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How Microsoft 365 Solutions Help Improve Employee Experience

October 18, 2022
7.5 min read
How Microsoft 365 Solutions Help Improve Employee Experience
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Many business leaders feel the pressure of new, growing employee expectations and are now required to consider how all organizational aspects impact employees.

Consider for a moment how your processes may affect your employees’ satisfaction and fulfillment. Is your organization meeting this need?

Employees’ feelings, perceptions, well-being, and a balanced work/life are all parts of the Employee Experience. Positive EX leads to better retention, employee engagement, and performance.

Improving Employee Experience is a goal that Microsoft has been pursuing faithfully. Microsoft Viva is all about enhancing the employee experience, which you can read more about in our other blog. However, just because Viva is flourishing, it doesn’t mean you should turn a blind eye to the tried-and-true M365 solutions designed to improve EX, such as:

  • Microsoft & GLINT
  • Microsoft Loop
  • Microsoft Search
  • Microsoft Teams
  • Power Platform
  • SharePoint
  • Yammer

Are you looking for 80+ pages of Employee Experience insights, best practices, and all the details on which Microsoft solutions to use? Find all the answers in our latest whitepaper.

Dowload our free 80+ Page whitepaper. Call to action graphic. Transform your employee experience at every stage with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Solutions That Improve EX

The following solutions are designed to address organizational and individual EX challenges.

Many of these solutions embrace new advancements and even leverage artificial intelligence to aid in creating, measuring, and maintaining improvements in EX.

Microsoft & Glint

Today Viva Pulse and Microsoft GLINT help organizations to create a thriving culture of engaged employees and inspiring leaders through automated programs that make gathering feedback simple, giving your people a steady voice and helping you better understand your organization. Viva Insights, Pulse, and Glint help organizations capture valuable employee feedback and translate insights into actions, allowing managers and teams to measure and improve the employee experience.

Note: Keep in mind that some experiences in GLINT are NOT represented in Viva Pulse today.

Example of alerts from Microsoft and Glint from the Glint interfae

Some of the biggest capabilities it provides are:

  • Keep your finger on the pulse: Business is always changing, so measure employee sentiment in real-time with survey programs spanning engagement, lifecycle, manager and team effectiveness, culture, D&I, and development.
  • Get AI-driven insights: Capitalize on the latest science of happiness in the workplace. Proprietary AI for HRTM and predictive intelligence aggregate and analyze feedback, surfacing opportunities and issues and helping you connect the dots between how work is happening and how employees feel.
  • Equip every manager to take effective action: Empower managers to understand and respond to their team’s needs, invite their employees into the conversation to identify solutions, learn through integrated LinkedIn Learning content in the Glint platform, and build better team practices over time.

Microsoft Loop

Microsoft Loop is a new app that combines a powerful and flexible canvas with portable components that stay in sync and move freely across Microsoft 365 apps. Work in chat, meetings, or documents using portable components that are always up to date. Connect naturally with emojis and expressions. Easily collaborate and track progress with notifications, highlighted changes, status labels, task lists, and more.

Example of Microsoft loop components in action. Microsoft teams table with multiple contributors

Some of the greatest capabilities it provides are:

  • Workspaces: Organize what you need for your project, such as files, links, and data from other apps, in a single workspace.
  • Pages: Organize your Loop components and important elements in your project, such as links, files, and data in Loop pages; flexible canvases that can grow to match the size of your ideas.
  • Components: Collaborate in the flow of work with Loop components. Work together on lists, tables, notes, or even a customer sales opportunity from Dynamics 365 on a Loop page or in a chat, email, meeting, or document.

Microsoft Search

Microsoft Search helps you find what you need to complete what you’re working on. Whether you’re searching for people, files, organization charts, sites, or answers to common questions, you can use Microsoft Search throughout your workday to get answers.

Example of Microsoft Search function bar in action inside of a digital hub

Some of the more significant capabilities it provides are:

  • Available across the employee experience: From SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Office Applications, Windows, Bing For Business, and more, you can run a search and find the content, people, or answers you need while quickly getting back to what you were doing.
  • Easy to search: Microsoft Search suggests results based on an employee’s previous activity in Microsoft 365, right in the search box.
  • Find shared files faster: Microsoft Search uses advanced query understanding to make finding shared files simple, making it easier for employees to find files they are collaborating on.
  • Show relevant content and promote results: Microsoft Search will promote the information and answers employees need to complete tasks such as policies, benefits, resources, tools and more with the ability to target specific groups, like new hires, remote workers, or different geographies to provide more targeted experiences or results.
  • Integrated and extensible: Microsoft provides connectors to 17 systems and services today as a 1st party and there are hundreds of pre-built connectors from vendors available for an organization to use to create a truly integrated employee search experience.

Microsoft Teams

Teams is an application that helps teams communicate and share knowledge. It has chat grouping capability through Teams and Channels, allows employees to conduct video meetings, supports employees with file storage, and enables direct chat.

Teams is the hub for work within the organization and act as the window into many of the other applications of Microsoft 365.

Some of the greatest capabilities it provides are:

  • Connect naturally: Chat, call and share videos simply from one place that helps you stay close to everyone in your life.
  • Make something great together: With shared documents and files always available, you can create, share, and exchange ideas whenever you want to and keep things moving forward together.
  • Stay in the flow: When all the best apps and features you need are at your fingertips, you become more focused and efficient.

Power Platform

The Power Platform is an extensive business process automation and analytics application suite. The Microsoft Power Platform is powerful alone but even better together as it’s more than the sum of its parts. If you connect Power Platform’s parts together along with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and hundreds of other apps, you can build end-to-end business solutions more efficiently and faster.

Power Platform Application spread. Logos laid out for Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, Power Pages, Data connectors, AI Builder and Dataverse

Key capabilities within the Power Platform include:

  • PowerApps: Turn ideas into organizational solutions by enabling everyone to build custom apps that solve business challenges
  • Power Automate: Boost business productivity to get more done by giving everyone the ability to automate organizational processes.
  • Power Virtual Agents: Work with the Teams app. It allows for easy scheduling and task management. Dataverse works with Teams to allow users to create chats and apps within the app.
  • Power BI: A very powerful analytics platform that allows for data visualization and AI-based information insights. This enables employees to make informed, confident business decisions by putting data-driven insights into everyone’s hands.
  • Power Pages & Power Portals: This Enables employees to quickly build low-code business websites for delivering vital information and services to your partners and customers.

SharePoint

SharePoint is a powerful and streamlined way for teams to share and communicate. It allows employees to house content, engage on intranets, and collaborate with external partners on extranets.

SharePoint allows users to collaborate from anywhere. It also allows them to share and create new ideas. If digital transformation is a goal of your organization, SharePoint can help achieve it.

Microsoft SharePoint interface view. SharePoint is a powerful and streamlined way for teams to share and communicate. It allows employees to house content, engage on intranets, and collaborate with external partners on extranets.SharePoint allows users to collaborate from anywhere. It also allows them to share and create new ideas. If digital transformation is a goal of your organization, SharePoint can help achieve it.

Some of the greatest capabilities it provides are:

  • Simple sharing and seamless collaboration: SharePoint empowers teamwork with dynamic and productive team sites for every project team, department, and division. Share files, data, news, and resources. Customize your site to streamline your team’s work. Collaborate effortlessly and securely with team members inside and outside your organization across PCs, Macs, and mobile devices.
  • Engage and inform your organization: Build cohesion and inform your employees throughout your Intranet. Drive organizational efficiency by sharing common resources and applications on home sites and portals. Tell your story with beautiful communication sites. And stay in the know with personalized, targeted news on the web and the SharePoint mobile apps.
  • Harness collective knowledge: You’re just a click away from what you are looking for, with powerful search and intelligent ways to discover information, expertise, and insights to inform decisions and guide action. SharePoint’s rich content management and valuable connections and conversations surfaced in Yammer enable your organization to maximize the velocity of knowledge.

Yammer

Yammer is a social network for businesses. It allows you to engage with leadership, ask questions and promote answers, and host live events for the entire organization.

Microsoft Yammer interface spread. Yammer is a social network for business that allows you to engage with leadership, ask questions and promote answers, and host live events for the entire organization.allows you to engage with leadership, ask questions and promote answers, and host live events for the entire organization.

Some of the biggest capabilities it provides are:

  • Open and dynamic communication across your organization: Improve engagement and enhance communication in your organization. Build communities of interest, gather ideas and feedback, and keep everyone informed, aligned, and moving forward with help from Yammer.
  • Conversations and communities across Microsoft 365: Join the conversation and connect with coworkers in the apps you use everyday. Refer to Viva Engage for more insights here.

Solutions that Power the Digital Workplace

Each of these platforms can elevate your company’s employee experience single-handedly but can have a tremendous impact with their combined powers. Bringing one or all of these experiences into your workplace could bring about the changes necessary to fulfill the expectations of a modern employee.

A workplace that supports the intangible needs of its employees with exceptional employee experience will stand out as the obvious choice for long-term commitments.

For additional insights on best practices for Employee Experience and all the details on which Microsoft solutions to use for what, download our latest 80+ page whitepaper.

Download the Definitive guide to employee experience with Microsoft365 and Microsoft Viva. Use our free guide to improve retention, employee engagement and performance
DOWNLOAD NOW
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