![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/ms-digital-technical-stories-300x112.png\")
At Microsoft, we\u2019re creating a seamless, effortless workday experience for our employees, enabling them to manage their workday, find information, and get things done quickly and easily. We\u2019re transforming our search and task-completion experience into a unified, informed, and automated digitally assisted workday that improves our employees\u2019 productivity and helps them achieve more.<\/p>\n
The digitally assisted workday is part of a\u00a0broader vision for\u00a0providing\u00a0the most productive employee experience possible as we continue our digital\u00a0transformation.\u00a0To learn more about\u00a0how Microsoft is achieving this vision,\u00a0refer to\u00a0Reinventing the employee experience at Microsoft<\/a>.<\/p>\n The digitally assisted workday is rooted in a functional vision\u2014our employees have the unified, highly informed, assisted, and automated experiences that they need to be empowered, productive, innovative, and satisfied. Our vision is to help our employees save time during their day so that they can focus on more critical, complex work responsibilities.<\/p>\n The unified employee experience creates an empowering, productive, and personalized workday with consistent tools and a centralized access hub. Great search experiences enable our employees to find relevant information in whatever context they need it, including proactively delivered information and insights that fit their needs and interests. Personalized assistance and automated task completion provide simple, accessible help for routine tasks and the capabilities to automatically complete those tasks when applicable. We envision all these experiences working together to help Microsoft employees get the most out of their day.<\/p>\n We\u2019re designing the digitally assisted workday to improve the Microsoft employee\u2019s daily work life. We want our employees to have easy access to important tools, to be informed with an unmatched search experience, and to receive assistance on the go. We\u2019ll provide an automated experience to support employees\u2019 workday, enabling them to focus on high-value tasks and innovation. For example, a typical Microsoft employee\u2019s day might resemble something like this:<\/p>\n Enabling employees to quickly find information wherever they are and providing an efficient way for them to complete their planned tasks are significant contributors to employee productivity. Companies\u2014including Microsoft\u2014are focusing on giving their users a unified and coherent experience with improved search capabilities and the ability to act on what they find.<\/p>\n Employees want information to get their work done, and it\u2019s essential that they obtain the right information or next action. Within the Microsoft internal search portal, only 52 percent of searches conducted in 2018 were successful and more than 50 percent of monthly queries were new, creating a complex and diverse search set. Internally, Microsoft has more than 7 petabytes of data. Much of that data contains inconsistent metadata, which has made it difficult to obtain relevant results or connect and aggregate information repositories. Our employees commonly cited the following issues in the past year:<\/p>\n Our employees need fluidity and consistency throughout the workday, and it was taking them too long to discover and execute tasks. When employees must stop what they\u2018re doing to try to find information and execute simple tasks, their productivity decreases. Studies show that it takes 25 minutes to return to the original task after being interrupted. This results in an average 40 percent productivity decline when trying to multitask.<\/p>\n Our employees\u2019 sentiments on their workday environment underscore the need for a more unified, informed, assisted, and automated experience:<\/p>\n \u201cI wish I had one central location to manage my life at Microsoft.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cMy ideal work experience would include fewer manual tasks, like tracking expenses and vacation.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAt times, it\u2019s hard to make connections with people outside my team.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI work with teams across the globe. Scheduling meetings is just so tedious and time consuming. I wish there were a bot that could figure out the best time to meet, taking time zones into account. Then, the bot would follow up with each attendee if they don\u2019t respond within a defined period so that we know if they can attend or not.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI would love to use fewer internal tools. That would start me off efficiently, save me enormous amounts of time, and give me a great progress boost.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cAt work, it would be nice if our tools and systems were integrated by using the same back-end data, instead of requiring me to navigate through different portals depending on what I need.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The digitally assisted workday will make resources such as information, people, files, and answers easily discoverable and contextually integrated throughout the employee experience. We want to present highly relevant information to our employees before they even know they need it. We believe that the digitally assisted workday facilitates a significant shift toward increased employee productivity. We want to place our employees in an environment where they can find the key person who can answer the question that no one else can, thus creating person-to-person connections.<\/p>\n We\u2019re enabling our employees to locate the document they need quickly, be informed about an app that will double their productivity, or efficiently accomplish frequent and tedious tasks in context. Microsoft Digital is partnering across the Microsoft 365 portfolio with SharePoint, Bing, OneDrive, Office, Teams, and Cortana to make this vision a reality. The goal is to deliver intelligent, personalized, and interconnected experiences to Microsoft employees and our customers. We\u2019re focusing on three major pillars, as depicted in the following figure.<\/p>\n Microsoft MyHub will provide a simple, personalized, and mobile experience for employees to quickly navigate employee life, do what they enjoy, and achieve more. MyHub is an app and web portal that unifies the employee experience. It puts common tasks, including commuting, managing benefits and pay, scheduling dining, navigating our campus, and more within a centralized tool. MyHub enables employees and partners to simplify their lives at Microsoft and be more productive. With MyHub, employees can easily discover task-completion options and then personalize their preferred tasks in a single location. This gives employees quick access to information and tasks that matter to them. The unified experience eliminates the need to access fragmented tools and creates one simple, seamless experience.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve designed MyHub to provide personalized experiences for employees in context. By receiving relevant, curated content, each employee is better connected to the Microsoft company, culture, and mission. With MyHub, we\u2019re providing tools for employees to ensure they make the most of their Microsoft benefits, identify career-development opportunities, obtain training, and more. We\u2019re prioritizing and developing several employee-focused scenarios, including the following:<\/p>\n Our goal is to enable our employees to find relevant and accurate information quickly and easily, regardless of the search channel or work context they\u2019re in. Microsoft Search provides consistent and coherent experiences across a broad set of search channels in the company, such as SharePoint, Bing, and Microsoft 365 products. We\u2019ve modernized and upgraded our previous enterprise search experience with Microsoft Search to give our employees the context-based environment they need and provide the most relevant information based on their search activity.<\/p>\n The new search experience is personalized for each user, providing the most relevant results for the user\u2019s role and context. Microsoft Search provides intelligent, user-specific recommendations, enabling them to continue where they left off or letting them connect easily to their co-workers within the enterprise by using intelligent Microsoft Graph technology.<\/p>\n We\u2019re developing Microsoft Search to be a single, simple search experience that spans the entire enterprise. It provides an intelligent search experience that results in a coherent, consistent interface across the apps and devices that our employees use most. Microsoft Search is embedded in Microsoft 365, and it\u2019s designed to fulfill search and knowledge retrieval across the web, collaborative workspaces, personal information, and enterprise knowledge sources. It provides high-performance, relevant search sessions that connect to all experiences by using Microsoft 365, Microsoft Graph, and customizations. We\u2019re using Microsoft Search to:<\/p>\n Going forward, we will develop more personalized and intelligent experiences for employees that deliver answers and insights directly in search and use natural language to determine user intent. Understanding the user from an activity and network perspective is fundamental to a highly personalized, informed, and connected workday and workplace experience.<\/p>\n More than 50 percent of our employees\u2019 frequent searches are for getting things done. We want our employees to have the tools that they require to efficiently complete common and tedious tasks. Integrated, in-context experiences will provide our employees well-placed, easily discoverable solutions through automated task completion, such as opening a support ticket or approving an expense report. Natural-language capability in the search experience will provide quick access to answers and potential actions, enabling employees to complete tasks.<\/p>\n The new paradigm for work has moved away from the traditional workday and workspace into an anytime, anywhere model. Microsoft employees move around throughout the day and can\u2019t be tied to their computers or offices to be productive. From their morning commute to navigating buildings, to getting home at the end of the day, our employees now use multiple ways to keep up and get things done. Assisting employees wherever they are allows them to get briefed on their day, get caught up while they\u2019re in motion, and gain insights using a variety of devices.<\/p>\n As the digital-assistant realm expands in the consumer environment, users are beginning to expect that the voice and productivity technology that they use in their homes is available at work. We\u2019re investing in personalized and in-context technologies that empower our employees to focus on what matters most and allow them to get work done efficiently and seamlessly across all roles and environments, within a secure, trusted enterprise experience.<\/p>\n Personal assistance and in-context automated task completion focus on enabling employees to continue working in their current context. We want the natural flow of an employee\u2019s work tasks to continue undisrupted. This means providing digital-assistant capabilities that automate routine tasks through contextualized and personalized interactions across the tools and interfaces that employees use daily.<\/p>\n When employees are using their work tools, personal assistance and automation will be at their fingertips. Employees will no longer need to shift focus to complete mundane tasks. We\u2019re creating an environment where employees can get things done in context and get personalized, intelligent, and connected experiences wherever they are. Employees will receive available meeting times and recommended shuttle reservations if they look up a colleague. Travel booking and expense logging will be available from within the Microsoft Teams experience as employees discuss their planned business trip. Our systems will learn from behavior and suggest and complete tasks on behalf of users.<\/p>\n In addition to MyHub, we\u2019re also building these capabilities into our most commonly used search tools, MSW, our internal company news and information portal, and Microsoft Search in Bing. We recognize that employees have different interaction preferences, so we\u2019re also using Microsoft Teams and Cortana to provide text-based and voice-based digital assistance to our employees on whatever device they\u2019re using. We\u2019re supplying task completion that fits our employees\u2019 personal needs without taking them away from what they\u2019re doing. Some examples include:<\/p>\n We\u2019re creating a seamless workday experience for our employees, enabling them to get things done quickly and easily. With Microsoft Digital\u2019s vision-led approach and strong collaboration with our core product partners, we\u2019re creating a unified, informed, assisted, and automated digitally assisted workday. In the future, we\u2019ll free up employees\u2019 time to do their most innovative work, continually reducing and eliminating delays that reduce productivity. We\u2019ll make it simple and efficient to find the resources, people, and information that employees need to get their work done or to achieve that next big idea or breakthrough. The digitally assisted workday helps employees get things done by assisting and automating routine task completion so that Microsoft employees can go further, faster.<\/p>\n At Microsoft, we\u2019re creating a seamless, effortless workday experience for our employees, enabling them to manage their workday, find information, and get things done quickly and easily. We\u2019re transforming our search and task-completion experience into a unified, informed, and automated digitally assisted workday that improves our employees\u2019 productivity and helps them achieve more. The digitally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":10074,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[423,597],"coauthors":[646],"class_list":["post-10072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-developer-tools","tag-employee-experience","program-microsoft-digital-technical-stories","m-blog-post"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nEstablishing a vision for workday productivity<\/h2>\n
Creating the workday of the future<\/h3>\n
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Understanding the workday experience at Microsoft<\/h2>\n
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Transforming the digitally assisted workday<\/h2>\n
![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2023\/03\/8998_image001.png\")
Unified employee experience<\/h3>\n
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Great finding experience<\/h3>\n
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Personal assistance and automated task completion<\/h3>\n
Providing in-context experiences<\/h4>\n
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![\"Key](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/key-takeaways-300x74.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Related](\"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/uploads\/prod\/2021\/10\/related_links-300x81.png\")
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