The need for digital transformation

The need for our digital transformation is evident—the global pandemic has created challenges for every organization, from employee placement to supply chain management, to continued retail operations. The investments that Microsoft has made in digital transformation have helped us respond quickly and efficiently to the frequent changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our continued digital transformation will enable Microsoft to further its mission of empowering every person and every organization of the planet to achieve more, and it starts right here at home, with MDEE. Every new challenge presents an opportunity to assess our role in the organization and how we can put Microsoft in an even better position to take on new challenges.

Disruptions have always been a catalyst for business transformation. To lead on the forefront, we’re becoming more agile, efficient, and innovative. This means changing our systems and processes to support and quickly adapt to new products, services, business models, regulations, and anything else that comes our way.

Leading with vision and world-class execution

Leading with vision is the primary driver of our digital transformation. MDEE powers the company, and we are critical to both internal and external customers. To lead with vision, we need a clearly articulated view of where we want to take things and what we need to get there. Aligning our work to a larger vision of what we want to accomplish pushes us past day-to-day fire drills and comfortable routines to deliver something truly great for Microsoft.  Each one of our groups has a clear, targeted vision grounded in what our customers need and what we need as an organization. However, articulating the vision is not enough. An inspired and productive vision must accurately reflect what we actually do.

Vision is the foundation for the major decisions we make, not a document that we write once a year and put on a shelf. Building a strong connection between vision and work can be clarified by telling a story. The vision should create a narrative that informs our day-to-day decisions at every level. Each choice, no matter how granular, should connect itself and contribute to the broader vision. In turn, the vision inspires these choices, supporting aspirations for the business and energizing our employees. Telling the story this way makes us think carefully about how a piece of work fits into the broader vision—or if it doesn’t. It also helps us define our work in a way that’s consumable by our various stakeholder audiences, which is critical if we want them to support and partner with us. If we tell the story well, our stakeholders should be able to tell the story of how our work supports them to others.

[Discover how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World. Learn more about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation. Find out how we’re enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft.]

Making hard choices

Being vision-led means making difficult and specific choices about where we will focus our efforts, and which work we will need to postpone or simply not do. We ruthlessly prioritize, focusing on what to stop investing in as much as what to invest in next. We set a high bar for quality, delivery, cost, and compliance. Our approach includes observing important guidelines for how we implement our vision and how that informs our operations. This includes:

• Connecting outcomes to the vision and clearly prioritizing.
• Placing user experiences at the center of our designs.
• Building capability and depth within role-specific disciplines.
• Investing in core platforms and systems to drive engineering productivity.
• Using data and insights to continually assess and prioritize our approach, ensuring that we achieve our most important goals and that they align with our vision.

With this mindset and these guidelines for execution, we empower our employees to think strategically. We want them to continually have this question in their minds: What experience do customers have when interacting with Microsoft, and how can we make it better?

Establishing priorities that support our vision

As part of our Microsoft Digital Product Vision, we established and articulated critical priorities that framed our areas of work. We based the priorities on pain points that existed within MDEE and on best-in-class experiences across other organizations that we studied. The priorities continue to define and guide our work, and they act as an organizational tool for measuring our transformation’s progress:

Cloud-centric architecture

Cloud-centric architecture is designed to deliver a consistently high level of service reliability. Our systems in the cloud are agile, resilient, cost-effective, and scalable, so we can be proactive and innovative. Microsoft Azure is at the core of our architecture. We use Azure to automate our processes, unify our tools, and improve our engineering productivity. This includes transitioning to a DevOps model using the out-of-the-box capabilities that Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines offer. The DevOps model enables faster deployment of new capabilities that are more secure and compliant. A modern cloud-centric architecture is foundational to our digital transformation, and we’re building integrated, reliable systems, instrumented for telemetry, to gather data and enable experimentation. Our investments include:

• Transitioning from on-premises to cloud offerings to enable dynamic elastic compute, geo-redundancy, unified data strategy (Azure Data Lake), and flexible software-defined infrastructures.
• Moving to cloud-centered IT operations, with provisioning, patching, monitoring, and backups for our cloud and on-premises environments utilizing Azure-based offerings.
• Enabling continued company growth and improvement in our platform services while staying flat on the running cost of our services.
• Developing deeper and richer insights into our service reliability, via standardization of monitoring solutions through Azure Application Insights, and standardization of incident-management tooling and automatic alerting. At the same time, we’re increasingly modeling our critical business processes and helping ensure end-to-end integrity through the monitoring and alerting of complex processes spanning multiple systems.
• Providing a powerful feedback loop to our product-group partners (such as those for Azure, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Windows) to showcase Microsoft running on Microsoft. This results in an improved enterprise-customer experience, including running one of the largest SAP instances entirely on Azure and helping ensure that Azure is SAP-ready for our customers.

Secure enterprise

Security is a never-ending, holistic pursuit that requires the same level of innovation and improvement found in every facet of the tech industry. Cloud-based architecture and ubiquitous user access require an enterprise security strategy that embraces identity as the new perimeter and encompasses our entire digital footprint. Improved security, which we’re seamlessly integrating into all parts of our digital transformation, is a component of every product we develop. Our strategy aligns around six core security pillars: device health, identity management, information protection, data and telemetry, risk management, and security assurance. Some of the specific areas in which we’re investing include:

• Using Zero Trust as a model to help protect our infrastructure through enforced device health, strong authentication, least-privileged access, and pervasive telemetry that verifies control effectiveness.
• Eliminating passwords through strong multi-factor authentication.
• Thwarting phishing attacks on our users by using Microsoft Office 365 safe filters and Safe links, phishing detection, and email-delivery prevention.
• Making our Security Operations Center even more efficient and effective through automation and the orchestration of detection and response.

Data and intelligence

Data is the most critical asset that modern organizations possess. The exponential increases in data, sophisticated algorithms, and computational power are fueling modern organizations to make rapid advances in technology and business disruptions. Our data’s value is directly proportional to the number of people within our organization who can find it, understand it, know they can trust it, and then connect it in new and meaningful ways for the deepest insights. We’re turning disparate company data into cohesive insights and intelligent experiences, and we’re investing in core areas including:

• Creating a modern data foundation by aggregating clean, connected, and authoritative data that is catalogued and easily discoverable in a common location and any team can understand how to use to create insights and intelligent experiences.
• Developing AI and machine learning—not to replace human experts but augment and accelerate human decisions using trusted intelligent models built on the wealth of available data.
• Using analytics services to understand user journeys, processes, behavior, and insights, which roll up to executive scorecards to measure our progress against strategic goals.

Customer centricity

Employees and customers belong at the center of our focus and need to feel that they’re doing business with “One Microsoft” across all products and channels. Our ability to digitally transform hinges on a strong foundation of customer data. Achieving a holistic understanding allows us to provide customers with relevant and tailored offers and highly customized customer service by responding to their needs proactively. The complete technology solutions in the offers give customers the best value and a consistent experience. To achieve a security-enhanced and 360-degree understanding of our customers, online identity tenants need to be linked with sales accounts, purchase accounts and agreements, billing accounts, and third-party organizational-reference data. Our investments include:

• Developing customer health-analytics and recommendation engines, using a clean directory and historical customer actions and interactions, to better understand and predict our customers’ needs and how we can add value with our offerings.
• Publishing a shared, authoritative, and clean directory of organizational data and providing the tools and processes to maintain its accuracy and completeness.
• Augmenting the organizational data that Microsoft holds by identifying and managing the relationships for any organization, enabling a more holistic understanding of who the customer is and how we can better serve them.

Productive enterprise

Microsoft employees are at the heart of our mission to enable and support our customers and partners to achieve more. We empower our employees to be their most creative and productive in how they work and collaborate across physical and digital environments. We use Microsoft products and services underpinned with Microsoft 365, AI, and machine learning to deliver connected, accessible, interactive, and individualized experiences for our employees. Our specific investments include:

• Supporting a broad selection of devices, providing a quick and easy setup, and ensuring the devices are always up to date. We provide secure and seamless access to work-related apps, sites, services, documents, and data.
• Developing enterprise search and task-automation capabilities that use Microsoft Search and integrated digital assistants. We’re providing our employees with a coherent and reliable enterprise-search experience and delivering automated micro-task capability to further enhance productivity.
• Enabling team productivity by using Microsoft Teams and Office 365 as the backbone, fostering increased engagement, and accelerating decision making across devices and locations.
• Creating a modern workplace where our employees have integrated digital and physical experiences for finding meeting spaces, indoor wayfinding, transportation, parking, and other workplace services.
• Providing a customizable web and mobile employee experience focused on what’s important to the individual, delivering personalized access to workplace services, and making it easier to quickly complete common tasks.

Turning vision into a practical reality

Our priorities describe what we do, but how we’ll do it is just as important. We’ve made significant changes to the way we work to enable transformation. These changes allow us to take more ownership of our work, run more efficiently and effectively, and build in a way that’s durable over time. With a model for transformation, we can move away from decisions and directions based on team budget availability and move toward the delivery of clear and prioritized business outcomes. We measure our collective success by directly applying this model to our business and not by pure delivery of features. We prioritize as an organization based on where our vision directs us rather than at the local budget level. The practical goal of our vision-led product mindset is to discover the most effective and efficient solutions that will have the greatest impact on the transformational focus areas that make our vision a reality.

[Learn how we’re creating the digital workplace at Microsoft. Discover how we’re transforming modern engineering here at Microsoft. Check out how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft. Learn how we’re transforming enterprise collaboration at Microsoft.]

Transformed operating model

With an operating model for transformation, we can move away from decisions and directions based on team budgets and move toward the delivery of clear and prioritized business outcomes. Through this model, we’re empowering our business groups and employees by giving them autonomy and decision-making capabilities. Each business group maintains its own vision and has the freedom to prioritize its work based on that vision. However, this work still needs to align with the overarching MDEE vision and is assessed twice a year during a central review. This ensures that work is correctly prioritized and funded across the entire organization. Examples of our transformed operating model include:

• Centralizing funding and prioritization: We’ve moved away from a decentralized, department-focused funding model and toward a centralized model where MDEE owns the budget. In the past, our business groups, such as Finance and Marketing, drove funding and projects. Now, we can use our priorities to fund work based on our vision.
• Insourcing core systems and engineering: We’re managing the systems most critical to our organization’s success with trained, full-time employees. Historically, we outsourced much of this work. However, we’re bringing it back under the control of our employees and retaining intellectual property. We want our people behind the design, development, and operation of our most-important internal products.
• Focusing metrics on business outcomes: Our metrics reflect the business outcomes to which we’re driving as opposed to traditional IT operating metrics. To transform successfully, alignment with our vision and contribution to the organization’s success take top priority. Therefore, how we measure success is based on business outcomes and not on arbitrary metrics.

Product-based approach to our business

To enable world-class execution of the services we build and run, we’re taking a product-based approach to our processes. We want to focus on developing solutions that contribute to our vision, and we want to use agile development methods and product-focused management in our development. Taking a product-based approach to our business means:

• Creating a vision and business-driven agenda: We ensure that anything in which we invest resources aligns to our vision. We’re asking our internal teams to always have the best interest of Microsoft in mind. If it doesn’t align with our vision, it should be questioned—regardless of who’s doing the questioning. We want to produce the best products for our internal and external customers.
• Focusing on skill development and a DevOps structure: A DevOps structure extends the management lifecycle for developers beyond version release. With the DevOps approach, the people on our team in MDEE who build solutions are responsible for the operation, fixes, troubleshooting and ownership over each line of code they write. A DevOps approach and agile methodology focus our employees on a solution’s success both during its development and after it’s in use. This leads to a more fluid evolution of product features and a focus on functionality rather than on feature addition.
• Shifting to product management: We manage products rather than projects. Product management keeps our teams focused on the success of the product rather than the completion of a project. Our product managers are involved in the entire process, from managing relationships with stakeholders to understanding the technical foundations of their products. Product management builds on the DevOps structure to help ensure that teams who develop a solution feel invested in the ongoing success of that solution and not just on the release of the latest version.

Modern engineering and design practices across all processes

Modern engineering focuses on providing a common set of tools and automation that delivers code and new functionality to our employees by enabling continuous integration and delivery practices. We prioritize the most effective outcomes for the business, delivering against a ranked backlog. We add telemetry to monitor customer usage patterns, which provides insights on the health of our services and customer experiences. We want to remove functional silos in our organization and increase the ways in which our infrastructure, apps, and services connect and integrate. Behind all this, we have a unified set of standards that protect and enable our employees. We engineer for the future by:

• Establishing a coherent design system: We’re creating a consistent, coherent, and seamless experience for our employees and customers across all our products and solutions. This means establishing priorities and standards for design and the user experience and creating an internal catalog of shared principles and guidelines to keep our entire organization in sync. Historically, we’ve developed in siloes, which led to varying user experiences and a cacophony of different tools. Now, we’re reviewing work in aggregate and scrutinizing experiences to drive user productivity.
• Creating integrated and connected services: Our move to the cloud increases the overall agility of the development process and accelerates value delivery to the company. We’ve achieved this by re-envisioning our portfolio into a microservice architecture that promotes code reuse and enables cross-service dependencies through APIs. This further enables the delivery of a seamless and integrated experience that brings data and tools together, providing users with intuitive experiences and new insights.
• Building privacy, security, and accessibility standards into our workflow: We integrate tools that support our engineers in building improved privacy, security, and accessibility into our solutions. Without these standards and automated policies, we’d have to rework and clean up as situations change. This is more costly and impacts our velocity of releases to users. Creating standards that we apply organization-wide, and from the beginning, creates an environment of trust in our engineering practices. Our innovations in this area ensure that our solutions also benefit our customers as these solutions are integrated into our commercial products.

Using a customer-zero feedback cycle

In MDEE, we have a unique opportunity to help our customers through their own transformations by sharing our best practices and lessons learned. As early adopters of Microsoft solutions, we provide feedback to our product-development teams and we co-develop solutions with them, which ultimately improves the products that we, and our customers, use to transform. Many of our product enhancements begin as internal solutions to business problems at Microsoft and then evolve within the feedback cycle, and then are incorporated into a final product. A key part of being customer zero is that we provide advice, guidance, and reference materials to customers based on our transformation blueprint and early adopter experience.

Almost every company in the world, including Microsoft, finds itself at a point unlike any other since the industrial revolution. The old IT model hinders the ability to remain relevant in an ever-changing marketplace, and companies must transform to maintain their competitive positioning. At Microsoft, we’ve rallied around transformation and are well underway. We’ve set ambitious goals, and we’re reshaping what we value and how we work. At our core, we’re vision-led and adopting the expectation for world-class execution. The combination of external and internal change presents a significant challenge but, more importantly, it offers a substantial opportunity for us to become more agile and respond more quickly. As a result, we’re in a better position to empower our employees, engage our customers and partners, optimize our operations, and transform our products.

Transformation does not have a finish line—it’s a journey. As we progress through our transformation, we’ll make mistakes and adjust our strategy accordingly, but we’ll also continue to move forward. We will share our transformation journey with our customers with the hope that our experiences can inspire, advise, and assist them through their own transformations.

• Discover how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a Hybrid World.
• Learn more about Microsoft’s cloud-centric architecture transformation.
• Find out how we’re enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re creating the digital workplace at Microsoft.
• Discover how we’re transforming modern engineering here at Microsoft.
• Check out how we’re redefining the digitally assisted workday at Microsoft.
• Learn how we’re transforming enterprise collaboration at Microsoft.

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

The post Understanding Microsoft’s digital transformation appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

“Over the past few years, employees have embraced hybrid work and enjoy the balance that it brings to their lives,” says Claire Sisson, who leads the internal deployment of Teams at Microsoft in her role as a principal group product manager. “Microsoft Teams has been key to enable that empowerment.”

It’s empowering your employees to do their best work no matter where they’re working.

“Having the right tool to enable boundaryless collaboration, asynchronous work and meetings that scale from 1:1 to large events make all the difference for our employees,” Sisson says. “With the recent Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities added to Teams, the AI infused experiences will make hybrid work even more seamless. We’re very excited about the journey we’re on to enable everyone to reach their goals however they wish.”

Microsoft relied on Teams to support remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic, including in China, where company employees were among the first to work from home. To learn more, read this blog post from Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, and Lily Zheng, director of Microsoft China. You can also go here to read Spataro’s post on the company’s commitment to customers during COVID-19.

Sisson says there are many other examples of how Teams helps employees tackle all the different types of work they need to do in a day, including this one on a snowstorm that hit company headquarters in Redmond, Washington, shortly after Microsoft upgraded from Skype for Business to Teams.

“Ninety-five percent of our Redmond-area employees worked from home during that massive snowstorm,” she says. “We were interested to see how Teams would hold up, and it did so with flying colors.”

The larger Employee Productivity Engineering team also used Teams to hold a 500-person live global meeting that connected employees from 48 different countries. “That one also went very smoothly,” Sisson says.

[Discover how Microsoft uses Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms. Explore how Microsoft is rethinking the hybrid meeting room experience with Microsoft Teams. Learn more about advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.]

Guidance for working remotely

Microsoft wants employees working in Teams to feel like they’re not losing anything from working away from their office.

“With Microsoft’s commitment to flexible work (and teams spread across the world), face-to-face connection isn’t always possible. We want everyone to feel heard and included,” says Sarah Lundy, senior content program manager in MDEE in charge of communicating to employees about how to get the most out of Teams. “We have a set of tips that we share with employees when they need to work remotely in large numbers—things like turn on video to help everyone feel connected, pause to give people on the call a chance to speak, and remind people to mute themselves when they’re talking to cut down on distracting background noise.”

Sisson added to that list, saying remote meetings are much more effective when you record them for people who are not present if that’s acceptable to the team. Also helpful, she says, is to send an agenda in advance, and to identify a facilitator for the meeting that can monitor questions and make sure everyone’s voice is heard.

Check out the devices that can improve your meeting room experience with the help of Microsoft Teams.

“When everyone remembers to make a few adjustments, remote meetings can be as effective as being in person,” she says.

Features designed to help

In some ways, remote meetings can be more additive than meeting in person.

“When you make it a Teams channel meeting, then everything is captured in a single channel conversation for your reference,” Sisson says. “All the documents, all the chats, and of course, the recording of everything everyone said is in one place, and much of it is searchable.”

Channel meetings are highly effective for reoccurring meetings, where keeping track of a project over time is crucial, she says.

Teams channels themselves offer a great way for groups of employees to work together asynchronously, Lundy says. Collaborating in a channel ensures that the interactions employees have are transparent and open. Files, applications, and conversations are easily accessible to every team member.

Microsoft Teams launched the AI-infused intelligent meeting Recap feature to further support asynchronous workstyles. By collecting information shared in recorded and transcribed Teams calls, employees can view a video summary of the call and quickly jump to the highlighted chapters and topics that were discussed, read AI-generated notes and tasks from the call, and even see where their name was mentioned in the meeting.

“In a hybrid workplace, effective teamwork habits that keep everyone informed and connected become more important than ever,” she says.

When teams across Microsoft hold meetings larger than 1,000 people, they are asked to use live events in Microsoft 365 in conjunction with Viva Engage to broadcast the meeting while allowing the audience to engage via chat.

Teams pays attention to the strength of the network and adapts as needed, which helps make sure the experience is optimized. When employees work remotely in large numbers, their use of chat in Teams shoots up, Lundy says.

“If you chat with a person or group frequently, you can pin the chat so it always shows up at the top of your chat list,” she says. “We suggest that you name your group chats to keep them organized and easy to find.”

And when deeper-level collaboration is needed, employees are encouraged to move their chats into a channel.

Lundy urges employees to ask themselves a few key questions:

• Will you be collaborating on multiple related workstreams, each with their own conversations, files, and applications?
• Do you envision multiple conversations happening at once?
• Will the project last longer than two weeks?
• Are more than three people involved?
• Do you want files to be available for coauthoring to all members of the team?

When they answer “yes” to any of the questions, she encourages them to start a threaded conversation in a Teams channel.

There are many other Teams features that come in handy when employees work from home, Lundy says, including meeting backgrounds, live captions, and cloud recording.

“Use a background when you’re not happy with your backdrop, whether it be the airport, a coffee shop, or a messy room at home,” she says. “It keeps you in focus while hiding anything distracting behind you.”

Teams’ live captioning feature can detect what’s said in a meeting and, in real-time, present captions to anyone who wants them, she says. Cloud recording captures the audio, video, and screen sharing activity for anyone who missed a meeting or needs to refer to what happened.

Other steps Lundy encourages employees to take include downloading the Teams mobile app, managing Teams notifications to avoid missing important conversations, and setting their status message in Teams to include their current location (such as “working from home”) so that people know where they are.

“There are lots of trips and tricks that we use to help employees get more out of working on Teams,” Lundy says. “There’s a lot that they can do to stay effective, no matter where they’re working from.”

• Discover how Microsoft uses Signature Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Explore how Microsoft is rethinking the hybrid meeting room experience with Microsoft Teams.
• Learn more about advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.

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

The post How Microsoft enables its employees to work remotely with Microsoft Teams appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft’s cloud-first strategy enables most Microsoft employees to directly access applications and services via the internet, but remote workers still use the company’s virtual private network (VPN) to access some corporate resources and applications when they’re outside of the office.

This became increasingly apparent when Microsoft prepared for its employees to work remotely in response to the global pandemic. VPN usage increased by 70 percent, which coincides with the significant spike in users working from home daily.

So then, how is Microsoft ensuring that its employees can securely access the applications they need?

With split tunneling and a Zero Trust security strategy.

As part of the company’s Zero Trust security strategy, employees in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE) redesigned the VPN infrastructure by adopting a split-tunneled configuration that further enables the company’s workloads moving to the cloud.

“Adopting split tunneling has ensured that Microsoft employees can access core applications over the internet using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Office 365,” says Steve Means, a principal cloud network engineering manager in MDEE. “This takes pressure off the VPN and gives employees more bandwidth to do their job securely.”

Eighty percent of remote working traffic flows to cloud endpoints where split tunneling is enabled, but the rest of the work that employees do remotely—which needs to be locked down on the corporate network—still goes through the company’s VPN.

“We need to make sure our VPN infrastructure has the same level of corporate network security as applications in the cloud,” says Carmichael Patton, a principal security architect on Microsoft’s Digital Security and Resilience team. “We’re applying the same Zero Trust principles to our VPN traffic, by applying conditional access to each connection.”

[Learn how Microsoft rebuilt its VPN infrastructure. Learn how Microsoft transitioned to modern access architecture with Zero Trust. Read how Microsoft is approaching Zero Trust Networking.]
For a transcript, please view the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleFoL0NkVM, select the “More actions” button (three dots icon) below the video, and then select “Show transcript.”

Securing remote workers with device management and conditional access

Moving most of the work that employees require to the cloud only became possible after the company adopted modern security controls that focus on securing devices.

“We no longer rely solely on the network to manage firewalls,” Patton says. “Instead, each application that an employee uses enforces its own security management—this means employees can only use an app after it verifies the health of their device.”

To support this transformed approach to security, Microsoft adopted a Zero Trust security model, which manages risk and secures working remotely by managing the device an employee uses.

“Before an employee can access an application, they must enroll their device, have relevant security policies, and have their device health validated,” Patton says. “This ensures that only registered devices that comply with company security policies can access corporate resources, which reduces the risk of malware and intruders.”

The team also recommends using a dynamic and scalable authentication mechanism, like Azure Active Directory, to avoid the trouble of certificates.

While most employees rely on our standard VPN infrastructure, Microsoft has specific scenarios that call for additional security when accessing company infrastructure or sensitive data. This is the case for MDEE employees in owner and contributor roles that are configured on a Microsoft Azure subscription as well as employees who make changes to customer-facing production services and systems like firewalls and network gear. To access corporate resources, these employees use Privileged Access Workstations, a dedicated operating system for sensitive tasks, to access a highly secure VPN infrastructure.

Phil Suver, a principal PM manager in MDEE, says working remotely during the global pandemic gives employees a sense of what the Zero Trust experience will be like when they return to the office.

“Hardened local area networks that previously accessed internal applications are a model of the past,” Suver says. “We see split tunneling as a gateway to prepare our workforce for our Zero Trust Networking posture, where user devices are highly protected from vulnerability and employees use the internet for their predominant workload.”

It’s also important to review your VPN structure for updates.

“When evaluating your VPN configuration, identify the highest compliance risks to your organization and make them the priority for controls, policies, and procedures,” Patton says. “Understand the security controls you give up by not flowing the connections through your internal infrastructure. Then, look at the controls you’re able to extend to the clients themselves, and find the right balance of risk and productivity that fits your organization.”

Keeping your devices up-to-date with split tunneling

Enterprises can also optimize patching and manage update compliance using services like Microsoft Endpoint Manager, Microsoft Intune, and Windows Update for Business. At Microsoft, a split-tunneled VPN configuration allows these services to keep devices current without requiring a VPN tunnel to do it.

“With a split-tunneled configuration, update traffic comes through the internet,” says Mike Carlson, a principal service engineering manager in MDEE. “This improves the user experience for employees by freeing up VPN bandwidth during patch and release cycles.”

At Microsoft, device updates fall into two categories: feature updates and quality updates. Feature updates occur every six months and encompass new operating system features, functionality, and major bug fixes. In contrast, monthly quality updates include security and reliability updates as well as small bug fixes. To balance both user experience and security, Microsoft’s current configuration of Windows Update for Business prompts Microsoft employees to update within 48 hours for quality updates and 7 days for feature updates.

“Not only can Windows Update for Business isolate update traffic from the VPN connection, but it can also provide better compliance management by using the deadline feature to adjust the timing of quality and feature updates,” Carlson says. “We can quickly drive compliance and have more time to focus on employees that may need additional support.”

Evaluating your VPN configuration

When your enterprise evaluates which VPN configuration works best for your company and users, you must evaluate their workflows.

“Some companies may need a full tunnel configuration, and others might want something cloud-based,” Means says. “If you’re a Microsoft customer, you can work with your sales team to request a customer engagement with a Microsoft expert to better understand our implementation and whether it would work for your enterprise.”

Means also said that it’s important to assess the legal requirements of the countries you operate in, which is done at Microsoft using Azure Traffic Manager. For example, split tunneling may not be the right configuration for countries with tighter controls over how traffic flows within and beyond their borders.

Suver also emphasized the importance of understanding the persona of your workforce, suggesting you should assess the workloads they may need to use remotely and their bandwidth capacity. You should also consider the maximum number of concurrent connections your VPN infrastructure supports and think through potential seasonal disruptions.

“Ensure that you’ve built for a snow day or a pandemic of a global nature,” Suver says. “We’ve had to send thousands of customer support agents to work from home. Typically, they didn’t use VPN to have voice conversations with customers. Because we sized and distributed our infrastructure for a global workforce, we were able to quickly adapt to the dramatic shift in workloads that have come from our employees working from home during the pandemic. Anticipate some of the changes in workflow that might occur, and test for those conditions.”

It’s also important to collect user connection and traffic data in a central location for your VPN infrastructure, to use modern visualization services like Microsoft Power BI to identify hot spots before they happen, and to plan for growth.

Means’s biggest piece of advice?

Focus on what your enterprise needs and go from there.

“Identify what you want to access and what you want to protect,” he says. “Then build to that model.”

Tips for retooling VPN at your company

Azure offers a native, highly-scalable VPN gateway, and the most common third-party VPN and Software-Defined Wide Area Network virtual appliances in the Azure Marketplace.

For more information on these and other Azure and Office network optimizing practices, please see:

• Office Connectivity Principles
• Network considerations for Teams
• Azure OpenVPN client
• Azure VPN Gateways
• Azure Point-to-site VPN
• VPN Network Virtual Appliances in the Azure Marketplace
• Publishing web applications using Azure Active Directory’s Application Proxy
• VPN split tunneling for Office 365
• How-to guides for common VPN platforms
• Updates for improving work-from-home employee access

• Here are some alternative ways for security professionals and IT to achieve modern security controls in remote work scenarios.
• Check our best practices and guidelines for security professionals on how to work remotely and stay secure.

Here are additional resources to learn more about how Microsoft applies networking best practices and supports a Zero Trust security strategy:

• Learn how Microsoft rebuilt its VPN infrastructure.
• Learn how Microsoft transitioned to modern access architecture with Zero Trust.
• Read how Microsoft is approaching Zero Trust Networking.

The post Using a Zero Trust strategy to secure Microsoft’s network during remote work appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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

What does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

Changing behavior is hard. Gamification can help.

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

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

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

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

—Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Seamless Teamwork team

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

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

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

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

—Bryan Bonham, Senior Business Program Manager, Minecraft Education

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

From idea to execution

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

Early on, we decided that humor was key.

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

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

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

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

Let the games begin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Digital is creating a modern support experience that focuses on identifying and remediating issues automatically by enabling seamless support, generating high-quality knowledge content, providing a unified agent experience, and maintaining infrastructure and site-service excellence.

“In talking with our customers and partners, we are hearing that a modern digital support experience that can enable a hybrid working environment is a priority but may seem daunting and complex,” says Trent Berghofer, General Manager of Microsoft’s Modern Support team in Microsoft Digital. ”However, with a comprehensive vision-led approach and targeted investment, the results yielded can have a significant impact.”

Modern Support is part of a broader vision focused on enabling the most productive employee experience possible in today’s ever-changing environment. The team is a diverse, multi-disciplined group of IT professionals that manage end user support, site services, infrastructure deployments, and venture integration to drive employee productivity. This team plans, learns, and adapts to drive and transform the modern employee support journey at Microsoft.

To create an efficient and effective digital first employee support experience, the Modern Support team is improving auto-healing capabilities and enabling digitally assisted support through seamless interaction for employees by providing broad access to support with in-context tools.

Transforming agent assisted support at Microsoft

Although service-level metrics have traditionally been important in overall support health, the need to put greater emphasis on the digital employee experience has proven to be critical. It’s important to understand not only if services and tools are functioning properly, but also whether they meet employees’ and support agents’ needs.

In the area of agent assisted support, Modern Support efforts focus on the two key roles that participate in support activities: employees who experience and report issues and the support agents and technicians who track and resolve those issues.

Several factors prevent employees and agents from experiencing and delivering optimal support. The shift from a support model where work tasks are costly, complex, and require significant support intervention to a model that creates experiences that are easily discoverable, simple, accessible, personalized, and automated greatly improves the overall dynamic. By connecting the experiences that exist today—and the ones in the future—in an end-to-end way, this new model better reflects how people want to seek help, outlined below.

The four pillars of Microsoft’s Modern Support Experience

The team is pursuing Microsoft’s Modern Support vision based on these four critical pillars with our employees in the center.

Pillar 1: Seamless support

Employees need to have the most simplified and transparent support experience possible. For example, if an employee reports an issue with an app they are using, relevant telemetry needs to be gathered systematically and, if possible, trigger automated workflow tasks to help resolve the problem immediately. By using telemetry from the employee’s device, information about the current application context and other relevant data, the system supplies automated remediation tasks to resolve the issue without agent intervention. If automated remediation isn’t possible, users can engage the Virtual Agent from within the app to help diagnose and resolve the issue and, if unsuccessful, the user can be seamlessly handed off to the most appropriately skilled agent via phone or chat with all the previous steps and telemetry provided on a ticket automatically.

As employees embraced hybrid work, Modern Support reopened walk-in support centers by appointment only and added or transformed some locations to virtual support kiosks with video support capability. These centers, both physical and virtual, use technology for online booking and focus on hardware-related issues to minimize wait time while enabling a seamless environment. Employees are able to book an appointment via the Virtual Agent so the bot can drive self-help solutions before finalizing an appointment. Modern Support remains committed to delivering an experience that anticipates the different ways employees need assistance while providing the flexibility and agility employees now require. The team works diligently to resolve the issue remotely prior to having an employee physically show up to a walk-in center.

Also, a 24-hour exclusive executive support service was designed to quickly resolve technology-related issues for our company’s leadership team and their executive assistants. Executive support services also focus on and identify automation opportunities that can be applied throughout the organization.

Key results

Seamless support investments have produced three key results:

• Employees have more time to focus on their job because issues are automatically identified and remediated transparently on their devices. This means less interaction and time interfacing with support.
• Employees get support anytime, anywhere, and the efficient ticketing process doesn’t require a repetitive description of issues or tedious tasks.
• There has been an increased ratio of successful unassisted support incidents vs. assisted support––from 15 percent to 40 percent.

Pillar 2: High-quality, intuitive knowledge support

At Microsoft, employees are empowered to seek self-remediation methods. Accordingly, investments in the capabilities of the company’s knowledge systems make them easier to use for both employees and support agents. Multiple self-help and virtual-agent modalities driven by powerful search technologies that automatically present to employees accurate, meaningful, and simple-to-follow content help them mitigate issues quickly.

Modern Support is rethinking the company’s knowledge base to improve the experience and increase efficiency for employees and support agents. It includes expanding the scope of knowledge for our self-help tools and Virtual Agent, and driving a set of standards, quality, and best practices for the lifecycle management of knowledge content. Integrating with Microsoft 365 Knowledge Base provides not only issue-tracking capability but also automated support processes and predictive recommendations.

Through a broad partnership across multiple teams, employees can retrieve content from a single-entry point that searches multiple domains transparently, including Bing for Business, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft 365 Alchemy, and the traditional support portal. GS&VI resources include a broader range of media types to provide a more optimal support experience. Short, easily consumable, on-demand guidance videos also better support individual content-consumption preferences.

New employee onboarding processes are being improved to ensure employees are prepared for new products and services introduced into their workflow. This also includes new employee onboarding for companies that have been acquired by Microsoft. A complete toolset leveraging Microsoft Viva is now available to new employees to enable them to be more productive on their first day of employment. This is accomplished by unifying onboarding approaches, creating a consolidated content platform, and introducing learning paths based on employee roles and business functions.

Key results

Intuitive knowledge support efforts have produced these key benefits:

• Support content is accessible, simple, easy to follow, and targets a broad reading level and regional context.
• Consumption of support content is tracked and can be correlated to a reduction in employee-initiated support inquiries.
• New employees can more easily find and use knowledge content their first day on the job.
• Employees can easily find and subscribe to high-quality training content that’s relative to the tools and services they use in a variety of media types.

Pillar 3: Unified agent experience

Our support agents and technicians also need the proper toolset to fix issues quickly and support Microsoft employees. To meet this goal, the team is developing and using connected tools and correlated platforms that increase information reuse and employ data pertaining to the support environment. The result will be a seamless experience for both agents and employees.

To improve the agents’ experience, toolsets are being made more intelligent by using machine learning and predictive analytics to enable our agents to access all the information they need to resolve an issue. Telemetry captured on the ticket will drive recommendations and workflows for the agent so they can supply the quickest resolution possible. Intelligent playbooks have also been implemented that automatically present themselves to the agent. These playbooks, based on issue classification, help guide the agent through the troubleshooting process with the employee and ensure a consistent, efficient experience.

Predictive Intelligence allows us to automate many mundane tasks agents must do, such as issue triage and taxonomy management. Tickets are routed to the right team for the first-time using machine learning capabilities, avoiding the need for an agent to review and transfer the task to someone else. This eliminates the waste of time on the ticket lifecycle, thus providing a faster solution for the user. Using Predictive Intelligence, we are also prepopulating taxonomy on behalf of the agent so they can focus on issue resolution and not issue classification.

For tickets created from email or the web and not via our self-help solutions, we are now handing off the management of these tickets to the virtual agent. If a solution is within the scope of the Virtual Agent, then they will proactively reach out to the employees in Microsoft Teams to help on their issue. If successful, the Virtual Agent will manage the update and closure of the ticket. This enables our agents to focus on the most complex problems.

The ticket-resolution toolset gathers robust employee sentiment from chat experiences, call-quality data, and Yammer communities. This information helps agents understand the issues’ complete context and respond more appropriately to the initial employee contact. Agents need to enter the issue-resolution process with the greatest possible chance of success. Employee sentiment also helps Microsoft’s leadership and key stakeholders better understand the issue-resolution process and where intervention might be warranted. The data also helps our product groups and partners to continually improve.

Key results

Unified agent efforts have produced these key benefits:

• A single lens and data repository for the agents. They can manage and interact with tickets from a single location.
• Proactive and predictive support insights. Agents can find and potentially resolve issues before they’re reported by employees.
• Enhanced automated-support capabilities. Automation-assisted mitigation actions expedite resolution of technical issues.
• Automated ticket management and resolution via the Virtual Agent for simple issues.

Pillar 4: Infrastructure and site-services excellence

Aligned with our vision for hybrid workplaces, which enable our people to be connected, engaged, and productive wherever they are, Modern Support field-based teams drive the deployment and operation of innovative technologies and services for over 790 buildings in 110 countries. Modern Support teams are digitalizing on-site experiences and enabling physical spaces as a strategic tool to reenergize our workforce, maintain engagement, and attract and retain the best talent.

Hybrid work is driving significant realignment of how we utilize our physical spaces worldwide, impacting key infrastructure related to collaboration, connectivity, and security. In response to this demand, our infrastructure and AV deployment teams have implemented robust global technology standards to maximize value and drive consistent experiences for our global user base. Unifying data sets such as building occupancy and incident volume with historic project delivery data (including cost, scheduling, and deviations) yields critical insights to support ongoing investment prioritization. Combined with data collected during each project delivery phase (deployment, provisioning timelines, and associated costs), we are able to drive reductions in total cost of ownership and increased overall return on investment through enhanced planning and delivery processes.

One consequence of the shift to hybrid work has been increased demand for richer meeting room experiences that better accommodate remote and in-person participants. To support this demand, Modern Support teams are deploying new Microsoft Teams-powered hybrid meeting room technology across our 14,000 AV-enabled conference rooms worldwide. Bringing remote attendees “into the room” is moving us closer to parity of experience for those attending outside the office.

Key to enabling our vision of digitalizing on-site experiences and empowering our field-based teams is a focus on unifying existing data sources to allow critical insights around workplace experience health. Using infrastructure telemetry (such as network, AV, and environmental (IoT)) to corroborate employee sentiment, captured through both surveys and dynamic sentiment analysis, enables a holistic view of employee experiences in our physical spaces. This data-driven approach has allowed us to introduce the concept of a franchise model to empower Field IT Managers to be fully accountable for services delivered within their geographic scope and effectively drive experience improvement activities.

As we look to embrace the opportunities presented by automation and AI, we are deploying services such as “Just in Time” (JIT) cable room access alongside AI-driven “Computer Vision” solutions to monitor the critical infrastructure hosted in over 1,200 cable rooms globally. Doing this enables us to automate change management processes and ensure physical security for crucial infrastructure components at our sites across the globe. Enriching our CMDB (Configuration Management Data Base) capabilities with these and other new data sources has been key to automating Device Lifecycle Management (DLM) processes across our estate.

Through our continued focus on digitalizing the delivery of our critical on-site experiences, we can optimize support costs while driving employee satisfaction and productivity, aligning with our mission to transform the employee support journey at Microsoft.

Key results

Infrastructure and site-services efforts have produced these key benefits:

• All infrastructure projects are delivered on time, on budget, and within standards or with approved deviations.
• Alert monitoring is on all meeting room assets and site infrastructure (network, IoT) to increase proactive issue detection.
• Customer satisfaction metrics for Modern Support services are met or exceeded at the geographic and site level.

Modern support experience benefits

The Modern Support experience at Microsoft is transforming the way employees and agents experience and provide support across the company. This environment enables employees to be creative, innovative, and productive by providing a support experience that focuses on identifying and remediating issues automatically—before employees are even aware they exist. By creating a seamless support experience, creating high-quality knowledge content, supplying a unified agent experience, and maintaining infrastructure and site-services excellence, employees’ support interactions are greatly improving. This Modern Support experience gives everyone at Microsoft broad, inclusive access that enables employees to do more with less and empowers every person and every organization to achieve more.

Here are tips you can try as you work to transform your support experience at your company:

• Take a vision-led and phased approach when modernizing your support experience.
• Place greater emphasis on the employee experience when measuring your service level support metrics.
• Increase employee productivity by detecting and remediating issues proactively before your employees report them.
• Invest in seamless, in-context support and simple, intuitive knowledge systems to improve employee experience and efficiency.
• Establish a listening system across the organization that can engage with your local stakeholders and employees and be accountable for support services and experience.

• Learn more about how we’re using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance our end-user support.
• Find out how we’re reinventing Microsoft’s Employee Experience for a hybrid world.
• See how we’re transforming enterprise collaboration internally here at Microsoft.

The post Enabling a modern support experience at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

If you’re in IT, you know device management is a challenge all companies face. It’s especially difficult to make sure devices are up to date and in compliance within an enterprise environment of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of devices. Another complication is that employees use a mix of personal and corporate-owned devices, which might run several possible operating systems, each with unique needs.

At Microsoft, we’ve experienced and met these challenges. Daniel Manalo shares how with Gabe Storment, our senior business program manager, in this Inside Track Spotlight interview.

Manalo, a principal service engineer in Microsoft Digital Employee Experience (MDEE), Microsoft’s IT organization, explains that we overcame many hurdles to reach a modern management state with our devices.

“Some of our build mechanisms have hard dependencies on on-premises or Active Directory—a traditional environment,” Manalo says.

To handle these needs, we in MDEE worked with the Microsoft Intune product group to implement co-management. With co-management, a device can be simultaneously managed by both the traditional managed environment of Configuration Manager and the modern environment of cloud-based Microsoft Intune.

Zero Trust principles are another aspect of device management at Microsoft.

“At Microsoft, we ensure that a set of zero trust policies are enforced using conditional access policies,” Manalo says. “An example of some of these device health checks are minimum operating system, anti-malware installed, the device is malware-free, application control, and other conditional access checks.”

Watch our interview to learn more about device health checks in the video as Manalo describes how compliance is verified over time, what happens to non-compliant devices, and how users are kept informed.

Try Microsoft Intune at no cost.

• Learn more about co-management and how you can use it at your company.
• Unpack evolving the device experience at Microsoft.
• Discover making device management frictionless at Microsoft.
• Explore verifying device health at Microsoft with Zero Trust.
• Check out verifying identity in a Zero Trust model internally at Microsoft.

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

The post How modernization is helping Microsoft along its internal device management journey appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

By investing in the meeting experience with Microsoft Teams and by reimagining the physical and virtual spaces where meetings take place, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help Microsoft employees and our customers thrive in a hybrid world of work.

—Nathalie D’Hers, Corporate Vice President, Employee Experiences

Thanks to Microsoft Teams and the innovation being driven by the product team, we’ve seen a real opportunity to transform Microsoft employee and customer meetings from a weakness to a strength. By investing in the meeting experience with Microsoft Teams and by reimagining the physical and virtual spaces where meetings take place, we’re laying a foundation of innovation that will help Microsoft employees and our customers thrive in a hybrid world of work.

We’ve already seen satisfaction with meetings increase, while also making sure hybrid work remains seamless for Microsoft and our customers. How are we doing it? I’m glad you asked!

Simple questions, complex answers

The Microsoft’s WorkLab blog describes hybrid work as …”a blended model where some employees return to the workplace and others continue to work from home.” The Microsoft 2022 Work Trend Index identified five key trends driving hybrid work. While all are relevant, two stood out to us:

1. Employees have a new “worth it” equation
2. Leaders need to make the office worth the commute

It was clear we had some work to do as a team to ensure a successful hybrid future. My team asked two simple questions:

• What is the value of our physical work environment in a hybrid work world?
• What kind of meeting experiences satisfy the modern world of hybrid work?

Our answer to the first question was simple—to socialize and to collaborate. The pandemic tested all of us in innumerable ways, but a common response from employees, even those who have enjoyed the flexibility to work from home, is how hard it can be to collaborate remotely. The ability to socialize and connect is closely related, as both of those activities build trust, an essential ingredient of successful teams. We determined that the meeting experience of the future needed to honor the value of physical space while making it possible for everyone to fully participate, regardless of where they were.

The second question was more complicated. We recognized the need for simple, powerful meeting experiences in our facilities and had been working on just that in the years leading up to the pandemic. But how could we reimagine the meeting experience to enable our employees to collaborate without friction and feel connected even if physically apart? Microsoft Teams has already implemented an innovative feature in Together Mode to help make hybrid teams more connected. But how could we take that vision to the next level?

The way things were—hybrid meetings in an in-person world

To answer that question, contributors across Microsoft have built prototypes in a space we call “the Hive,” a design environment optimized for reimagining physical and virtual spaces. In the Hive, PMs, designers, and software engineers are empowered to question everything, so no idea goes unexplored, and no constraints go unchallenged. This approach led to breakthroughs across both physical and virtual space.

In the physical world, a typical Microsoft conference room consists of a rectangular table, with space for six to 18 people, dependent on room size. It’s a pretty traditional layout you’ve likely seen before. A large monitor or projector screen is mounted on a wall. In person attendees are oriented toward each other on either side of the table, not facing the screen unless they tilt their chairs. Online participants are out of sight during discussion, only visible when in-person participants are focused on the screen. Physical white boards are situated on either side of the table, out of view for online participants. These traditional conference rooms were designed and optimized for in-person collaboration, inadvertently putting remote participants at a disadvantage.

In the virtual space, Teams focuses on a shared presentation or a “spotlighted” presenter. Whomever shares their screen needs to choose what additional details to display whether it be the list of attendees, the chat window, or neither, in order to maximize presentation space. While Teams is highly optimized for the online meeting experience, the hybrid meeting experience was uneven. We realized quickly we had some work to do if hybrid meetings were going to continue to be the future of work at Microsoft and for many of our customers.

Building the perfect meeting

To address these shortcomings, we spun up a virtual team comprised of product engineers, representatives from our facilities team, and the Microsoft Digital team. Together, we imagined a new meeting room experience that would offer a corporate boardroom-like experience for all employees.

The team began by shifting the center of the room from the middle of a table to the halfway point between in-person and remote attendees. They imagined a “single pane” of content instead of multiple screens, where remote attendees could appear at eye level and approximately life size. With the seating arrangement allowing more viewable space, content takes center stage, with still more room for chat and other meeting content at the sides.

As the team iterated, they began to see an exciting new experience taking shape: one that brought people together across physical and virtual spaces. Remote attendees might join from their phone, their home, or a focus room somewhere else on campus, but each participant was on equal footing and on the same page.

As the heartbeat of the employee experience across the company, and as part of the team that propels the company forward in terms of modern workplace patterns and practices, it’s important that we provide an inspirational enterprise blueprint for customers and partners.

—Nathalie D’Hers, Corporate Vice President, Employee Experiences

Since sharing these prototype designs, the response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Unlike bespoke systems from some of our competitors, the new meeting room experience we’ve envisioned can be created and supported with commodity hardware at modest cost and powered via enhancements to our already ubiquitous Microsoft Teams product. We were thrilled when Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jared Spataro and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted this prototype environment in their talks at Microsoft Ignite, and since then there has been an outpouring of interest from customers and hundreds of engagements at The Hive.

From “traditional IT” to “stewards of the Employee Experience”

This new meeting experience is a great example of how my team inspires our Microsoft product teams by thinking holistically about the employee experience and driving innovation that helps our customers. As the heartbeat of the employee experience across the company, and part of the team that propels the company forward in terms of modern workplace patterns and practices, it’s important that we provide an inspirational enterprise blueprint for customers and partners.

With this new meeting room experience, we’re leading the way and preparing for a future of hybrid work that is here to stay, and where everyone regardless of their physical location can collaborate, socialize, and feel like a trusted and important member of the team. To support that vision, we’ve published a free guide for business leaders to help navigate the complexities of the hybrid workplace. Coupled with inclusive meeting behaviors, we believe that hybrid meetings can be just as productive as in-person meetings if done right.

It’s been exciting working with our counterparts in product development and facilities to turn this prototype into a real experience that will help everyone to be more productive. It’s a great demonstration towards our commitment to Microsoft’s mission to Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

• Familiarize yourself with Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide to enhance video conferencing, chat, document collaboration, and integration functionalities.
• Evaluate your current meeting spaces, whether physical or virtual, and identify areas where improvements can be made. Consider how you can create a more inclusive and engaging meeting environment that promotes collaboration and participation for both remote and in-person attendees.
• Embrace the concept of hybrid work within your organization. Encourage employees to adapt to the hybrid work model and establish inclusive meeting practices that ensure everyone, regardless of their physical location, feels connected and valued during meetings.

• Discover how Microsoft enables its employees to work remotely with Microsoft Teams.
• Unpack driving inclusive and effective meetings at Microsoft with Microsoft Teams.
• Explore advancing your meetings with the Microsoft Teams Meeting Guide.

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

The post How Microsoft is reimagining meetings for hybrid work appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Koch, a self-described Microsoft fan, has been selling or advocating for the company’s products “for more years than I care to admit.” In her role, she’s a customer success manager for the company’s Great Lakes Region in the United States. Her job is to help customers adopt and get the most out of Microsoft Teams.

It was a major moment for her when she showed up for her first day of work in 2020, even if she never left home to do it.

“Everything about this entire process has been virtual,” says Koch, who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. “I haven’t met anyone face-to-face—I met my new manager on a Teams call.”

Samocha’s onboarding journey has been similar.

“When I started in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hadn’t shut everything down yet,” he says. “My manager was going to fly in to meet me, and I was getting ready to go to new employee orientation.”

Then a work-from-home order went out across Microsoft and everything changed.

“Everything switched to virtual,” says Samocha, who is learning how to manage two Texas-based Microsoft Azure customer accounts from his home near Houston. “The whole experience has definitely been different.”

There’s a new way of bringing employees onboard across Microsoft since the company started working remotely, says Kashay Sanders, the learning and development consultant for Microsoft Human Resources, who manages new employee orientation at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Microsoft needed to pivot fast, and Sanders, Cameron Thompson, director of Human Resources’ new hire program, and the rest of the Human Resources team partnered with Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s IT and Operations organization, to make starting a new job at Microsoft just as smooth virtually as it was in person.

“We want people to feel welcome,” Sanders says. “We want them to know that Microsoft is excited to have them, that this is where they belong, and that they made the right choice in choosing us.”

When that’s done in person, everyone is brought into Redmond or another Microsoft campus. They meet fellow new employees starting on the same day, tour the facilities, get issued their equipment, and meet with people who help them get everything set up. A member of the company’s senior leadership team talks to them about what it means to work at Microsoft, and their manager comes to meet them. They are welcomed with open arms.

Producing all of that and a hot cup of tea isn’t quite as easy when no one can step foot on a Microsoft campus—a change that was initially hard to absorb for all involved. “It was jarring when we realized we couldn’t hold our New Employee Orientation event,” Sanders says. “It’s always been an in-person experience, and suddenly that was taken away.”

In all, two dozen Microsoft employees from across the company volunteer to host the weekly new employee welcoming sessions in Redmond. This group of co-facilitators was well versed in presenting Microsoft’s story in person—shifting to doing it virtually presented a big change.

[Learn how Microsoft enables its employees to work remotely with Microsoft Teams. Find out how to lead a successful transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. Learn how Microsoft is using Autopilot to speed up deployment of Windows 10 for company employees.]

Embracing virtual onboarding

Taj Heniser is good at juggling—especially the virtual kind.

That came in handy when they co-facilitated Microsoft’s first ever virtual New Employee Orientation (NEO) session for the first 250 or so employees to start working at Microsoft in the US after the company’s work-from-home order went out.

“The first thing was, we had to learn how to pivot our logistics quickly,” says Heniser, a senior business program manager in MDEE communications. “We had to rethink what the experience we normally had in the room was going to be for our virtual audience.”

Heniser learned a lot right away when they tried presenting, engaging in the meeting chat, and running the slides at the same time during that first virtual NEO session. That proved to be too much and has been split between two people in subsequent sessions.

After the team got through that first session, the biggest challenge was replicating the connections and friendships new employees would have made going through orientation in the same room with their fellow new hires.

“We encourage everyone to chat with each other during our presentations and hold breakout groups where they can get to know each other and ask each other questions,” Heniser says, explaining that their conversations are facilitated by volunteer employees who are also relatively new to the company. “We want to foster a sense of connection with each other and with our company culture that will stay with them when they finish NEO and start their jobs. To do that, we need them to have the same side conversations they would have had if they were there together in the same room.”

Sanders says the team has worked hard to smooth out the process so that it’s straightforward and predictable for hosts like Heniser to welcome new employees. The shift to virtual is helping the team bring in more facilitators.

“Now we’re able to cast our net wider for facilitators,” Sanders says. “For the first time, it doesn’t matter where you sit in the US—it’s pretty awesome to be able to pull someone in from beyond the Washington state offices.”

The team has learned how to refine its presentation. Guidance on how to sign up for benefits and other actions for new employees is becoming clearer and easier to follow. Little things like recognizing that not everyone will be on the same version of Microsoft Teams have been worked out.

“We let people know ahead of time that their experiences will vary so they don’t get distracted trying to replicate exactly what we’re showing on the screen,” Sanders says. “We have an occasional blip, but everything is running fairly smoothly now.”

The most important thing that the team had to realize is that everything doesn’t need to be perfect—it just needs to be welcoming, informative, and very clear on what the new employees need to do next.

“I’ve been so inspired with how our new hires have come to our virtual calls with so much excitement,” Sanders says. “They have so much desire to connect with us and with each other. They have extended so much grace—I’ve felt a lot of appreciation and gratitude from them.”

Equipping new hires for success

Unboxing your new PC is a big moment for new employees, and at Microsoft, where most employees choose a Microsoft Surface device, the moment is often extra special.

Koch’s new Surface device arrived at her home the week before she started.

“Everything was packed very nicely,” Koch says. “It included very well-written documentation about setting up the device—it was six pages long and walked me through exactly what I should do.” The instructions included setting up her phone as a second way to authenticate herself on her PC.

Microsoft Digital used Windows Autopilot to set up Koch’s new device, a new program developed in partnership with the Windows and Intune teams that enables Microsoft Digital to use the device manufacture image based on Microsoft’s enterprise image guidelines. All Koch had to do was power on, connect to the internet, authenticate, and the rest was silently hydrated via Microsoft’s Endpoint Management—Intune.

“Our goal is to help our new employees get through setup as quickly as possible,” says Mina Aitelhadj, a program manager on Microsoft Digital’s Modern Device Platform Team. “Using Autopilot has reduced the time it takes our employees to set up their new devices by 90 percent—it now takes them less than 10 minutes to get up and running.”

By the time Koch went through orientation, she had her machine working and had signed up for all of her benefits, save for one that required further processing.

“My team got me fully up to speed right away on my first Monday,” she says. “They had meetings with me to welcome me. My boss met with me, gave me the rundown of what the plan was for my job, who I’d be working with, and made sure I connected with my onboarding buddy, who was local.”

The switch to working remotely did make it difficult for some new employees and interns to get issued a computer, especially in India and other countries where new employees couldn’t leave their homes and shipping wasn’t allowed.

There were delays getting new machines in the US too, including for Samocha.

“When I started, Intel chips were back-ordered because the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he says. “They couldn’t get me my new PC by the time I started.”

He used Azure Virtual Desktop to set up a virtual desktop on his personal computer.

“I had a seven-year-old MacBook Pro that I ended up needing to use,” he says. “I enrolled it in Intune, set up a virtual desktop, and was able to download the work version of Office 365.”

This allowed him to have corporate access, sign up for benefits, attend meetings, get email, and otherwise get started as a new employee. He wasn’t able to access the Dynamics 365 sales tool and some other core tools for his job, but he learned about the two Microsoft Azure accounts he would work on, began making connections with those he would work with, and otherwise started to find his way.

When he got his new PC a few weeks later, unboxing it and getting connected took 15 minutes, and all the settings and favorites from the virtual desktop carried over. “That part of it was much faster than I expected,” he says.

Microsoft is using Azure Virtual Desktop to get new employees and interns started at locations across the world where getting new PCs to new employees has proved challenging, says Jo-Anne Beaudet, an area IT manager for Microsoft Digital. She expects the company will use virtual desktops more frequently as the company continues to ask employees to work from home or in a hybrid fashion of from home and at the office.

The changes that have come with onboarding new employees while they work remotely has created new and interesting opportunities to improve new employee orientation across Microsoft, something the company was already overhauling when COVID-19 hit.

“Switching to doing this virtually has been challenging, but it’s also giving us new ideas and helping us to speed up our overall transformation,” Beaudet says.

Her colleague Robert Koester, a senior IT service operations specialist in Microsoft Digital, agrees.

“The beauty of Microsoft is you can be productive with just a few tools anywhere, immediately,” Koester says. “That’s a powerful statement.”

He says it’s been amazing to see that play out as new employees start at Microsoft, but also with existing employees who shifted to working from home very easily.

“We’re surprised and delighted about how well it’s gone,” he says. “With just a few technologies, we’ve been able to go so far so fast without needing to be in our offices.”

• Learn how Microsoft enables its employees to work remotely with Microsoft Teams.
• Find out how to lead a successful transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.
• Learn how Microsoft is using Autopilot to speed up deployment of Windows 10 for company employees.

The post Onboarding new Microsoft employees with Microsoft Teams while working remotely appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Safeguarding corporate resources is a high priority for any business, but how does Microsoft protect a network perimeter that extends to thousands of global endpoints accessing corporate data and services 24 hours a day, seven days a week?

It’s all about communication, collaboration, and expert knowledge.

Phil Suver, senior director of networking at Microsoft, and his team help champion Zero Trust networking, an important part of Microsoft’s broader Zero Trust initiative. Driven by Microsoft’s security organization, the Zero Trust model centers on strong user identity, device-health verification, application-health validation, and secure, least-privilege access to corporate resources and services.

“Zero Trust networking is ultimately about removing inherent trust from the network, from design to end use,” Suver says. “The network components are foundational to the framework for our Zero Trust model. It’s about revising our security approach to safeguard people, devices, apps, and data, wherever they’re located. The network is one piece. Identity and device health are additional pieces. Conditional access and permission are also required. That involves the entire organization.”

Indeed, this extensive initiative affects all of Microsoft and every employee. To support the Zero Trust initiative, Microsoft’s network engineering team is partnering with the security and end-user experience teams to implement security policy and identity while ensuring productivity for employees and partners. Suver says that his team always aims to minimize those impacts and communicate how they ultimately result in benefits.

“We’re fundamentally changing the way our network infrastructure has worked for more than two decades,” Suver says. “We’re moving away from internal private networks as the primary destination and toward the internet and cloud services as the new default. The security outcomes are the priority, but we have to balance that against business needs and productivity as well so that connectivity is transparent.”

That means being sensitive to how implementing Zero Trust networking affects users on a granular level, to ensure that employees don’t experience work stoppages or interruptions.

“Some of our efforts aren’t very disruptive, as they’re simply accelerating in a direction we were already heading,” Suver says. “Shifting to internet-first and wireless-first network design, and enabling remote work are examples of that. Others are indeed disruptive, so we work closely with the affected groups to help them understand the impact.”

Suver notes that understanding and communication are critical to avoiding disruption.

“Microsoft is an established enterprise, with some software and systems that have been in place for decades,” he says. “To run our business effectively, we must be able to accommodate processes and technology that might not be immediately ready to transition to a Zero Trust architecture.”

We’re able to be a little more opportunistic and aggressive with our in-building connectivity experiences while our user base is working remotely. This has allowed us to roll out configurations and learn things with a much smaller user population on-campus.

– Phil Suver, senior director of networking

Suver stresses the importance of working closely with affected employees. “We need to partner closely with our engineering teams to understand their connectivity requirements and build solutions around those for the short term and then broaden our scope for the longer term.”

With more employees working from home than ever due to COVID-19, many deployments in Microsoft buildings have been implemented relatively quickly and efficiently because of the decreased on-campus presence. Engineering teams can perform rollouts, including deploying new network segments, creating new wireless connections, and deploying network security policy with much less disruption than if buildings were fully occupied.

“We’re able to be a little more opportunistic and aggressive with our in-building connectivity experiences while our user base is working remotely,” Suver says. “This has allowed us to roll out configurations and learn things with a much smaller user population on-campus.”

[Check out these lessons learned and best practices from the Microsoft engineers who implemented Zero Trust networking. Find out what Microsoft’s leaders learned when they deployed Zero Trust networking internally at the company. Read Brian Fielder’s story on how Microsoft helps employees work securely from home using a Zero Trust strategy.]

Managing Zero Trust networking across the enterprise

Mildred Jammer, Zero Trust network principal program manager at Microsoft, acknowledges that the inherent complexity of Microsoft’s operations—there are more than 1 million devices on Microsoft’s network, which supports more than 200,000 employees and partners, which requires a highly strategic planning approach to transition to a Zero Trust environment.

“It’s a huge scope, and we have so many different environments to consider. Unsurprisingly, planning is a top priority for our teams,” says Jammer, whose work centers around ensuring that people and functional groups across Microsoft unite to ensure that Zero Trust Networking initiatives receive the priority that they deserve.

Zero Trust networking goals include reducing risk to Microsoft by requiring devices to authenticate to achieve network access providing a network infrastructure that supports device isolation and segmentation. A third key goal is to devise a system for enhancing response actions if devices are determined to be vulnerable or compromised.

“Zero Trust networking extends beyond the scope of Microsoft networking teams,” Jammer says.

Jammer says that many business groups at Microsoft might not understand what Zero Trust networking is, or they might not consider it as important as other initiatives they’re supporting.

“Zero Trust networking is a huge priority for our teams, but our business groups have their own priorities that don’t account for Zero Trust,” Jammer says. “Neither priority is optional, and they may conflict. We must manage that.”

She says communication being upfront with requirements, and collaborating willingly across Microsoft to ensure everyone’s needs are met.

Jammer says that distilling high-level goals into smaller, more achievable objectives helps employees and partners understand the practicalities of Zero Trust networking so that her teams can establish realistic expectations. “For example, we worked with the security team to break down risk mitigation into specific risks and the outcomes,” she says. “We developed solutions to deliver the outcomes and grouped them when there were commonalities. If business priorities challenged our outcomes, we could break down those groupings, as necessary.”

Jammer cites the deployment of Zero Trust networking as an example, noting that her team initially planned to deploy globally across all wired and wireless networks.

“We planned for a full deployment, but soon learned how disruptive that would be to our developers and infrastructure,” she says. “So, we broke it into chunks, we implemented changes to wireless networks with internet-first posture, and then came back to address our wired networks. To minimize impact and identify best practices, we used flighting deployments with a ring-based approach, starting with a smaller, well-understood population that closely represented our larger target population. As we gained more experience and confidence, we expanded the deployment to reach a larger population.”

Jammer notes that using targeted, achievable goals not only help get work done but also help identify when larger goals might be challenging to accomplish.

“Breaking down large goals into an agile-friendly process was also crucial to demonstrate areas that simply weren’t achievable near term,” Jammer says. “It’s more concrete and actionable to tell someone that we can’t refactor a specific app to be internet-facing than it is to say that we can’t eliminate our corporate intranet infrastructure.”

Making Zero Trust networking a reality

For David Lef, Zero Trust principal IT enterprise architect at Microsoft, implementing Zero Trust networking in a live networking environment carries a significant challenge.

“Reducing risk is a big focus in Zero Trust, but we need to do so with as minimal impact to user experience and productivity as possible,” Lef says. “Our users and employees need this network to perform their job functions. There is a reality that some things have to continue to work in their current state.”

Lef cites a few examples, including printers that didn’t support internet connectivity, IoT devices that required manual configuration, and simple devices that didn’t support Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). “We isolate those on the network and potentially come back to them later while we address projects that are ready to adapt to Zero Trust.”

Lef’s team actively works to establish network access, implement policies, segment networks, and onboard Microsoft business groups, regions, and teams to the Zero Trust networking model. While Zero Trust networking is critical to enabling a Zero Trust model, enterprise-wide collaboration and adoption are equally vital.

“We put a lot of effort into observing activity and talking with our local IT representatives about the details and challenges of each phase of our implementation,” Lef says. “We created our deployment plans so that employees and partners could naturally adopt the new network designs and usage patterns without significant effort on their part.”

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

Lef notes that his team recommends best practices to partners and suppliers to help build Zero Trust-friendly products and solutions.

“Making legacy technology conform to Zero Trust is difficult. We want to adopt solutions built for Zero Trust networking across our entire enterprise as much as possible. Identities, devices, apps, data, infrastructure—they all contribute to the model, along with networking,” Lef says. “Across the organization, all of these need to be in place for a properly functioning Zero Trust model.”

Thinking about the broader picture

Soumya Subramanian, partner general manager of enterprise infrastructure services at Microsoft, recognized a need to bring multiple workstreams together to accommodate the size and scope of deploying Zero Trust networking.

As organizations consider the scope of what they want to achieve with Zero Trust, they should remember to think about other network modernization initiatives and be intentional in either combining them under the broader program or allowing them to operate independently.

– Soumya Subramanian, partner general manager of Enterprise Infrastructure Services

“We already had a workstream in flight to move remaining applications from the corporate network to the cloud” Subramanian says. “We also needed to accelerate our long-term plans for remote connectivity due to the pandemic, which allowed us to reevaluate remote access technologies under the context of Zero Trust. For instance, as you move high-volume applications off the corporate network and onto the cloud, you reduce VPN volumes and usage. You need to consider alternate remote connectivity solutions like Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), virtual desktops, and application proxy services in your Zero Trust networking scope, not just the in-building user experience.”

Subramanian notes that these efforts depend on network automation and data-collection workstreams that many organizations could use to accelerate Zero Trust deployment.

“We started to tie these efforts together so that the network designs and policies we created for Zero Trust could be managed through automation at scale. As a result, we’re more data driven with clear objectives and key results that connect these dependent workstreams.”

“As organizations consider the scope of what they want to achieve with Zero Trust, they should remember to think about other network modernization initiatives and be intentional in either combining them under the broader program or allowing them to operate independently,” Subramanian says.

• Check out these lessons learned and best practices from the Microsoft engineers who implemented Zero Trust networking.
• Find out what Microsoft’s leaders learned when they deployed Zero Trust networking internally at the company.
• Read Brian Fielder’s story on how Microsoft helps employees work securely from home using a Zero Trust strategy.

The post Sharing how Microsoft now secures its network with a Zero Trust model appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Over the last two years, we’ve all had to radically adjust how we meet and collaborate as most information workers transitioned to remote work. Almost overnight, in-person and hybrid meetings moved online. Even daily interactions with colleagues morphed into online meetings, resulting in a 58 percent increase in Microsoft Teams meetings usage at Microsoft. For better or worse, “virtual coffee chats” became the new normal, and the water cooler moved online.

Researchers at Microsoft and across the industry have worked hard to understand the impact of these changes and to determine how to improve meetings so they achieve their purpose through empowered participants. One of these large studies came to an interesting conclusion: the odds of a meeting being rated as effective are two times higher if attendees say the meeting was inclusive, and more than three times higher when attendees feel comfortable participating.

In other words, inclusive meetings are the most effective meetings. Remarkably, as we’ve adjusted to the new normal of remote work, meeting satisfaction at Microsoft increased by 31 points! The primary reason? Prior to the pandemic, remote participants were less likely to be active participants in hybrid meetings. Now that the playing field is leveled, participants report being more comfortable participating in online meetings. Across the company, we’re learning to be more inclusive and meetings are becoming more participatory.

So, how can you make your meetings more inclusive? Here are some practical tips that we’ve learned running remote and hybrid meetings at Microsoft.

1. Limit meeting invites to necessary attendees

Be thoughtful about who you invite to your meeting. Make sure roles are clear and everyone understands why they are there and how they can contribute. Provide a place outside of the scheduled meeting to engage and view the artifacts or bring others into the conversation. Record your meeting and remember that hybrid meetings don’t always have to be a “point in time” exercise—they can be a gathering place for ongoing collaboration, grounded in the initial conversation but extending beyond the original participants and agenda. This is particularly important for teams that span time zones!

2. Keep meetings short

Research shows that remote and hybrid workers experience increased fatigue from too much time spent in meetings. Fatigue begins to increase 30–40 minutes into video meetings, so keep meetings as short as possible—30 minutes max—or plan breaks in the schedule for longer meetings. Starting and ending meetings on time is a significant stress reducer for your attendees. Also, consider a buffer between meetings.

Could you start at five minutes after the hour to give people time to recharge? Or end five minutes early? You can even set up Microsoft Outlook to automatically end meetings early using the “end meetings early” option under File > Options > Calendar > Calendar Options > Shorten appointments and meetings. I’ve made this a requirement for my leadership team meetings—it’s made our meetings more focused and our days a little less hectic!

3. Always provide an agenda!

Agendas appear throughout the available research as an indicator of a meeting’s effectiveness. Meetings without clear agendas contribute to increased frustration and meeting fatigue, while well-run meetings with clear communication are associated with better perceived productivity. You can even implement a more radical policy in your enterprise, requiring an agenda for mandatory meetings or letting your team know that a meeting without a published agenda should be considered optional.

4. Camera shy? Still consider turning on video

In remote and hybrid meetings, sharing video creates rapport with colleagues. Studies have highlighted the importance of observing body language and facial expressions to build positive group dynamics. However, there are some situations where video may not be appropriate, including large meetings (when you aren’t presenting), when bandwidth is poor, and when video contributes to meeting fatigue. For those cases, update your Microsoft 365 profile with a photo or an avatar that represents something about your personality to help other meeting attendees relate to you when you choose not to share video. If the camera isn’t your thing, try making a commitment to start meetings with your camera on to build some rapport, then turning it off once the meeting is underway. And try to relax—you look great on camera!

5. Send pre-reads and follow-ups

Preparation and clear communication are vital in today’s remote and hybrid work environment. Share any tools or files you’ll use during your meeting in advance, along with the meeting agenda. After your meeting ends, immediately send follow-up materials or notes and be sure to record and transcribe the meeting so those who can’t attend synchronously have access. Focus on capturing well-defined action items with owners and due dates, since an action owner in another time zone might not have been able to attend the meeting synchronously.

6. Establish norms

Make a point of establishing participatory norms for the meeting. For example, should attendees raise their hand, unmute, speak up, or use chat when they have questions and comments? Or, if the agenda is tight, would you prefer them to save questions for the end of the meeting? If you expect everyone to turn on video for a face-to-face conversation, state this in your invitation so no one is caught off guard. Also, inform attendees before starting a recording or transcription.

7. Have everyone join the Teams meeting

As more people globally return to worksites, many meetings will likely have a mix of people joining remotely and from a meeting room. Whether employees are joining from home, on the road from their mobile, from their own desk, or together with others in a conference room, they should feel equally included in the meeting.

You can accomplish this by centering your meeting in Teams rather than in the meeting room. Encourage everyone, even those who attend in person, to join the Teams meeting. From there they can participate in chat, use reactions, and raise their hand when they have something to contribute.

8. Make meetings interactive!

It can be challenging to manage a remote or hybrid meeting, but the more interactive the session, the more likely you are to achieve the desired outcome. Once norms are established, be on the lookout for people who come off mute—it’s normally a sign they have something to add. Look for people who raise their virtual hand and keep an eye on the chat window for questions or shared insights, then repeat them for all participants. Depending on the size of the meeting, it may be beneficial to select a moderator to watch for raised hands and questions in the meeting chat then have the moderator facilitate a brief meeting retrospective to ensure participants felt seen and heard. Chats can add depth to a meeting, especially when participants use emojis or GIFs (when appropriate and aligned to local law or custom). Encourage users to express themselves with live reactions. Finally, consider ways to incorporate additional interactive elements, like a Teams Whiteboard, a poll, or through an embedded app. This recent article from Harvard Business Review includes some fun tips to make meetings more engaging that require no technology at all.

While some of these suggestions may seem self-evident, building a culture that routinely and instinctively implements these best practices is challenging. If you’d like additional inspiration, our peers over at the Microsoft 365 blog recently featured a great article detailing seven strategies for building a healthier meeting culture.

Check out Microsoft’s internal Microsoft Teams Meeting guide.

Learn how Microsoft is using Microsoft Teams and ServiceNow to enhance end-user support.

Read how Microsoft is implementing a Zero Trust security model.

The post Microsoft’s tips for staying productive in an evolving hybrid world appeared first on Inside Track Blog.