Workplace analytics and what it means for the workplace of the future, John O’Doherty, Enterprise Commercial Director, Microsoft Ireland

We caught up with John O’Doherty, Enterprise Commercial Leader for Microsoft Ireland. John focuses on helping customers to digitally transform their businesses, empower their employees, engage their customers, optimise operations, and transform their products and services – all in conjunction with partners. We discussed Microsoft Viva, a new platform within Microsoft 365, which will help organisations reimagine the employee experience.

Workplace analytics and the workplace of the future with John O’Doherty

John, what is your background, and does it form a logical path to what you do now?

Yes, it certainly does. I have always worked in the technology sector, typically on large-scale projects, working directly with customers and end-users.

I started my career with Hewlett-Packard after college, designing and implementing technology solutions. I returned to Ireland and worked with PA Consulting and then Accenture before finally joining Microsoft.  Through all those experiences I have worked on many large-scale transformational projects designed to help customers drive cost reductions, increase competitive market share and grow revenue. So with a practical IT background, it certainly helps leading Microsoft’s Enterprise Commercial team in Ireland.

Our customers are the heart of everything we do and it’s the role of my team to identify how we, together with our partners, can solve real-world business problems for Irish enterprises, which can often be quite complex. We are ultimately responsible for ensuring that our enterprise customers get as much long-term value as they can from their engagement and investment with Microsoft.

Tell us a bit more about what Microsoft Viva is, and what it aims to help with?

Having seen how much the “world of work” – both for organisations and individuals alike – has evolved in the past year, Microsoft has created solutions designed to help combat pain points associated with this, such as meeting fatigue and the continued strain put on work-life balance that generally comes with work today. Microsoft Viva is the next step in this effort. Viva helps organisations reimagine the employee experience by focusing on the power of people. This toolset will help employees be their best while working with hybrid and remote teams, ultimately driving the whole organisation forward.

So, what tools does the Viva platform comprise of?

It has been designed to deliver an integrated system of employee experiences, bringing together knowledge, learning, and company resources into the flow of work.

To start with, Viva will have these four modules, and we’ll be adding more in the future. Each of these builds existing capabilities in Microsoft 365 and are integrated directly in Teams:

• Viva Connections is the gateway to the employee experience, personalised to the organisation to provide a curated, branded hub for news, conversations and resources.
• Viva Insights helps organisations improve work-life balance and manage employee wellbeing by identifying personalised and actionable insights for individuals, managers and leaders.
• Viva Learning provides a central hub where employees can discover, share, assign and learn from content libraries across an organisation, helping expedite the onboarding process, among other things.
• Viva Topics reduces wasted time spent searching for already-existing information by utilising AI to automatically organise content across systems and teams into related topics like projects, products or customers to make information more easily discoverable.

So, as you can see, Viva has the power to be quite transformational for our customers and is unique in five key ways:

1. Provides an organisational layer through its integrated system of employee experiences instead of the fragmented point solutions that exist in each of these categories today.
2. Puts people at the centre by delivering personalised experiences, embedded into the apps people use every day like Microsoft Teams and Office.
3. Provides powerful insights for individuals, teams and leaders based on the Microsoft Graph.
4. It has privacy and security you can trust. For example, your personal data can only be viewed by you.
5. And finally, Viva provides an open and extensible platform, with an ecosystem of partners so it works with your existing systems and tools. It is designed so customers can leverage their existing investments in Microsoft technologies as well as their existing systems for HR, Learning and Wellbeing.

What are the most common sort of challenges you see, and that you help give solutions to?

So much has changed in the last year if you think about what organisations and people have gone through. How we work has, and continues to be, fundamentally transformed by the pandemic. Many organisations have adapted to either a fully remote or hybrid model of working. Resilience is very important and so too is asking how we make work more sustainable, and fundamentally, more enjoyable for our people.

This is also one of the biggest challenges that we’re seeing from our customers. Aligned with our mission to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more, we believe it is important for Microsoft to go beyond productivity tools and digitising processes to focus on empowering people and teams to grow, to succeed and to be their best.  It is a focus on people’s success versus productivity tools.

During this last year, and starting well before that, Microsoft has focused on being students of this change.  We are listening to our customers, commissioning research, analysing data from our cloud services, and following the science.? Some of the insights I want to share are:

• Highly engaged employees are 12X less likely to leave their company than those who are not engaged 1
• 86% of top-performing companies reported that digital training programmes boosted employee engagement and performance 2
• 94% of employees say they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their learning and development 3
• Organisations with highly engaged employees have 21% greater profitability 4

1 Glint, 2 PwC’s Global Digital IQ survey, 3 LinkedIn Learning 2020 Workplace Learning Report, 4 Gallup

While we certainly don’t have all the answers, we’ve gained valuable insights to help guide our approach and product investments.

It is about empowering people at the end of the day and that’s where our main insights come from. With products like Viva, it is about putting customers and employees right at the centre and constantly assessing their needs.

What insights have you gathered from the analytics? What is it telling you that maybe people didn’t realise were real issues?

In a lot of instances, we’re seeing missed opportunities for better connections within an organisation which might help drive efficiencies. This is particularly evident from a knowledge perspective. Time is being wasted tracking down information or the right people with the right expertise for example.

Based on looking at my own team’s analytics I am garnering some really helpful insights. These help by showing me if I’ve missed an opportunity to connect with someone or access a specific piece of information that I may otherwise not have known about. Viva will provide everyone with a personalised and centralised way to discover relevant news and conversations within their business.

In addition, and importantly, the insights from Vivia will help to remind me that I haven’t had a one-to-one with a team member in the last 10 days for example. The data helps us to see how time is spent on internal and on more external demands. Knowing how people are spending their time helps them to assess if they need to change their behaviour in any way to become more efficient or find a better balance in their working day.

Workplace analytics also help us and our customers see if people are working too much? Are they online too much? Working from home, for example, can become all-consuming for individuals in a pandemic environment. They can end up spending more time working than they would normally, and it can be more intense. Having this type of analytics tool can help to avoid burn out.

Has anything come up that surprised you from the data that you didn’t expect?

What we’re seeing across all the insights we have garnered is that when we invest in people and focus on the employee experience, an organisation’s retention rate improves – and ultimately employee satisfaction impacts on a company’s financial success. What we found is there are several key elements that show what makes a great employee experience, in terms of a person’s physical, mental, and emotional well-being. We need to constantly ask ourselves if people feel a sense of connection. Do they have high-quality relationships with their colleagues? Do they have mutual respect? Are they part of a trusted, diverse community?

Empowerment is important too. Do your employees have the right information, the right tools, and the right resources and are they empowered to make the right decisions required for success? Personal growth is also important. Do team members have the ability to maximise their strengths? Can they learn new skills and broaden their experience and with a view to meeting their own individual goals?

Finally, we’ve identified that from a workplace culture perspective, we all need to have a central vision or purpose too. It’s not just about getting a pay-check at the end of the day; most people want a great employee experience too. They want to be part of something bigger than just themselves, something they believe in, that has a meaningful impact. The data helps to systematically build a set of experiences for an employee that really targets their key attributes to deliver a great experience.

What are you excited about in terms of where a tool like this might be able to take us?

There’s never been a bigger need than right now to have access to technology-driven data and insights that have been designed to centre around the employee experience. Employees need to feel more connected. They need to feel more aligned to their company’s purpose and mission.

They want to grow, to make a meaningful impact and make a difference. Leaders in organisations and managers need a modern way to engage and develop their employees. The goal is to put people at the centre but provide an integrated employee experience. It should serve people by providing the right resources and support them to succeed no matter their location.

The aim is to help organisations present data-driven insights to employees. We have built on our existing capabilities in Microsoft 365 and then integrated them directly into our Teams platform. Employees can go to one place, rather than several different places and can have a personalised view that provides access to the right people and resources to help them better execute their tasks and manage their workloads more efficiently.

What do you see the future of work looking like?

Over the last year, organisations have been forced to adapt to a new working model at pace and at scale. This has demonstrated the many benefits of working remotely, especially for employees who can see the value in having a more flexible approach to the traditional model we’ve all been accustomed to. The pandemic has served up many challenges and has been an incredibly tough time for so many, but it’s also shown for a lot of people that they can work very effectively from home with the right tools and processes.

In terms of what’s next, we may see a more permanent approach to the new blended or hybrid working environment, where individuals sometimes work from home when it suits them and sometimes work from the office. The challenge will be, how do you manage and provide the right set of tools for individuals so they can be successful no matter what the workplace looks like.

I think people will gravitate back to the office, but work practices have been established for remote working too, which means many people are likely to take advantage of the flexibility a hybrid work model has to offer. The challenge is how do we manage those different environments, so it becomes seamless for the individual and that employees feel included regardless of how they choose to work.

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John is the Director of the Enterprise Commercial at Microsoft Ireland, focusing on helping customers digitally transform their businesses, empower their employees, engage their customers, optimise operations, and transform their products and services – all in conjunction with partners.

Microsoft in Ireland

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