calls, and other mechanisms used for communication. That helped us ensure follow-through when we needed direct sponsor activity, such as inserting Microsoft Viva messaging into talking points at an internal town hall or embedding Viva into a leader’s message sent via Viva Engage, Microsoft Teams, or email. In addition, the primary point of contact helped to identify additional champions in their organization.

The impact of these efforts is compelling: business units where we’ve successfully activated senior sponsors have seen 25 percent greater adoption of Microsoft Viva so far.

Educating employees

At Microsoft, employees can be overwhelmed by the volume of applications. Part of our change management approach has been to ensure employees understand which application to use and how it applies to their specific role. For example, legal may value different features of an application compared to engineering. Some features are more appealing to employees in the US than those in Germany or Singapore. To address this, we provided global, centralized communication and training offerings, complemented by regional and business unit-specific messaging that could be personalized and tailored for role-based or regional interests and norms.

For example, as part of our awareness campaign for Microsoft Viva Insights, we created overviews for individual contributors that highlight features they will find useful. We also provided overviews specific to managers that focus on capabilities designed especially for them. We then asked our regional and business unit leaders to adjust the messaging to foster alignment with local norms, and to conduct regional or business unit training sessions led by champions of those communities.

Listening to employees

The global-plus-local approach had an additional benefit—the diverse network of champions that we built enabled us to gather feedback and requirements to improve the Microsoft Viva experience for all! Experiences such as accelerating Japanese language support in Viva and improving the Microsoft Viva Topics knowledge base were direct results of this approach.

Capturing and acting on employee feedback is critical to improving our products for not only our employees but our customers as well. More details about Microsoft’s approach to employee listening are available in a three-part article series, “Digital transformation through mastery of the employee experience.”

Partnering with HR and Learning

Inside Microsoft, employees are continuously encouraged through internal campaigns to enroll in a new beta, or join a new community, or pilot a new process. Amid this competition for employee attention and mindshare, we conducted targeted campaigns to drive adoption of Microsoft Viva modules, but just as importantly, we nurtured a strategy of embedding Viva into employee processes that would outlive any temporary campaign. The HR and Learning teams were important partners to accomplish this.

The health and wellbeing of our employees is a top priority, and taking time off to rest and recharge is an important aspect to ensure employee wellbeing.

—Rich Kaplan, HR leader, Employee Experiences

Early in the project, we approached HR leadership and asked them to invite every HR team to ask, “How could Viva enhance the service I deliver?” This led to Microsoft Viva being woven into the fabric of many existing HR services and messages.

For example, we collaborated over several months to help HR define how Microsoft Viva Insights could become a valuable new tool for Microsoft people managers. Viva Insights helps managers identify opportunities to improve culture and work-life balance in their team. By officially embedding Viva Insights into a HR’s manager framework, not only did usage increase, but it facilitated Microsoft Viva messaging in their natural rhythms and channels to managers rather than through a temporary campaign.

Now that Viva has taken off, HR leaders of Employee Experiences at Microsoft offered these additional examples:

The health and wellbeing of our employees is a top priority, and taking time off to rest and recharge is an important aspect to ensure employee wellbeing. That’s why we’re including Viva in our Microsoft Benefits mail to remind employees to take time off. Viva insights helps plan time away. Manage calendars, set automatic replies, notify collaborators, and resolve meetings—all in one place. Our training reminders include resources on Viva Learning. Our quarterly manager newsletters include insights on teamwork habits and encourage managers to create team agreements on how they work together to enhance Hybrid harmony. We have embedded Viva organically into many of our existing processes and communications, enabling a more seamless and engaging experience for everyone.

Measuring progress

Defining metrics and sharing progress against those metrics with leaders has played an important role in keeping our sponsors engaged. So far, our primary metrics have been active usage and user satisfaction since these are leading indicators of business value.

For usage, we’ve focused on monthly active usage by Microsoft Viva module and for Viva overall. At the end of calendar year 2022, 90 percent of Microsoft employees were using Viva monthly. For calendar year 2023, we are focusing more on the quality, engagement, depth of usage, and retention to better understand how employees can maximize the overall benefits of Viva.

Regarding measuring user satisfaction, we learned that it’s currently difficult to accomplish in-app, so we have relied on surveys to solicit employee feedback. Recognizing this difficulty, we have collaborated with the Microsoft Viva product engineering team to define in-app enhancements that, in the future, will make it easy for any employee to provide feedback about their experience using Viva.

We know from industry and customer research that the business value of Microsoft Viva is substantial:

• Post-pandemic, 53 percent of employees are more likely to prioritize their health and wellbeing over work, and Viva helps to facilitate employee health and wellbeing.
• Seventy-nine percent of employees experience work-related stress that leads to lack of interest, motivation and effort at work, and Viva helps employees to achieve better balance between work and their personal life.
• Highly engaged employees are 12-times less likely to leave their company than those who are not engaged, and Viva is designed to ensure your employees stay connected and engaged to company culture, learning opportunities, and knowledge in the enterprise.

As a result of these insights and changing workplace expectations, we are in the process of shifting our focus to quantifying the impacts of Microsoft Viva adoption on the productivity, performance, engagement, and personal growth of our employees.

Through sponsorship, education, listening, and measurement, we’re off to a good start at Microsoft, but there are a lot more opportunities in the months ahead. In your own organization, you’ll have unique advantages and challenges when it comes to Microsoft Viva adoption, but here are a few takeaways to get you started:

1. Get senior leadership involved from the beginning. Having them understand the overall benefits and model behavior will significantly increase adoption.
2. Partner with leader-nominated points of contact who are close to the rhythms and communication channels where Viva can be naturally promoted, and who can recruit additional champions.
3. One size does not fit all. Communicating at a broad, global level is not enough for a large, diverse organization. You must consider how to connect at a regional, business unit, or even a role-based level.
4. Finally, the employee feedback loop is key. This will help senior leadership and product teams understand what is working and what is not and pivot to make future improvements.

Please reach out on LinkedIn—we would love to learn together how to be successful nurturing an employee experience platform:

• Marcus Young
• Ed Novak
• Danielle Yedinak

• Learn more about Microsoft Viva, an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights in the flow of work.

The post Driving adoption of Microsoft Viva at Microsoft: Lessons learned appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Adopting a new product across an organization as large as Microsoft is an enormous task, and we’re always expanding our knowledge about how to roll out a new tool or platform more effectively. Product adoption data is at the core of how we build that knowledge — and how we implement the strategy that goes along with it.

“When it comes to driving adoption, the key to success is to identify the insights we need to deliver success upfront,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of employee experience at Microsoft. “We define those success measures then ensure we have the right data to meet our objectives.”

[Check out our Microsoft Viva adoption guide. Visit our Microsoft Viva content suite to learn how work life is better at Microsoft with Viva. Learn how we’re creating the digital workplace at Microsoft.]

The discipline of deployment

The transition to a modern, hybrid workplace has introduced new challenges into the product adoption process.

“The first challenge in a remote or hybrid environment is awareness because it’s really difficult to get users’ attention,” says Amy Ceurvorst, senior business program manager and adoption specialist with Microsoft Digital (MSD). “Now you’re competing against messages, chats, and emails to grab your employees’ attention, so we’ve had to try a bunch of different strategies to help users engage with a new product.”

Over time, we’ve learned some key lessons about driving effective adoption:

• Change doesn’t happen automatically—Employees need encouragement and guidance, or they’ll simply stick with existing technology.
• Buy-in from leadership matters—Engaged executives are effective champions for wide-reaching rollouts.
• Targets need to be measurable—If it doesn’t get measured, it won’t get done.
• Learn from the process and each other—Every adoption is an opportunity to build knowledge and improve processes, and collaboration provides valuable insights.

These principles have helped us build out an adoption process that flows naturally through envisioning, onboarding, and driving value by measuring success. Each stage of that journey involves thoughtful consideration, collaboration, and preparation.

Capturing the right data

But how do we ensure we’re making the most of the adoption journey? The answer is in the data.

The first challenge is securing the right data to meet our goals for each stage of the adoption journey, whether we’re building out our vision for a new tool, generating buy-in from executive sponsors, or demonstrating the success of a rollout.

That’s where our Employee Experience Insights team comes in. They’re responsible for looking at the experiences we support at Microsoft and collecting that data. Through collaboration with technical teams and change managers, they source and collocate the information we need to inform our deployments.

“We start with operational data from different sources, including services, applications, and devices,” says Miguel Uribe, principal product manager for Employee Experience Insights. “We put that together with enterprise data like employee profiles, support tickets, and survey results, and then use it to discover knowledge about how the user is perceiving the experience.”

Turning subjective, written responses into useful data can be a challenge, but Miguel’s team leverages machine learning and natural language processing to summarize and aggregate large swathes of feedback into sentiment scores and other useful information.

To protect employee privacy and ensure compliance with confidentiality standards, our data professionals work with our Human Resources and Privacy teams as well as our Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs team. They provide the guidance to ensure that user data is anonymized and aggregated so it doesn’t violate our employees’ privacy.

You need to give leaders a reason to buy into a tool’s value, articulate how you’ll measure success, develop targets to track against, and provide specific actions they can take to be successful.

—Marcus Young, employee experience director, Microsoft Digital

The goal is to enable a HEART analytics model that provides insights across five aspects of usage: happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task value. All of that data provides rich context, not just for guiding future rollouts, but for engaging sponsors throughout the ongoing adoption. The HEART framework is a set of user-centered metrics used to evaluate the quality of a user experience and to help measure the impact of UX changes.

Inspiring sponsors to drive Microsoft Viva adoption

Our recent Microsoft Viva rollout is a powerful example of good data’s effect on executive sponsorship. When Viva became available, MSD led the platform’s adoption across our more than 200,000 employees. Check out our Microsoft Viva adoption guide to get tips for deploying Viva at your company.

“We knew from experience that active and visible sponsorship is the number one factor for success when you roll out a change,” says Marcus Young, employee experience director with MSD. “You need to give leaders a reason to buy into a tool’s value, articulate how you’ll measure success, develop targets to track against, and provide specific actions they can take to be successful.”

To meet these needs, the team combined usage data with gamification, automated recommendations, and a stylish user interface to let leaders know where their organizations stand within our Microsoft Viva rollout. We called it the Microsoft Viva Leader Index (VLI).

Through this tool, any leader managing more than 20 people can navigate to an internal website that automatically detects their role and organization. The VLI then delivers an all-up view of Microsoft Viva usage across that leader’s team, including information about individual modules, how their team stacks up against their peers and the entire organization, and automated recommendations for how they can advance adoption.

This simple and engaging tool provides everything a leader needs to gauge their organization’s adoption success and work toward their goals. It’s a powerful example of what data can do when paired with purpose and personalization.

Measuring impact and managing knowledge

All throughout the rollout process, adoption specialists from our Employee Experience Success team actively consider the cycle of envisioning, onboarding, and driving value. As a deployment matures, they can use data to inform the process of their next rollout.

The Employee Experience Insights team collaborates with change management practitioners to incorporate adoption activities like localized comms, office hours, or sponsor influencing through our Early Adopter Program. That way, they can find correlations between adoption activities and spikes in usage to identify which methods drive the best results.

In Microsoft Viva’s case, we discovered that attention-grabbing, one-minute demos and direct-to-employee communications through Microsoft Teams were the most effective ways to boost adoption. Insights from this test-and-learn process mean our adoption specialists will be more prepared to support the next rollout.

“It’s hard to compete for people’s time,” Ceurvorst says. “So we’ve learned that we need to work hard to get into the sessions and spaces where they already work.”

On the product side, getting granular also supports a better development process and user experience moving forward. That depends on asking the right questions.

“Is there something happening making usage surge, or do we have significant drop-offs at certain times of year?” Ceurvorst asks. “There’s so much value in data from feature requests, bugs, and anonymized usage behaviors, and it helps us come up with insights we can share back to product groups.”

When our teams work together to capture effective adoption data, it produces meaningful impacts on the employee experience — from change management best practices to executive sponsorship, right through to product development. That means being intentional about the kind of information we capture and how we put it into action for ongoing and future adoption programs.

It’s all about creating a virtuous cycle, driven by data.

Here are some tips that you can use to build a plan for driving Microsoft Viva adoption at your company:

• Identify what success looks like, how to quantify it, and how to distribute accountability for that success to your leaders.
• Have the right data because it makes ROI powerfully tangible.
• Be diligent about advocating for your data desires to your data team.
• Deliver data with a human touch to energize sponsors and stakeholders.
• Align there is a plan and resourcing for collecting high-quality data signals.
• Work with legal professionals to understand the security and privacy rules and regulations around data.
• Identify who the primary users of your success measurement reporting will be, such as adoption specialists, and partner with them to define and design reports.

• Check out our Microsoft Viva adoption guide.
• Visit our Microsoft Viva content suite to learn how work life is better at Microsoft with Viva.
• Learn how we’re creating the digital workplace at Microsoft.
• Read more about helping Microsoft employees understand their value with the Total Rewards Portal.
• Get five key learnings from Microsoft’s Windows 11 upgrade.

The post Revolutionizing the rollout: Using product adoption data to streamline deployments appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Across Europe, workers’ councils are responsible for representing employees and protecting their rights. Elected from a company’s workforce, representatives protect against misuse of employee data and ensure compliance with local employee related law. Germany’s workers’ councils are among the most well-established in Europe, so they’ve become leaders in the conversation around employee data usage.

In the past, when Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, wanted to deploy a new tool or service in Europe, the Microsoft workers’ councils in countries/regions there would undertake a lengthy, product-wide review process to ensure it didn’t violate employee rights. Any features that made personal, behavioral, or performance data usable to the organization triggered extensive reviews that could take up to a year and a half to complete.

The Microsoft Digital team, charged with deploying new features and services, needed a way to avoid delays and rollbacks while meeting regulatory obligations across all of Europe.

We have new functionalities every couple of weeks. We’re moving away from separate applications and toward platform thinking where everything is in one environment, for example in Teams or Dynamics 365. And then we’re adding modules, which means we have to think differently about how we review.

—Anna Kopp, regional director, Microsoft Digital

The solution?

Microsoft Digital, in partnership with Microsoft Human Resources and the company’s legal team, developed a collaboration with the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany that would triage and streamline approvals and then take that framework and use it to inspire similar collaborative efforts across all the countries that have workers’ councils.

[Learn how Microsoft is building an employee-centric experience. Experience the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft. Find out how Microsoft reinvented the employee experience.]
For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grMzZ798W30, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Building a process for success

Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the company, started by grappling with how agile software development has changed the nature of deployment—moving toward modular releases for individual features within larger platforms, which dramatically sped deployments up because it avoided lengthy, product-wide reviews.

“We have new functionalities every couple of weeks,” says Anna Kopp, regional director of Microsoft Digital in Germany. “We’re moving away from separate applications and toward platform thinking where everything is in one environment, for example in Teams or Dynamics 365. And then we’re adding modules, which means we have to think differently about how we review.”

The Microsoft Digital team undertook a full inventory of existing tools and categorized them by how they interact with employees’ private information. Features that presented no risk to employee privacy received expedited approval, so the team could move on to modules that share workers’ information in one way or another.

For those features, the team collaborated with the workers’ council to determine what components needed closer scrutiny. Does a tool’s contact card reveal an employee’s org chart? Does it employ gamification or stacked ranking? Are there red, yellow, and green indicators attached to employee names—no matter how benign their intentions?

Each of these elements has implications for how employees’ personal information and behaviors appear or how others might interpret their performance. As a result of their review effort, the team developed a review process for new features Microsoft plans to release.

First, the team must confirm the feature interacts with employees’ information in a limited, private capacity that General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) are complied with, and that Microsoft commits to not make any performance and behavior control with the data. After that threshold is cleared, Microsoft Digital fills out a single-page intake form asking simple questions like the tool’s name, its audience, its owner, and access rights to the data. Finally, the Microsoft workers’ council expedites a simplified review that takes under four weeks.

Features that share employee information more widely or if Microsoft intends to carry out performance or behavior control with the data enter a second, more extensive process. Microsoft Digital completes a lengthier form that outlines things like how the tool would fit into the organization, how managers might use it, and if the information it presents could inadvertently suggest an employee’s performance to anyone other than really necessary roles or persons (e.g., a direct manager).

Trustworthy codetermination organized in this way—between the workers’ council and Microsoft—gave us speed and structure, and it gave us confidence. Because we’ve established strong relationships with stakeholders, we’ve been able to start from a place of compliance in product development and engineering.

—Peter Albus, chairman, Microsoft Germany Central Workers Council Committee for Employee Data Privacy

That form typically gives the workers’ council everything it needs to approve a feature. But if they still need more information, they initiate a dialogue with other teams; including product, engineering, and human resources.

Trust through collaboration

“What we try to do is balance the benefit with the risks,” says Peter Albus, dedicated workers’ council member and chairman of the Central Workers Council Committee for Employee Data Privacy for Microsoft Germany. “How can we mitigate the risks while enabling the benefit? If the added value is sufficient, we mitigate the risks through technical settings or organizational orders (policies).”

Beyond minimizing the time a feature might take to roll out, increased dialogue between the workers’ council and product teams has helped engineers anticipate regulatory demands and build solutions accordingly.

“Trustworthy codetermination organized in this way—between the workers’ council and Microsoft—gave us speed and structure, and it gave us confidence,” Albus says. “Because we’ve established strong relationships with stakeholders, we’ve been able to start from a place of compliance in product development and engineering.”

The ongoing deployment of Microsoft Viva illustrates how streamlined this process has become. Viva, Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform (EXP), includes modules that interact with workers’ information differently.

Microsoft Viva Insights supports productivity and well-being by supplying behavioral data and intelligent recommendations directly to employees themselves. Private information doesn’t go beyond their own inboxes, so Microsoft Digital only needed a quick sign-off on the feature.

Microsoft Viva Learning is an AI-powered platform that offers relevant training to employees. In its initial form, Viva Learning included capabilities for tracking progress against course recommendations. Those tracking elements meant that the tool needed further review. But with only minor progress-sharing elements involved to secure approval, the team was able to put the tool into action quickly.

Microsoft Viva Manager Insights provides team leads with data about employees’ work patterns to help assess their workloads. That extra layer of behavioral data necessitates a more in-depth review.

But because the approval of Microsoft Viva Insights and Microsoft Viva Learning was so rapid and approval of Microsoft Viva Goals is coming, the workers’ council can give Viva Manager Insights their full attention. As a result, they’ve substantially reduced the turnaround time for Microsoft Viva compared to previous releases—from one and a half years to a target of around six months.

Cloud, agility, compliance

This more flexible, triage-friendly form of review wouldn’t be possible without cloud-driven agile development, which, for example, enables modular releases for individual features within Microsoft Teams. Agility in product development leads to flexibility in the approval process because entire products aren’t held back by individual feature reviews.

Instead, teams can easily activate or deactivate modules hosted within larger platforms without disrupting the overall experience. Kopp sums up the value of that modularity: “You can bring out the non-critical modules much faster and spend your time reviewing the ones that really need it.”

Meanwhile, increased collaboration between the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany and product teams helps the cross-company collaborative group anticipate and resolve many compliance issues before features reach the approval process. As a result of this multifaceted collaboration, Microsoft Germany is winning back hundreds of hours per year, and they’re sharing those lessons with other country and regional offices in Europe.

A leader in trust

Internal rollouts are only the beginning of the story. The rigorous process developed by the Microsoft workers’ council in Germany is a story worth sharing with partners and customers in hopes that it will help them streamline how they roll out new product features and services at their companies.

Roxana Schupp, account executive for Microsoft Dynamics 365, says it’s become a sales differentiator and a way to build relationships with customers who are trying to solve some of the same challenges at their companies.

“The customers are looking at us as a benchmark,” Schupp says. “The way we deal with data and how we address management or usage of systems in order to comply with regulations in different countries, those are very important for them.”

As a result of this close collaboration between Microsoft Digital and the German workers’ council, an unofficial rule has emerged across Europe. “If it works in Germany, it should work everywhere,” Kopp says.

Here are some tips on how you can better partner with your workers’ councils to streamline how you roll out new features and products at your companies:

• Build a robust triage system: Establish parameters for triggering reviews and criteria for different levels of engagement.
• Understand that you’re allies: Teams focused on compliance aren’t there to be blockers. They want to make sure enablement is compliant.
• Establish trust through dialog: Build internal awareness across teams to bring everyone to the table.
• Engage early: Seeking feedback early in the product development process avoids churn and rework.
• Embrace modularity: Deploying on a feature-by-feature basis empowers effective compliance triage without delaying overall product rollouts. Make the features configurable at the geo/country level to comply with local regulations.
• Ask good questions: What do you need to see? Why is this a concern? What are your fears?
• Compliance and privacy are non-negotiable, so ensure that your technical settings and policies mitigate risk while providing benefits.

• Learn how Microsoft is building an employee-centric experience.
• Experience the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft.
• Find out how Microsoft reinvented the employee experience.

The post Microsoft workers’ council partnerships boost the company’s product and service rollouts appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“One of the best parts of leading Microsoft Digital Employee Experience is getting to be Customer Zero for our latest products,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president for Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), the company’s IT organization. “It’s always gratifying to see our insights and ideas reflected in the final products, and I’m especially proud of the work we’ve done with Viva Amplify, which will bring a new level of innovation and efficiency to communicators.”

To get our virtuous Customer Zero cycle right, we must communicate well with our employees—this is why our internal IT Communications team has been rethinking everything they do.

“Your employees won’t get behind you if you don’t bring them in at the right time with the right info,” D’Hers says. “We’re reinventing the way we do internal IT communications, and it’s working.”

Getting communications right is critical. It fosters collaboration, empowers individuals, and drives business growth. At Microsoft, we recognize that getting communications right is not just a necessary skill, but a strategic advantage. It enables us to align our teams, engage our customers, and ultimately, deliver innovative solutions that transform people’s lives.

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

Our IT Communications team and all communicators at the company are preparing to use Microsoft Viva Amplify to get their messages to our employees. Viva Amplify is our new communications platform that we’re starting to roll out in September 2023.

[Learn more about our role as Microsoft’s Customer Zero. Find out how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva. See how we’re using Minecraft to teach our employees healthy hybrid meeting habits.]

Inform and inspire

The core job of our IT Communications team is to disseminate product updates and productivity guidance to our employees while gathering valuable feedback from them. The team’s goal is to drive product adoption, improve employee engagement, productivity, and to foster increased customer empathy in product development groups.

“Getting communications right is critical,” D’Hers says. “It fosters collaboration, empowers individuals, and drives business growth. At Microsoft, we recognize that getting communications right is not just a necessary skill, but a strategic advantage. It enables us to align our teams, engage our customers, and ultimately, deliver innovative solutions that transform people’s lives.”

Having a well-crafted strategy is essential for achieving effective communication. The IT Communications team lives by the guiding communication pillars of informing and inspiring employees and encouraging innovation.

“Inform” calls on Microsoft communicators to not only educate employees about new product features and capabilities, but to discuss the importance of what’s changing and trying new products out.

“Our goal is to ensure people at Microsoft know about, embrace, and influence technology changes at Microsoft. To do that, we provide critical information about technologies developed within Microsoft to employees,” says Diana McCarty, a principal group content program manager and the leader of Microsoft’s IT Communications team. “From the start, we’ve tried to be methodical in our planning and creative and flexible in our communication approaches to mitigate internal audience burnout.”

Avoiding burnout is a vital part of “inform,” as employees can feel fatigued by the amount of messaging directed at them at work. To do so, the IT Communications team employs user-centric messaging, which focuses on using different channels to reach people where they are in ways that are clear and concise. The other key element in user-centric messaging is providing an answer to the crucial question of “why” that comes up during transitions.

We feel that Microsoft employees are consumers—they are our Customer Zero. And, like external consumers, they want content that is inspiring.

—Susanne Smith, principal content PM manager, IT Communications team, MDEE

“So often in IT communications, you’re told to update or to move to a new system,” says Susanne Smith, a principal content PM manager on the IT Communications team in MDEE. “But at times you don’t get great context as to why that’s important so the change can feel arbitrary. Often, the “why” is that we are Customer Zero and test our products internally before we release them externally. But we also focus on what’s in it for our employees and their productivity.”

Microsoft views employees as its first customers, and this is where the “inspire” communication pillar comes to life.

“We feel that Microsoft employees are consumers—they are our Customer Zero,” Smith says. “And, like external consumers, they want content that is inspiring.”

The IT Communications team looks for ways to give employees a reason to smile, and to provide moments that make employees feel valued and connected. “That’s something that our team has really been focused on in the last couple of years—to create delightful marketing,” Smith says.

Change, particularly technology change, can be intimidating. Communications that are quirky, clever, and fun—when appropriate—invite employees to embrace the moment, get involved, and maybe see themselves working in a new way.

Being innovative within those pillars is also important. This involves incorporating feedback, and the two-way communication function that the IT Communications team carries out between internal customers and product teams.

“The innovation aspect is vital,” McCarty says. “We work with product and deployment teams to roll out new technologies. As we receive feedback from our internal customers, we send this back to the product teams—and often, features are added or altered using the feedback to create better end-user experiences.”

Innovation also happens within the IT Communications team. A top priority for the team is to keep finding new ways to get the word out about changes in technology, to try different approaches, and incorporate new communication tools and channels, like AI and Microsoft Viva Amplify.

Driving product adoption and engagement

If you make adopting new products interesting to employees, they’ll work with you.

“We are guardians of employee experience within new products,” says Eva Etchells, a program manager on the IT Communications team. “We advocate for the employee experience to ensure that products properly serve the intended audience. We also drive product adoption by making new technologies interesting and relevant to employees.”

To ensure that products serve the intended target market, Etchells and other members of the IT Communications team test new products themselves and share them with employees who want to be the first to try out new products.

The team has also carved out a role as an “ask desk” within the company on Microsoft Viva Engage. Answering questions, helping their peers work through issues with new technology, and connecting them with the Helpdesk when necessary allows them to nurture relationships and build rapport with employees who are willing to try out the very earliest builds of new products.

Employees are busy, and there are always a lot of messages coming at them in their daily work. Capturing attention is a key focus for us as communicators trying to drive adoption.

—Eva Etchells, program manager, IT Communications team, MDEE

The IT Communications team also stays in close contact with product development teams, testers, and others charged with gathering product feedback so they know what’s coming next and can adapt messaging to reflect or influence employee sentiment.

This isn’t easy. Cultivating interest in testing new products presents difficulties—this is where the team emphasizes how impactful being an early adopter is.

“Employees are busy, and there are always a lot of messages coming at them in their daily work,” Etchells says. “Capturing attention is a key focus for us as communicators trying to drive adoption.”

Reinventing how we communicate with employees

To get Microsoft employees interested in new products, the team starts with meeting employees where they are in their day-to-day activities. Using Microsoft Viva Engage for announcements and news provides a seamless, social media-like experience integrated into employees’ daily routines, eliminating the sense of it being an additional task.

Microsoft Viva Engage is an employee experience tool that’s part of the larger Microsoft Viva platform—with some aspects available within Microsoft 365—that enables organizations to foster employee engagement and collaboration through a centralized digital space for communication, announcements, and social interactions. When it comes to convincing employees to make the jump and test out new products, the team reaches back to their “inspire” communication pillar. Often, this translates to finding the right marketing angle.

“To encourage employees to incorporate something new into their schedule, we prioritize making our content engaging and demonstrating empathy towards employee interests,” says Sarah Lundy, a senior program manager on the IT Communications team. “Viva Engage is one of the most powerful tools we use to do this.”

The Microsoft Viva employee experience platform, for example, was set up as a tool that can help employees increase their internal visibility across the company, which in turn can help them advance their careers within the company. In the supporting content, the team highlighted how Microsoft Viva tools make employee lives easier and their job performance better.

The team also found new and creative ways to reach people beyond sending emails. For example, the IT Communications team used Microsoft Viva Engage hashtags to mix up how they got their messages out.

One fun way the team connected with employees was to create a Minecraft game to change their behavior in meetings to better accommodate our new hybrid work world.

“You never truly know what’s going to excite people,” Etchells says. “Recently, we helped our colleagues name their work semesters after elements in the periodic table for fun, and let people participate in polls to choose which ones we used. It was surprising how engaged and excited folks were—and the key to success here seemed to be focusing on user participation.”

At the end of the day, driving adoption and engaging employees often relies on the willingness of the team to try new ideas and adapt.

It helps us drive adoption for new products when executives engage with the content we create. Leader sponsorship can make a huge difference.

—Sarah Lundy, senior program manager, IT Communications team, MDEE

“As communicators, we have to be willing to try new things that might or might not work, and to pivot quickly when things don’t work,” Etchells says.

“There’s an aspect of behavioral science to communications,” Lundy says. “Employees may respond well to a type of communication once, and then later respond poorly to that same style of communication.”

Boost your message with executive voices

It helps when executives show support for the work that communicators do.

“It helps us drive adoption for new products when executives engage with the content we create,” Lundy says. “Leader sponsorship can make a huge difference.”

A campaign that the team ran, called “#2022Reflections,” featured Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

Nadella shared his reflections in a video on his storyline in Microsoft Viva Engage and urged people to participate with their own reflections using the hashtag #2022Reflections. When they used the hashtag, participants’ posts were aggregated in an official campaign in Viva Engage, generating conversations and interactions. The IT Communications team sent an email to employees highlighting ways Viva could support them as they wrapped up the year and encouraging reflections in the campaign.

Ultimately, the campaign successfully drove awareness of the Microsoft Viva Engage features and encouraged meaningful interactions within the product.

Becoming Customer Zero with Microsoft Viva Amplify

In a meta moment, the IT Communications team recently got to be their very own Customer Zero for a new communications tool, Microsoft Viva Amplify.

They helped us understand the challenges they face as communicators, from designing communications campaigns to tracking employee engagement metrics. This informed our development of Viva Amplify and helped us build a better user experience very early on in development.

—Judith Yaaqoubi, principal product manager, Microsoft Viva Amplify product group

Microsoft Viva Amplify is part of the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform that empowers internal communication teams and leaders to elevate their message and energize their audiences. Specifically, Viva Amplify provides a single platform for communicators and leaders to plan, create, and send their communications to employees. In one motion, they can use Viva Amplify to build a communication once and have it automatically formatted for and published to multiple endpoints—email, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Viva Connections, and internal SharePoint sites. Microsoft Viva Engage is being added as an endpoint soon, as well as other communications channels.

Microsoft Viva Amplify makes sure that company messaging meets employees where they already are throughout Microsoft 365, making it an intuitive part of their daily activities. Viva Amplify is available to customers as part of the Viva suite and as part of a new communications offering.

“To create Microsoft Viva Amplify, we did a lot of deep research with external companies, but also with the IT Communications team,” says Judith Yaaqoubi, a principal product manager on the Microsoft Viva Amplify product group. “They helped us understand the challenges they face as communicators, from designing communications campaigns to tracking employee engagement metrics. This informed our development of Viva Amplify and helped us build a better user experience very early on in development.”

Particularly, the IT Communications team allowed the Microsoft Viva Amplify development team to study their work habits during communication campaigns over a long period of time, which wasn’t possible during the research conducted with customers. This allowed the development team to better discern how campaigns are created, and to comprehend the usage of tools within the campaigns.

“The IT Communications team also hosted workshops with other teams and individuals within Microsoft to test Microsoft Viva Amplify and identify challenges experienced in the product as we developed it,” Yaaqoubi says. “This close partnership not only helped drive internal adoption of the product but has allowed to us to create a product that better serves the needs of communicators.”

In Microsoft Viva Amplify, the results from internal testing with the IT Communications team are clear. The features for planning and sending communications across the company are intuitive and simple.

Viva Amplify has the following features for executives and communications professionals:

• Campaign orchestration tools, including the creation of a campaign brief that drives alignment on objectives and key messages between campaign collaborators
• The ability to create content once and publish it simultaneously across Microsoft 365 tools such as Microsoft Outlook, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams (Microsoft Viva Engage is coming soon)
• Publication preview modes to test how content will look on each platform before pushing it live
• Detailed performance metrics within Microsoft Viva Amplify to check campaign reach and engagement with target audiences
• Campaign cards that allow you to visualize and manage all campaigns in one place, with “Live” statuses for active campaigns

The “Campaign Brief” tab, in particular, shows the influence from the IT Communications team’s testing. Upon selecting the tab there are multiple sections, the first being “Campaign Objectives,” where goals and messages that apply to the entire campaign can be listed.

“We learned by working with the IT Communications team that often, there are many people with different roles and perspectives working on the same communication campaigns. This feature allows everyone to stay in alignment and ensure that key messages are clear across all campaign content,” Yaaqoubi says.

Each platform has its own nuances, and we wanted to be able to get that right. Sending everything out at once with the ability to adjust the message for each endpoint is very powerful.

— Diana McCarty, principal group content program manager, IT Communications team, MDEE

So far, the IT Communications team has used Microsoft Viva Amplify to develop several communications campaigns and has seen how the platform makes communications more efficient.

“We love being able funnel all of our communications into one tool,” McCarty says. “It allows us to reach employees where they are.”

The quick customization that her team can do makes sure that the message is appropriate for the various platforms where the content is published, which helps it land well. “Each platform has its own nuances, and we wanted to be able to get that right,” McCarty says. “Sending everything out at once with the ability to adjust the message for each endpoint is very powerful.”

Building toward the future

Looking forward, the Microsoft Viva Amplify team is excited to continue working on how to make communicators more successful, including saving time by using generative AI.

“Internal communications is primed for a revolution,” says Naomi Moneypenny, who leads product development for Viva Amplify. “Our goal is to empower and scale the impact of communicators by managing their extended teams and assets effectively, recommending most effective actions and resources.”

The IT Communications team is also working alongside other development teams to test communication features currently being built to add to Microsoft Viva Engage. Microsoft 365 Copilot in Viva Engage will help users to write posts by generating content.

“We innovate every single day and I’m so proud of this team,” Smith says. “From the channels that we use to the messaging we create all the way down to our use of AI to enhance our materials.”

It’s all about empowering the team to be creative in ways that drive impact, McCarty says.

“We thrive on exploring unconventional uses, finding new ways to approach challenges, constantly seeking fresh perspectives and unique solutions, and working with product teams like Viva Amplify to transform internal communications capabilities” she says. “Everything we do ends up supporting our employees and customers, and that’s what truly drives us.”

Microsoft Viva Amplify will start rolling out publicly in September 2023 and will undergo continuous improvement—with plenty of insights from the IT Communications team.

Here are some things to think about as you consider transforming your IT communications function at your company:

• Microsoft offers a range of powerful tools, including Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft Viva Amplify, to enhance productivity and streamline communication within organizations.
• The IT Communications team plays a crucial role in disseminating information, gathering feedback, and driving product development within Microsoft.
• The team follows three guiding communication pillars: inform, inspire, and innovate, to educate employees, create inspiring content, and incorporate feedback into product development.
• Microsoft views employees as their first customers and focuses on driving adoption and engagement by meeting employees where they are and using user-centric messaging.
• The IT Communications team has played a significant role in the development of Microsoft Viva Amplify, working closely with the product development team to ensure a better user experience and more effective communication tools. The product will start rolling out in September 2023 and will continue to be improved with insights from the IT Communications team and other early users.

Go here to learn more about getting started with Microsoft Viva Amplify at your company.

• Learn more about our role as Microsoft’s Customer Zero.
• Find out how we’re evolving our culture with Microsoft Viva.
• See how we’re using Minecraft to teaching Microsoft employees healthy hybrid meeting habits.

The post Getting our internal IT communications right with Microsoft Viva Amplify appeared first on Inside Track Blog.