Dining at Microsoft is undergoing a significant transformation to meet the evolving needs of employees in a hybrid workplace. Following the shift to remote work and the changing consumer expectations for on-demand services, Microsoft’s Dining Operations team on the Puget Sound campus sought to create a seamless, intuitive, and mobile-first dining experience for returning employees.
The goal was to integrate new programs that respect changing expectations and incorporate the intuitive nature of the mobile apps employees use at home. With digital integration, Microsoft aimed to offer premium value while also meeting the demands of a flexible work environment.
A Campus-Scale Challenge
With over 70 dining locations across the Puget Sound campus and a constantly changing menu, Microsoft faced the challenge of providing an intuitive experience for tens of thousands of daily diners. Jodi Westwater, senior services manager of Dining Operations for the Puget Sound Campus, stated that dining at Microsoft should reflect the company’s cultural principles, including sustainability, accessibility, diversity, inclusion, and digital transformation.
“We recognize that from an employee experience standpoint, Dining at Microsoft needs to reflect our cultural principles, whether that’s around sustainability, accessibility, diversity and inclusion, or digital transformation. We have a job to do, and that’s to make sure we create a great dining experience for our employees every day and have our food and programming reflect who we are as an organization.”
To modernize the dining experience, Dining Operations aimed to provide a mobile-first approach for browsing menus and purchasing items, integrating it directly into the digital environment employees already use.
Dining Transformation Tailored to Employees
Microsoft’s Puget Sound Dining team collaborated with Microsoft Digital to create a mobile ordering system for returning workers. The team integrated a mobile menu and ordering interface into an internal app, allowing employees to access transportation, benefits, and other daily functions.
To integrate the dining experience, the team bridged the internal mobile app with Dining Operations’ existing POS and menu tool. By utilizing Microsoft Azure API, the team created the necessary connections between platforms.
Thomas Po, a product manager on the Microsoft Digital team, explained: “One of the key focuses early on for building this integration was not only that the information be accurate for Microsoft end users. It also had to be relatively easy to use on the back end to minimize room for error and stay in sync with the operations side.”
In line with Microsoft’s commitment to accessibility, the team implemented Microsoft Accessibility Standards (MAS), conducting user-group testing with employee resource groups and internal accessibility experts. The resulting app features inclusive elements such high-visibility contrast settings and read-along technology.
To ensure the app’s security, Microsoft Digital worked with the Finance Security Team to meet data-capture and retention requirements. The team used various Azure tools, including Azure API for POS integration and Cosmos DB as a data repository.
The new ordering experience was piloted in April 2021 for essential on-site employees and is now available across the whole Puget Sound campus.
Employees are now able to browse menus with food images, order and pay digitally, and pick up their food from their location of choice quickly. This shift reflects a user-centric approach to catering: “From an experience standpoint, everything we do, design, and ideate must be customer-centric, which for us means employee-led,” Westwater says.
The app can automatically determine the nearest dining location based on an employee’s current location. Additionally, iOS users can use Apple Pay for transactions. Employees can even view the week’s menu in advance to plan their office visits accordingly.
This app provides employees with the convenience of quick food retrieval and eating on their own terms, which also accommodates those with back-to-back meetings that allow for little time to eat.
The Future of Fueling Up at Work
Online ordering has significantly increased since before the pandemic and is at 10-12 percent with at least a quarter of those completed through the mobile app. Microsoft intends to integrate dining order capabilities into Microsoft Viva Connections for ordering via mobile and desktop with their regular Teams interface.
Dining Operations is also exploring systems that allow employees to be informed about the busiest cafes. These tools will use a mix of colors and graphics to inform employees about dining locations and their traffic so that they can adjust accordingly.
“Everything we’re doing is designed to create the most convenient and intuitive experience for Microsoft employees, visitors, and guests,” Westwater said.
