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5 Ideas to Improve Employee Experience in The Digital Workplace

June 6, 2022
7 min read
5 Ideas to Improve Employee Experience in The Digital Workplace
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There is no shortage of ways organizations can improve the employee experience (Improve Employee Experience By Understanding The 8 Stages) in the workplace today. The opportunity to accelerate app impact is high today. IDC, Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation by McKinsey reported that 50% of digital work can be automated with current tech and 60% of all occupations have greater than 30% automatable activities.

For a complete understanding of employee experience along with actionable insights, download our definitive guide where we share just that, and how Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva can come into play.

Momentum and demand are building with more need for better apps and solutions than ever before. This demand is unprecedented and continues to accelerate. It is not uncommon today for larger organizations to have more than 200 apps in use across their organization with a backlog and demand for many more.

Momentum and demand are building with more need for better apps and solutions than ever before. This demand is unprecedented and continues to accelerate. It is not uncommon today for larger organizations to have more than 200 apps in use across their organization with a backlog and demand for many more.

The more we can maximize Microsoft 365 apps and services to integrate, connect or displace these apps, the less isolation and silo effects we should see across our apps and solution ecosystem within our organizations.

In this blog, we will be sharing these five solution ideas:

  • Center of Digital Excellence
  • Time & Expense Submission
  • Enhancements for Company Communicator
  • New Employee Onboarding Assistance
  • SharePoint Syntex Assessment

Navigating More Great Ideas

Before we dive into those five solution ideas, we should note that over 400,000 partners and tens of millions of developers are working with Microsoft 365 today. A robust ecosystem and marketplace of solutions from customers, community leaders, and vendors like Microsoft can show how Microsoft 365 meets many of those app needs and provides a better digital employee experience, but this ecosystem and marketplace are fragmented across many sites and spaces today.

To help here, we have put together an ebook to help organizations like yours navigate and take advantage of digital workplace solutions that build on Microsoft 365. This eBook helps organizations better understand how they can elevate their digital employee experience and meet key employee needs.

Those needs include:

  • Adoption
  • Business Processes
  • Employee Communication
  • Employee Networking and Connectivity
  • Employee Onboarding
  • Ideation
  • Microsoft 365 Management
  • Organizing the Digital Workplace

Download our latest Microsoft 365 resource below or read this blog, where we showcase 5 solutions out of the 35+ included in our eBook.

#1 Establish a Center of Digital Excellence

Every organization is working hard to improve digital excellence. Having a center for digital excellence is a foundational solution that will work to reinforce and communicate governance and provide a hub for self-service learning, connect champions, mentors, experts, and house tips, tricks, and considerable adoption material.

What does it do?

Acting as a hub for digital excellence, this templated or customized site, yammer community, and connected teams serve as a place to store, share, monitor, and manage digital excellence within the organization.

When used in combination with Viva Learning and other technology investments such as Microsoft Learning Pathways, it can surface and connect users to learning programs, materials, and resources.

The Digital CoE is also a foundational investment for governance. It provides a clear location for sharing, storing, and enabling a richer understanding of your digital governance policies and guidance. Many house champion programs, lists, mentorship, Q&A-driven communities, and much more.

Technology Used

Solution Areas

  • Center of excellence
  • Adoption
  • Champion programs
  • Learning management
  • Governance

#2 Time & Expense Submissions

What if timesheets could proactively reach out to employees and simplify the process of submission. This approach would require no extra login, no additional app as it’s in Teams where employees already work, with a simplified and improved end-user experience.

What does it do?

The app pro-actively reaches out to employees to perform a time and/or expense submission in Microsoft Teams.

With single sign-on, employees do not have to sign in every time to access the app or leave the Microsoft Teams experience. Whether using any device, mobile, desktop, or web browser, the user experience remains the same.

Managers get a single consolidated view of their team’s time entry information and/or expenses. The manager can view action time & expense submissions for each direct report (accept, reject, and send a reminder).

Technology Used

Solution Areas

  • Professional services
  • Time & expense management
  • Project operations

#3 Company Communicator For Microsoft Teams

Take your company communications to the next level with an enhanced company communication experience that enables pushing key messages to people and channels in Microsoft Teams.

What does it do?

The core solution enables communicators to leverage Microsoft Teams as an effective push channel for key or targeted employee communication. This is achieved by enabling:

  • Message creation: Easily create messages by using a team tab where team members who have permission can collaborate and create messages.
  • Audience selection: Pick from four options for to target audience. Send to the general channel of selected teams, send in 1:1 chat to members of selected teams, send to all users who have the app installed, or send to M365 distribution lists or security groups.
  • Message metrics: Export messages delivery report.
  • Localization: Supports multiple languages.

While this core solution is a great starting point many of our customers have worked with us to implement further enhancements and improvements. Here are a some of the more popular ones:

End-User Experience

  • Improved first-run experiences
  • Track, as read/acknowledged/confirmed
  • Improved layouts

Publishing

  • Delay delivery or schedule communication
  • Send out to Yammer, email, or other channels beyond Microsoft Teams
  • Integrate with other key systems (like digital signing)

Authoring

  • Rich text improvements
  • Drafting improvements
  • Approval improvements
  • Publishing improvements
  • Private previews
  • Improved layouts

Analytics

  • Tracking acknowledgment
  • Sentiment analysis of responses
  • Segmentation and audience tracking
  • Power BI integration

Technology Used

Solution Areas

  • Corporate communications
  • Digital workplace
  • Employee experience

#4 New Employee Onboarding Assistance

With the New Employee Onboarding Assistance solution, new employee checklists, feedback capture, and the ability for new hires to introduce themselves using the app are all available. Managers can even approve the introduction and share it with relevant teams.

What does it do?

The Onboarding Assistance enables human resources to manage relevant content and processes for new employees via a new employee checklist (corporate or departmental). It allows employees to introduce themselves by sharing information that is automatically shared with their managers. This makes it easier for managers to review introductions about all new hires and share them with the relevant teams via the application.

At any time, new employees can share feedback on a task in their onboarding journey or on the overall experience using a helpful bot command. All feedback is shared with the HR team through notifications that can be downloaded.

HR teams can also use the app to share pulse surveys for new employees to review the employee feedback using Microsoft Forms.

Technology Used

Solution Areas

  • Employee portals
  • Employee experience
  • Onboarding
  • Employee networking

#5 SharePoint Syntex Assessment

Using the SharePoint Syntex Assessment enables you to gather data about your SharePoint libraries and generate a Power BI report with recommendations of where Syntex and AI might fit and bring added value to your organization.

These recommendations are based on factors such as the size and structure of libraries, the existing use of metadata or content types, and the use of retention labels.

What does it do?

This assessment tool can be used to report on the distribution and configuration of SharePoint libraries, content types, and more to help identify areas of opportunity for content and document automation, understanding, and enrichment. There are several reports available in the results of the assessment:

  • Libraries with custom columns and the libraries that use the most columns.
  • Column usage identifies columns commonly used across your document libraries, by name or by type.
  • Libraries with custom content types to identify libraries that are enabled to use custom content types. It will also show libraries that are using the most content types.
  • Content-type usage to help you to identify content types that are heavily used, both by number of files and locations
  • Library size and libraries with retention labels help identify content understanding/enrichment targets that Syntex can automate.
  • Library modernization status can indicate libraries that should still be modernized to take advantage of new capabilities and features like Syntex.
  • Prebuilt model candidates and Syntex Model Usage can both provide libraries and content types where the name matches the ready-to-use models or where Syntex is leveraged today and items that have been classified.

Technology Used

Solution Areas

  • Document understanding
  • Document management
  • Content automation
  • Document automation
  • SharePoint Syntex

Discover 35+ More Microsoft Solution Ideas

There are many more solution ideas in our eBook, and we’re sure you’ll discover a few valuable to your organization’s needs.

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