How Microsoft does IT
Sep 15, 2023 | Inside Track staff 
At Microsoft, we’re increasing the collaborative capability of teams across the company with Microsoft Teams.
We’ve initiated a fundamental change in the way our employees interact and communicate, with Microsoft Teams as the hub for communicating, meeting, and calling. We’re using change management processes and education so that our people can adopt and use Teams to its full capacity. As adoption grows, we are learning from the process and modifying our strategy to help people more efficiently make the cultural shift to the modern workplace with Teams.
Teamwork is an important aspect of the modern workplace, and a key element of enabling digital transformation at Microsoft. Microsoft Teams brings together tools and communication methods and is a hub for teamwork. Here on the Microsoft Digital team, we’re on our own path to digital transformation, and we believe that Teams has the potential to offer a new, more efficient way to work. Teams offers significant changes to collaboration, teamwork, and productivity within the Microsoft 365 universal toolkit that we want to realize in the modern workplace at Microsoft. The changes that Teams offers include:
Microsoft Teams, in combination with Microsoft 365, creates a hub for modern collaboration and effective teamwork. It empowers our employees to engage with the business and each other in a way that transforms our business for the better, moving our entire organization closer to fully realizing digital transformation. We want to shift our center of gravity to Teams to speed employee productivity and the velocity of communication.
[Find out how to get started with Microsoft Teams. Get in-depth guidance on Microsoft Teams adoption. Visit the Microsoft Teams product page. Explore transforming Microsoft with Microsoft Teams: Collaborating seamlessly, teaming up fearlessly.]
At Microsoft, the official decision to implement a workstyle change is typically made at the organizational or executive level. However, the impetus for change starts earlier, in response to the changing business needs of our people or parts of our organization. We have diverse groups that need to work in different ways, and adapting to modern workstyles is exactly what Microsoft Teams adoption is about. Our management recognizes that each of these groups has unique needs, and those needs factor heavily into how we manage organizational change.
While we want each employee at Microsoft to be empowered to adopt Microsoft Teams in the way that best fits their workstyle, we also realize that identifying the most common uses of collaboration tools helps our people see how Teams can benefit them every day. So, we give them a snapshot of “a day in your digital life.” We built our vision of Teams into the most common tasks in the modern workplace. For example:
At the core of managing organizational change is understanding how to manage change with a single person. Because overall adoption depends on wide adoption by our employees, much of our change management process revolves around meeting the needs of each employee. The essential needs are:
We also recognize the need for a structured, documented process to help our adoption team coordinate change. We need to provide a common toolset for them to use and enable them to scale initial change into company-wide adoption. We’ve adopted four pillars to help us deliver well-managed change from start to finish.
The awareness pillar is about landing the message. Before we even got our employees into training, we knew we needed to make a good first impression, hit the points that will interest them, and find the message that excites employees about Microsoft Teams. The awareness pillar encompasses several important tasks:
The engagement pillar builds on awareness and starts putting Microsoft Teams in the hands of our users while ensuring they have the training, guidance, and tools to succeed with it. Engagement is about integrating Teams into our employee’s modern workplace in a way that increases collaborative productivity.
The Measurement pillar keeps track of the practical steps of the engagement pillar. Once we’ve engaged the user community, we need to track the effectiveness of our efforts. Measurement is about acquiring actionable feedback on the adoption process and using that feedback to refine and improve the process.
The Management pillar is the final pillar of the four and has the longest lifetime of any pillars in the change management process. Management is about gaining efficiency and ensuring user satisfaction once Microsoft Teams is in place. Management means continuing to support Teams and finding user stories and additional training opportunities to support Teams users at Microsoft.
Harnessing employee ingenuity is critical to the overall success and relevance of a business. Working together, people generate more ideas and feel more connected to their work, which improves engagement and retention. Our employees are increasingly mobile and need to have resources and tools available wherever they go. To meet the needs of this changing modern workplace, Microsoft Teams was built as a chat-based workspace in Microsoft 365, with persistent chat, easy file access, customizable and extensible features, and the security that teams trust. We’ve started using Teams to streamline communication, improve collaboration, and get more done together.
However, successful Microsoft Teams adoption is not just technology adoption; it represents a change in behavior. Teams is more than a product—it is a fundamentally different way of working. This change is about people. We found that adoption was as much about social and cultural changes and challenges as it was about technology and tool implementation. Adopting Teams is a different journey than we’ve asked our people to take in the past. With Teams, we asked them to make four fundamental shifts in behavior:
To accomplish this journey, we needed to educate people by managing change and offering them readiness skills they may have never embraced for any other product rollout. Even if an advanced customer has these skills within their organization, the change to both collaboration and meeting scenarios can benefit from a fresh approach.
Understanding that Microsoft Teams adoption was about social and behavior change, we used the spark, ignite, bonfire communications framework to achieve our primary goals. This framework:
The sparks are the “what” of the campaign. They alert your audience to changes and opportunities, and they provide the small but vital beginnings of communicating change. The sparks for Microsoft Teams, and how we used them are:
This is the “how” of the campaign. Ignite is designed to convert immediate attention into short-term focus and initiate our adoption steps. We combined our sparks into an ongoing engagement that ignited action from our audience. During the ignite process, we used the following tasks to circulate our sparks:
Throughout the campaign, we tracked our adoption progress, and focused on growth among weekly active users. We regularly published a report to stakeholders that also looked at the effectiveness of our various channels: web traffic, promo click-throughs, training attendance, training satisfaction surveys, Yammer activity, and how often questions on Yammer were answered.
Every change communication or campaign should feed the bonfire, which is a constantly growing beacon of the success of Microsoft Teams adoption here at Microsoft. As successes are achieved and advertised, the bonfire helps to:
The most important aspect of the bonfire is that it adds to and integrates with the organization’s high-level technology and culture strategy. Our Microsoft Teams campaign was a piece of a bigger approach to modern workplace communication and readiness. We provided clarity on “what tool when” for our employees to help them understand how Teams fit into the bigger picture and how we envisioned Teams fitting into their workstyle.
During Microsoft Teams adoption, we did our best to be aware of the process, learn how we could improve the process during adoption, and provide lessons that could be applied to future adoption and change management initiatives at Microsoft. Here are few of the things we learned.
Here are more Microsoft Teams resources:
Tags: change management, collaboration, Employee Experience, Microsoft Teams
Apr 5, 2024 | Lukas Velush
[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.] When it became clear that Microsoft was going to ask its employees to work remotely, Kimberly Nafziger…
Apr 3, 2024 | Lukas Velush
At Microsoft, empowering our employees to do their best work means trusting them with self-determination. But to do that safely, we need clear data loss prevention systems in place. We describe it as self-service with guardrails. Giving employees that level of freedom relies on a robust governance strategy across our data estate that features employee-facing…
Apr 3, 2024 | Aleenah Ansari
[Editor’s note: This content was written to highlight a particular event or moment in time. Although that moment has passed, we’re republishing it here so you can see what our thinking and experience was like at the time.] Microsoft’s cloud-first strategy enables most Microsoft employees to directly access applications and services via the internet, but…
Apr 1, 2024 | Inside Track staff
At Microsoft we have integrated our ServiceNow environment with Microsoft Azure Monitor to create a comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring solution that helps us to ensure performance, reliability, and service excellence across our ServiceNow environment. Combining ServiceNow with Azure Monitor helps us monitor the availability, performance, and usage of the ServiceNow platform and provide actionable insights to…
As the leader of the Microsoft Digital Employee Experience team, it’s my responsibility to ensure that Microsoft employees are the most productive and collaborative in the industry. We are stewards of the employee experience, and we obsess over every detail of the online and in-person meeting experience for our employees. From the physical spaces on… Read more
New Microsoft Teams-powered hybrid meeting room technology is helping us design new experiences for our employees and vendors here at Microsoft and helping customers understand how to achieve these experiences for themselves. “We want to create an environment that is halfway between the physical and virtual,” says Matt Hempey, a principal program manager with Microsoft… Read more
Hybrid meetings aren’t new. Microsoft is a global company, and even before the COVID-19 pandemic, teammates dialed into conference rooms from all over the world. But when everyone started working remotely in March 2020, all our meetings moved to Microsoft Teams. And the truth is, all the amazing features available in Teams changed how we… Read more
Leave a Reply