5 Ideas to Improve Employee Experience in The Digital Workplace

There is no shortage of ways organizations can improve the employee experience 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.

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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Ignite the Hybrid Workplace

With much of the business world learning the advantages and how to optimize hybrid workplaces, it was evident that Microsoft would develop so much to provide answers and solutions to a lot of the world's questions and needs.

The desire and need for change don't only come from C-Level executives in need of adapting their business models. 58% percent of employees want to go back to the office to do more focused work and, the same percentage of individuals wish to continue to work from home for the same reason.

Ignite announcements make it a no brainer to upgrade and/or migrate

Our CTO and Microsoft MVP, Richard Harbridge, put together a few videos to highlight some of the more innovative and economic Ignite highlights that might allow your company to see the power of an up-to-date Microsoft 365 suite. These will make the shift to a hybrid workplace not only easier but more economical.

This blog will look at the highlights in two categories: financial & innovative wins.

If you want to understand what it would take to migrate or upgrade to Microsoft 365, register for our free webinar with our incredible partner AvePoint.

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This change means a big barrier is removed for many organizations looking to do more with Power Apps. We asked Richard about it and he shared some insights on what the change of pricing is and why it matters.

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From breaking down a huge Microsoft Teams barrier to a promise kept in the form of a new solution, the innovation was incredible this Ignite. Here are two we thought you would want to know more about.

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New apps mean new governance considerations (like Microsoft Loop) but subtle announcements like shared channels can have sweeping consequences. We asked Richard for his perspective on this and what it means for sprawl and governance.

Download our eBook to get ahead of the most common sprawl issues that plague Microsoft 365 digital workplaces everywhere.

Microsoft Loop

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Also, don't forget to find out how to plan and execute your SharePoint upgrade and/or migration in a webinar with our incredible partner AvePoint. This webinar will help make sure that your switch or upgrade to the most recent version of Microsoft 365 goes as smoothly as possible.

What is the Microsoft Power Platform?

Since its inception in November 2016, Power Apps and Microsoft Power Automate have focused on the mandate to help organizations support business transformation. They provide a foundation that empowers the non-IT user to take their day to day activities and automate their business processes. 

Let’s take a quick tour to meet the members of the Power Platform family. 

Power Apps 

Power Apps supports organizations to create responsive user interfaces to capture and present information in various devices and connect to data sources - obtaining or sending information. 

There are 3 main ways to create custom apps with Power Apps: 

• Canvas Apps – for apps where you want full control of the app design. 
• Model-Driven Apps – component-based apps that focus on the business data models 
• Power App Portals – external-facing websites that can surface business data. 

Canvas Apps 

With canvas apps, the world is your oyster! You have an empty canvas (pun intended!) to design your app just the way you want to. This may be a bit daunting at first, however, if you start from an existing data source (say, a SharePoint List for example) Power Apps is smart enough to give you a head start and create starter screens for you to browse the list, view or create/edit new items. 

Model-Driven Apps 

For model-driven apps, the focus is on the data itself and the business process around it. Instead of designing how the screen will look, you define the entities, business flows, forms, views, and/or dashboards around a specific business process. Model-Driven apps use the Common Data Service as the data repository for your entities.  

Power Apps Portals 

Power App Portals, also part of Power Apps, is one of the (old) new kids on the block that comes to provide a fresh new take on building external-facing portals for your organization. 

Portals provide the means to create low/no-code responsive websites. These websites cant can be used with any major commercial (think Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or enterprise login provider (such as your own local credentials or work accounts such as your Office 365 account) and presents the user with a simple WYSIWYG interface to create static and dynamic web site pages based on information stored in the Common Data Service. 

A few highlights of Power Apps Portals include: 

• Building Blocks – Pages, templates, and components to build your Portal. 
• New Page Experience to create great looking pages and a theming engine based on Bootstrap to quickly define a familiar look for your Portal. 
• New Page Experience to create great looking pages and a theming engine based on Bootstrap to quickly define a familiar look for your Portal. 
• Custom Domain URLs! 
• List components to present or capture information stored in your CDS 
• Form components to leverage model-driven forms (think of forms as part of a business process). 

Power Automate 

Power Automate on the other hand provides the ability to automate workflows that orchestrate business processes that gather data from disparate systems, make decisions and or transform the data into actionable tasks that can affect services in and out of the Office 365 or Microsoft ecosystem. 

Based on actions, triggers, and conditions, you can build flows that run on a schedule or are triggered by an action (such as receiving an email, tweets from an account, a message from other systems, etc.). Once the flow is running, you can take action by reading the initial data from the trigger, manipulate it, make decisions based on it and act on other systems, for example, saving a new item into a SharePoint List, sending out an email, creating an approval task, etc. 

Over 300 connectors are available for you to compose your flows in Power automate! 

AI Builder 

As you build new Power Apps or Power Automate flows there will be times where you want the power of artificial intelligence to support you in parts of the process. AI Builder provides capabilities to easily implement predictive AI capabilities that can speed up decision making based on historical data.  

Currently, in preview, there are additional capabilities to explore around object detection (identifying and counting items on an image), forms processing (read and capture information in standardized forms for digitizing the content of the form) and text processing. These capabilities can support you to identify key trends and/or categorize content based on your business needs. 

Power BI 

Let’s not forget their older but also quite powerful cousin, Power BI. A suite of tools (desktop client, web client, and the Power BI service) released in July 2011 that have grown to be a key resource for building interactive reports and dashboard experiences. 

Common Data Service 

I mentioned earlier the Common Data Service, or CDS for short, is a cloud data repository that is primarily leveraged by the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of tools (and the Power Platform, of course ) which can also be used to create your own custom entities to store your company data. 

CDS provides a robust security mechanism that can help you secure your data and provide appropriate access to each group that needs it. CDS is based on the Common Data Model schema and a standard set of entities that Microsoft has defined and is aligning with others such as Adobe and SAP as part of the Open Data Initiative. Another key benefit of the CDS is that it doesn’t need any infrastructure or administration, it is all managed by Microsoft. 

On-premises Data Access Gateway 

For those at home (see what I did there?), with the use of the Data Access Gateway, organizations can also connect to local services and information stores to effectively report on data sources (local SQL Server instances, SharePoint lists, and libraries, etc.) stored on-premises as well as create/update information in them in Power Apps or Power Automate. 

For a while, that’s all we had… Until now! 

Power Virtual Agents 

The main premise of Power Virtual Agents is to support subject matter experts to create, manage and optimize chatbots by providing a no-code, easy to use interface that allows users to define topics where the bot can assist by providing accurate responses and even initiate a process by integrating with a Power Automate Flow. 

The interface also supports quick testing of the bot and provides a dashboard with various key metrics to assess the engagement and effectiveness of the bot’s configured topics. 

This is a game-changer, as previously it required a highly specialized team of IT, Data Scientists, Developers, and AI experts to have a baseline bot experience built and released. 

Once you are done testing, you can easily publish your bot to a website (for external use), Microsoft Teams, or Facebook. With a few more additional steps, you can extend the reach to other canvases by using Azure Bot Service channels, allowing you to other services such as Skype, Kik, or Slack to name a few. 

Great, so where to start? 

Now that you are more familiar with the capabilities of the Power Platform, it will become easier to identify areas where these pieces can support your team to automate and make decisions day-to-day. 

One key step towards your journey to business process improvement starts with understanding what the process actually looks like. Very few processes are accurately documented (if at all) and it is key to map out the business process, inputs, and outcomes before automation work should start. There are also various methodologies for mapping and optimizing business processes, one of which is the value stream mapping exercise, one of the tools of Lean methodology. 

If you're looking for the latest Power Platform updates, take a look at our YouTube playlist!

We’re here to help 

Would you like to learn more? Have you identified a key business process that you can automate and transform the way you work? Reach out to us, we will be happy to support you on your journey towards business improvement.