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This month, we’re rolling out improvements to help you build a more productive, collaborative, and secure work environment for you and your organization.
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This month, we’re introducing new tools to help simplify compliance, app updates to boost productivity, and features to foster secure, collaborative user experiences.
The post New to Microsoft 365 in May—new tools to streamline compliance and make collaboration inclusive and engaging appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Today at the SharePoint Conference, we showcased recent and upcoming innovations in SharePoint and across Microsoft 365 that power the intelligent workplace.
The post New SharePoint home sites headline Microsoft 365 innovations for the intelligent workplace appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Earlier this month, we announced new intelligent event capabilities in Microsoft 365 that enable anyone to create live and on-demand events for teams and across the organization. Today, we invite you to use the public preview of live events in Microsoft 365 and discover new ways to foster connection and engagement between leaders and employees at every level in your organization.
More than ever before, employees in the modern workplace seek work environments that unlock creativity, make their lives more productive and fulfilling, and foster a sense of connection with their organization’s mission and purpose.
A critical first step for your organization to thrive in this new culture of work is to drive alignment of your people around shared purpose and goals. Leaders realize that organizations who do this well have an advantage in attracting and retaining an engaged workforce.
Here are four ways your organization can enable leaders and employees to connect with new live events in Microsoft 365:
Today, executives at Microsoft—including CEO Satya Nadella—use Microsoft 365 to connect and communicate with employees around the globe. Now, any company or organization with Microsoft 365 can create these moments of high engagement, where people are focused on leaders and their messages and ask questions to clarify or reinforce conversations in the community.
Using Microsoft Stream, Teams, or Yammer, you can create a live event wherever your audience, team, or community resides. Attendees receive notifications and can participate in real-time, with high-definition video and interactive discussion using web, mobile, or desktop.
Following an event, it’s easy to make the recording available on an event page, allowing you to watch the event on your own schedule and catch up quickly with powerful AI features that unlock the content of the event recording. The recording is automatically transcribed and detects changes in speakers—making it simple to search for content later.
For employees who are in different time zones or unable to attend live, the conversation keeps going, so they still feel connected to leaders and peers—helping to overcome geographical or organizational boundaries.
The event and recordings are powered by Microsoft Stream, the intelligent video service in Office 365.
Give everyone a voice—before, during, and after a live event in Microsoft 365—with Yammer communities that span functions or the entire organization. Providing a forum for employees to be heard is an important piece of transforming a culture. These communities are where people can come any time to raise ideas, concerns, or questions, and where leaders can reply in an authentic way.
An active Yammer community builds trust and a sense of connection and belonging. And it provides a forum where employees who might not feel comfortable speaking out during a live event can connect directly with leaders.
With inline message translation, live events in Microsoft 365 empowers people to express themselves in their own language.
Communicate at scale as a leader with a continuous, online presence using content, conversation, and video channels within a SharePoint communications site. You can optimize for news distribution and blogs, and deepen engagement with related content, polls and surveys, and readership analytics.
This is also a great spot to share recorded events for later viewing. Simply create a dedicated page for each event where employees can submit questions and comments in advance. Leaders and organizers can then use this input to craft the messaging and content of the events.
Executive and internal communications may be managed by a team of one or a team of many—but it takes careful planning and execution to ensure success. Microsoft Teams—the hub for teamwork in Office 365—is ideally suited to work together in the creation and production of events and other executive communications. It provides an effective backstage for your live event, giving you a shared space to work with speakers and approve content before sharing with a broader audience.
Once you have begun engaging your audience, every message within a Yammer community has a visible count of how many people your post has reached. This helps both community organizers and employees understand what is being read. Group insights demonstrate how the knowledge and information created in the community benefit people—regardless of their membership status in the group. For example, passive visitors may gain value from group conversations and apply the information elsewhere in their daily work. You can also see the number of views for an event recording and across a channel, and how many people liked the video. Pages and news articles also have statistics to understand readership.
Leadership, of course, does not just refer to organizational leaders. Leaders of communities may be subject matter experts, functional managers, or passionate individuals who are leading areas of expertise, practices, or interest groups. These same capabilities in Microsoft 365 can enable leaders at any level to create and sustain connection with their communities.
Patrick Yates, manager of Diversity and Inclusion at TDS Telecom, considers community connections and engagement an important part of the employee experience, and a boon to recruiting talent. “Younger generations entering the workforce especially want a modern, inclusive environment—to be part of something that’s larger than themselves.”
Experience the public preview of live events in Microsoft 365, and get started on connecting your leaders and employees today. We will be adding additional features and functionality based on your feedback in the Tech Community.
To create a live event, you will need an Office 365 E3 or E5 license and your admin must give you permission to do so. To attend a live event, you need an Office 365 license for authenticated users. Public (anonymous) access is possible in specific configurations.
To learn more, visit Connect leaders and employees on Office.com, and for more information on intelligent event capabilities, visit the Microsoft 365 live events post on Tech Community.
The post 4 steps to engage employees with new live events in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Today’s post was written by Anurag Seth, vice president and global head of Talent Transformation, TopGear, and Business Continuity at Wipro.
Digital transformation at Wipro includes a proactive evolution of our skills and qualifications to better serve customers. If Wipro is to help customers succeed on their own digital journeys, it’s critical that we stay ahead of the rapid evolution of technology in a world where cloud computing is the new normal. That means our employees need to become proficient with leading-edge technology concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data to help customers gain business value from these latest innovations in IT.
Our challenge, then, is to manage the rapid pace of new training—e-learning and hands-on experience—which is required for more than 160,000 employees working in 62 countries to offer expertise in the kind of technology and services that will help customers solve 21st-century problems. We’re doing just that by choosing Office 365 collaborative cloud tools to help develop a social learning platform that uses the enterprise social network Yammer.
Although we deployed Yammer two years ago, today more than 4,000 public groups and 100,000 employees are active in our Yammer network, and we are one of the first companies to introduce the role of social officer to create a strategy for using Yammer as a social learning platform. The social officer encourages the formation of dedicated social learning groups on Yammer, and employees subscribe to those they are interested in. These groups could unite a single role, such as project manager, where participants in more than 175 cities across the globe share their challenges and learning at a scale and pace we could never achieve with traditional methods. Most of these groups come from the 40,000 members of our Talent and Transformation Yammer group, which represents the learning and development function at Wipro.
As soon as employees saw their contributions recognized by senior leaders—our CEO regularly follows Yammer threads and adds his input—there was a groundswell of participation. When a social learning group appeared for the first time in the top five most engaged Yammer groups at Wipro, it was a breakthrough. Today, of the top 100 most followed people in the organization, 51 are from social learning groups. That represents strong leadership in a culture change that’s happening organically at Wipro—for millennials who are joining the company now, as well as our long-term employees.
Yammer also supports an exciting new learning initiative called Topcoder for our crowdsourcing platform at Wipro. This initiative acts as a crowdsourcing mechanism to discover and develop new expertise across the organization. For Topcoder, we created training, case studies, and learning refinements that are open to all employees, along with exciting, real-life projects and challenges—all publicized through Yammer. As employees work on the projects, in their own time, they create groups and collaborate on Yammer to learn new skills and solve the challenges, gaining companywide recognition in the process. Over time, we are seeing the growth of permanent communities of practice on Yammer—mainframe, Java, architects, and consultants—which raises the level of discoverable expertise that we can bring to bear on behalf of our customers.
All this represents a culture change at Wipro that has huge business value. As more employees participate in Yammer-based social learning—sharing their expertise and engaging with the company—or participate in Topcoder’s projects to solve real-world problems, we’re developing better skills to more quickly serve customers. For example, a recent challenge in Topcoder that generated buzz on Yammer asked employees to create an exciting UI for a mobile app. We received many entries and awarded prizes to the top three designs. Now when a customer comes to us with a similar challenge, we have dozens of Topcoder participants with relevant experience, ready to go.
As the number of people participating in social learning increases, Yammer provides a mechanism to tap into the talent of our more than 160,000 employees. This will take our digital journey to the next level. With an increasing pool of consultants rapidly honing their skill sets by learning in a more natural, engaging way, Wipro is in a better position to increase its competitive advantage.
—Anurag Seth
Read the case study for more on how Wipro used Yammer to deploy its social learning program.
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