Making Hybrid Work, Work: Microsoft’s Digital Transformation Journey
At Microsoft, we recognize that our employees are our greatest asset. To facilitate our mission of empowering every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more, we embarked on a transformation of our IT infrastructure in 2017. Our objective was to improve our own employee experience so we could better assist our customers with their technological transformations. Our investment in a renewed employee experience allowed Microsoft employees to innovate, create, and collaborate effortlessly. Shifting to the Microsoft Azure cloud made us more flexible.
However, despite a vision for the future and people-centric investments, nothing prepared us for March 2020. This was when Microsoft employees globally were sent home to safeguard their health and safety. The era of hybrid work had begun.
This article examines how we’re making hybrid work work at Microsoft. Our goal is to share our experiences with fellow digital transformation leaders, offering insights from keeping over 300,000 individuals productive, connected, and empowered worldwide. It includes the evolution from Microsoft IT to Microsoft Digital; our strategies for helping Microsoft and our clients succeed in the hybrid workplace across digital experiences, physical locations, and cultural standards; our investments in AI to revolutionize our IT infrastructure, employee experiences, and corporate functions portfolio; and the development and implementation of new technologies like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Viva, Microsoft Teams, and the Microsoft Power Platform.
Becoming Microsoft Digital
For years, Microsoft IT functioned like a conventional IT organization—highly reactive and focused more on technology than employee experience. Although the user experience was a concern, it was mostly outside our direct control since we primarily deployed and maintained solutions built by other teams or companies. In 2017, we renamed our team to End User Services Engineering, reflecting our transition to a modern engineering organization. Our team became “vision-led,” focusing on building and deploying optimum solutions to meet people’s needs, not just implementing the latest technology. We transformed from reactive practitioners to proactive visionaries. This transformation culminated in our transition to Microsoft Digital.
At the heart of that transformation is a focus on our employees’ needs that goes beyond tools and infrastructure, extending to their entire daily experience, from their first day to retirement. We manage their digital experience across every dimension of their employment, ensuring they have essential devices, applications, services, and infrastructure to facilitate productivity regardless of location or role. While our project to provide a world-class digital experience for Microsoft employees started years ago, the COVID-19 pandemic surprisingly accelerated its evolution. Dealing with the pandemic gave us the time and insights to ensure every Microsoft employee has a high-quality digital experience whether they’re in the office or working remotely. The subsequent parts of this article show how we’re putting that vision into practice for Microsoft’s employees worldwide, enabling them to thrive in a hybrid world.
Thriving in a Hybrid World
Our transition to remote work, like most big corporations, happened virtually overnight. The effects on company culture, infrastructure, and procedures have lasted well beyond the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. The implications of hybrid work continue to resonate. From now on, every investment must be considered through various elements of the employee experience: digital capabilities, physical spaces, and culture.
The sections that follow reflect our journey at Microsoft with these three dimensions of the employee experience.
Digital Capabilities
The pandemic and the transition to hybrid work accelerated our efforts to revolutionize the employee experience through Microsoft Viva. Generative AI advancements in 2023 have opened new approaches for supporting employee productivity, causing Microsoft Digital to rethink “core” IT. Breakthroughs include reimagining employee productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Furthermore, investments in Microsoft Teams, the Microsoft Power Platform, and other technologies are helping us speed up the transformation of our employee experience, while a Zero Trust security posture keeps our enterprise secure and our employees productive. More on each investment is shown below.
Microsoft Viva
When millions of people globally began working from home in 2020, it signaled a dramatic shift in how employees experienced the workplace and how firms supported their employees’ safety and productivity during a pandemic. Among the millions were thousands of Microsoft employees. Our issues mirrored yours: how do we stay connected, informed, and motivated as we transition to hybrid work? Although numerous employees reported positive feedback about the new availability of flexible work options, our CEO Satya Nadella describes a hybrid paradox in which employees want more flexible work choices and more opportunities to connect and collaborate with colleagues in person. Furthermore, there is considerable evidence that innovation suffers when workers have fewer opportunities to expand their networks and establish new connections. This is where Microsoft Viva initially emerged as a single, unified platform built around the employee. The initial goals were centered around employee connection, well-being, and productivity. Driven by global macroeconomic concerns, that experience has evolved significantly since Viva’s 2021 launch, with a present-day emphasis on business impact and performance.
Microsoft Viva has also introduced several new Viva apps since its original launch, and the Microsoft Viva deployment at Customer Zero now includes extra features in support of the new focus:
- Employee Experience and Engagement | Microsoft Viva
At Customer Zero, we are looking forward to new incoming AI-enabled features across the Viva Suite and seeing how these capabilities improve the employee experience.
Transforming with AI
Employee productivity reached a new level in 2023 thanks to AI’s increasing usage. Generative AI in Microsoft 365 provides new features that aid workers with fundamental activities like composing emails, making presentations, summarizing meetings, quickly searching for information, and more. The AI era has begun! Numerous new opportunities are emerging through AI to improve employee experiences, allowing for seamless collaboration, customized workflows, and simplified engagement across the organization. AI will streamline the many systems our employees must use and access, minimizing daily work obstacles, providing flexibility to do tasks anytime and anywhere, and facilitating smooth cooperation in a hybrid work environment.
“The potential for transformation through AI is nearly limitless. We’re evaluating every service in our portfolio to consider how AI can improve outcomes, lower costs, and create a sustained competitive advantage for Microsoft and for our customers.” says Nathalie D’Hers, CVP, Microsoft Digital.
In addition to these standard employee productivity circumstances, we see that AI can revolutionize other IT services and start a wave of innovation that can improve outcomes, cut costs, and increase employee productivity everywhere. We are taking advantage of this opportunity to use AI’s power to simplify operations and improve services across our large portfolio. Our objective is to use our extensive enterprise IT knowledge to speed up Microsoft’s AI transformation while assisting our clients in seizing this once-in-a-generation opportunity to accelerate their digital transformation.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is one technology that will be central to our transformation. Copilot uses AI to help you construct and modify documents, presentations, emails, and more. Based on your context and preferences, it can suggest content, formatting, design, and data. It may also help you work with your team and access relevant information from various sources. Research from Microsoft’s WorkLab team revealed that early Copilot users experienced considerable productivity gains:
- 70% of Copilot users said they were more productive.
- 68% reported improvements in the quality of their work.
- Users completed a series of tasks (searching, writing, and summarizing) 29% faster.
- 77% of users reported that they didn’t want to give up Copilot after they had it.
Microsoft 365 Chat is another key technology that will transform the employee experience at Microsoft. Microsoft 365 Chat will serve as a core engagement center for our employees, allowing Microsoft Digital to redesign the employee experience to be employee-centric rather than app-centric. Microsoft 365 Chat will allow employees to access key information in a summary rather than a multitude of search results, delivered through natural language Q&A while also performing tasks seamlessly.
We are in the early phases of designing these AI-powered employee experiences and will have further information as our vision solidifies.
Hybrid Meetings with Microsoft Teams
Our deployment, maintenance, and support of thousands of conference rooms around the world is a significant challenge. Employees often use different conference room technology, even within the same building. This can result in frustration, delays, and even support calls. As we gear up for a return to the workplace, we’re preparing our physical and virtual capabilities for an improved hybrid meeting experience. An unexpected result of remote work has been a 31-point rise in meeting experience satisfaction.
The main reason for the increase in satisfaction is simple: Universal remote meeting participation helps create an even playing field, with a more inclusive atmosphere for all. Remote participants are no longer at a disadvantage to their peers attending in person, and as a result, they feel more included in discussions and meeting outcomes. Extending that momentum is a priority, as is retaining a similar inclusive environment. Microsoft Teams provides new features, as well as new hardware in meeting rooms, like intelligent AI-powered cameras. These aid participation in meetings between on-site and remote attendees.
We will continue to use Microsoft Teams capabilities that promote engagement and participation. Features like meeting chat, the “raise hand” feature, reactions, emojis, and integrated GIF support ensure a productive and interactive meeting experience for everyone. Microsoft Teams also benefits from Copilot integration also enabling users to quickly recap, identify follow-up tasks, create agendas, or ask questions for more effective and focused meetings. Intelligent Recap in Teams Premium can summarize key takeaways, help employees see what they’ve missed, and even pinpoint key people of interest in chats.
We’re retrofitting conference rooms to use the latest Microsoft Teams Rooms features and capabilities. We’ll also continue to work with the Microsoft Teams product group to innovate with new features. This will leverage investments in hardware, software, and physical space, creating immersive and inclusive environments.
Our goal is to improve our current meeting rooms globally while selectively deploying high-end rooms in targeted locations based on need. In that way, we’ll modernize the experience for all our employees while also delivering maximum value to Microsoft.
Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft employs thousands of highly qualified developers and engineers. We also have thousands of employees from other fields who contribute to our success as citizen developers using the Microsoft Power Platform. Citizen developers utilize no-code/low-code solutions to speed up the digital transformation of their work streams. At Microsoft, the technologies that make up the Microsoft Power Platform give virtually anyone in the company the power to transform our employee experience. After all, who is the person most likely to identify a process that could benefit from automation, or most likely to need to collect, visualize, and analyze data? It’s typically not someone on a central IT team; it’s the employee closest to the problem or opportunity.
The Microsoft Power Platform is made up of these four separate capabilities, as seen in the graphic. They have made Microsoft more agile and productive than ever before. Each tool is simple to learn and allows your staff to initiate digital transformation from the frontlines of your workforce, empowering your employees and fostering innovation.
Securing Employee Experiences Across Devices, Apps, and Infrastructure
Microsoft was more prepared than most organizations when the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted the global economy in 2020. This was not because we had anticipated the pandemic. It was because we had already shifted nearly every critical workload to the cloud and put in place a Zero Trust security model. A cloud-first strategy is essential in a hybrid world. Zero Trust security ensures a healthy and protected environment by using the internet as the default network with strong identity, device health enforcement, and least privilege access. It reduces risk by establishing strong identity verification, validating device compliance prior to granting access, and ensuring least privilege access (just-in-time, just-enough-access) to only explicitly authorized resources. Zero Trust requires that every transaction between systems is validated and proven trustworthy before the transaction can occur. Ideally, the behaviors shown in this graphic are required.
The security threat landscape continues to evolve, with attacks on corporate networks becoming more frequent and complex. This is partly due to hybrid work. Through our Zero Trust security posture, Microsoft Digital protects our corporate assets and secures the enterprise while ensuring our employees have the best possible experience. You can also minimize threats to your essential enterprise infrastructure by implementing Zero Trust within your organization.
Physical Spaces and Facilities
One of the three essential issues that all digital transformation leaders must address when considering a return to the workplace is “What modifications are required in the physical environment to support an inclusive and equitable approach to hybrid productivity?” The greatest digital experiences matter little if you do not have the appropriate physical areas or hardware to maximize their collaboration potential. Keeping your employees safe and healthy is much more important than productivity.
Between our Microsoft Global Workplace Services (GWS) team and Microsoft Digital, we serve as the “digital front door” of Microsoft, providing both technology and facilities. Employees and visitors make their first impression when they walk into Microsoft. We want their experience to be outstanding. As Microsoft Digital’s, Becky West, said in her article:
Typically, technology is added to a building many years or even decades after building construction. For example, software for booking a conference room or reserving a campus shuttle is developed independently from an office building being built, bought, or leased. This model works OK. However, to truly transform, technology needs to be integrated into the building, which requires a tight real estate and IT partnership.
Commercial Real Estate (CRE) and digital transformation leaders see things through different lenses. When both functions align on vision with shared priorities and implementation, accelerated transformation of the employee experience is possible.
Some instances of the work we’ve done with GWS counterparts to enable new experiences include:
- The lobby check-in experience is the first impression an employee or visitor has when they go to a Microsoft location. In a hybrid work environment, streamlining and automating that experience is essential. We collaborated to create an amazing new visitor management system, which includes streamlined check-in and optimized check-out processes. These help employees or visitors quickly get to their next destination.
- Employees can use our Microsoft employee mobile app to order ahead at Microsoft cafeterias, or book a conference room or workspace in coordination with GWS. Soon, our employees will be able to locate available parking near their assigned workspace or meeting facility with this app.
- We’re powering smart buildings at Microsoft using Microsoft Azure Digital Twins and IoT-connected devices. By integrating inputs from separate data sources (such as motion and occupancy sensors), we’re evolving the way Microsoft employees engage with their spaces. Efficiency and productivity are our focus.
- We’re working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 running on Microsoft Azure to combine all facility management procedures and deliver them to our vendors.
- Working together, we developed a user-friendly health attestation app using the Microsoft Power Platform to guarantee that our employees acknowledge their health and vaccination status before entering a Microsoft facility. Microsoft even released a version, free of charge, for eligible clients.
None of these capabilities would have been possible without a strong partnership with our real estate colleagues in GWS, supported by a shared vision of the employee experience. By reimagining the physical and virtual spaces at Microsoft, we’re establishing an innovation basis that will help our employees thrive in the hybrid workplace.
Cultural Norms
While investments in hardware and physical spaces are significant, the greatest technology won’t help unless people embrace best practices and use constant standards. These will help ensure that all meetings are inclusive, allowing remote participants to have a great experience. Digital transformation leaders should consider simple actions such as those shown in this diagram, even though standards may vary based on location, culture, and technological capabilities.
These are only a few of the actions and standards to consider codifying as behaviors in your organization to facilitate effective hybrid meetings.
Driving Adoption of New Employee Experiences
Change management services are often overlooked in digital transformation. They must be consistent and principled to guarantee that your employees recognize the value of the investments you make in their experience. In fact, our organizational vision reflects the importance of change management. Microsoft Digital is fortunate to have a global team of change management experts to assist our employees in realizing the value of our innovations. We’ve also benefited from Microsoft 365’s standardized approach to change management. This easy three-stage strategy can assist teams of all sizes in unlocking the value of their digital transformation investments.
In addition to hands-on advice, case studies, and templates, Microsoft also provides free courseware. This courseware helps you develop your abilities as a service adoption specialist. This is an excellent approach to developing the skills your team needs to realize the full value of digital transformation in the hybrid workplace.
Conclusion
The world of work has changed drastically in the last few years. Hybrid work was the first substantial shock, and generative AI is next. In this article, we’ve included some of our key lessons from that journey, and we hope they will inspire you as you explore your own path to the future of work.
Hybrid work is more than a technological change; it’s also a change in mindset, culture, and a change in how you view physical and virtual spaces. All of these aspects must be in place to create an inclusive and productive environment for all. This transformation will not be simple; however, it’s well worth the effort. Your employees will be more engaged, productive, and connected if you take the time to do it correctly, even if they are miles away. Finally, this focus will make them much less likely to leave for a competitor with a more sophisticated and flexible model.
Generative AI, like Microsoft 365 Copilot, has the potential to unleash your workforce’s creativity, productivity, and effectiveness. Embrace AI in the workplace with confidence so that your employees have the tools they need to remain ahead of the competition.
We will all learn as the future of work continues to evolve. As we continue our journey, we will keep you informed of our progress and learnings. Rethink your employee experience across your digital capabilities and physical spaces to meet your company’s hybrid world needs.
Making digital capabilities, physical space and facilities, and an organizational culture a priority will help your business thrive in the hybrid workplace of the future. Microsoft Viva may assist your employees in achieving harmony and balance in a hybrid work environment, allowing you to keep talent in a competitive labor market. Microsoft 365 Copilot can help you unlock creativity and productivity in your workplace while giving your organization an advantage as AI emerges as a critical instrument for organizational effectiveness. Use the Microsoft Power Platform to allow innovation from your front lines. Enable your citizen developers to visualize and analyze data, create applications that address typical business scenarios, and automate business processes. Adopting a Zero Trust security posture will keep your network secure and your personnel safe. Develop a close partnership between your IT and real estate teams. Ensure that you have successful change management policies and extract value from your digital transformation investments. Focusing on the elements we detailed above will help your organization adapt now and in the future.
