Use These Microsoft Apps to Improve Employee Engagement

Engagement is a top priority for many teams. Keeping people mentally involved and invested in their work can be difficult. This is especially true as remote work is becoming increasingly common. Whether you have a hybrid model or a team working from around the globe or simply allow remote work sometimes, fostering employee engagement is important. Fortunately, a few Microsoft apps can help.

Fostering Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is the commitment that team members have to their work and to the success of the team and organization. Engaged workers are putting in effort not just to earn a paycheck or advance their careers, but also because they are interested in their work for its own value. A team member may care about the organization’s mission, want his or her team to thrive or simply find the work fascinating.

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It is typically futile to expect employees to be engaged. People can be paid to work but they can’t be paid to care — that comes from somewhere else. However, leaders can and should foster environments that encourage engagement and make it easier for team members to engage with their work. The good news is that there are many resources that can help with this.

Microsoft Apps That Can Help

Microsoft recognizes the growing importance of employee engagement tools in the increasingly remote era of work. In particular, the company has released Microsoft Viva and the Communities App, both of which deliver experiences primarily through Teams. Some new Teams features are also focused on engagement. These can help you foster stronger work environments from anywhere.

Microsoft Viva

Viva is Microsoft’s employee experience platform. Released in 2021, it brings together wellness, knowledge discovery, learning/training and engagement. These are all accessible directly through the normal flow of work. Viva makes it easier to share company news, provide helpful resources and empower people to connect and create communities.

Several of the engagement-related features are drawn from Yammer, Microsoft’s workplace social network. With Viva, it is simpler to keep track of everything happening on your team’s Yammer. Hi 👋 

• Connections: When the community has Yammer conversations or makes announcements, they automatically appear in the Viva feed. This helps people to stay tapped into the goings-on of the community. These articles and interactions are also available through the Connections app.
• Topics: This feature helps to collect organizational knowledge based on topics discussed on Yammer. When your team talks through a particular topic, great ideas and information are shared. Viva Topics pages make it easier to quickly collate that insight and make it available to other team members.

Communities App for Microsoft Teams

Another powerful tool in the Microsoft employee engagement toolkit is the Communities App for Microsoft Teams. This brings everything that is happening in Yammer communities into the Teams interface. It is an excellent way to foster new conversations, support cross-functional knowledge-sharing and crowdsource new ideas and best practices.

The integration with Teams makes communities a richer experience than ever. For example, you can use this to pin items from Yammer in Teams. Additionally, your Teams activity feed will now include content from Yammer, including announcements and @mentions.

Communities in Yammer are also accessible from Outlook. You can participate in conversations and events, engage with team members and share knowledge all from the Outlook app.

Q&A Sessions in Teams

For a long time, digital meetings were pigeonholed into a very generic format. Microsoft has been gradually updating Teams to make it better for specific types of meetings and events such as webinars. To help with employee engagement, Teams now has a Q&A app to help make meetings more useful for knowledge-sharing and community. 

Before and during meetings, team members can use the Q&A app to ask and respond to questions. Like other community-based functionality, all the content in the Q&A section is threaded based on topic. During the meeting, the presenter(s) can moderate the discussion to help tease out even more benefit from the questions and answers. They can also mark best answers, filter responses, dismiss questions and otherwise help moderate the process.

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Improve Employee Engagement and More by Moving to the Microsoft Cloud

Microsoft recognizes the importance of building employee engagement in the modern work environment. Many of these best tools are available with Office 365 and the Microsoft Cloud, and some are even exclusive to it. To help you harness the benefits of 365 for your organization, Cloudficient can plan and execute your migration to the Microsoft Cloud. We will help you make the change smoothly and successfully.

With unmatched next generation migration technology, Cloudficient is revolutionizing the way businesses retire legacy systems and transform their organization into the cloud. Our business constantly remains focused on client needs and creating product offerings that match them. We provide affordable services that are scalable, fast and seamless.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Cloudficiency to your migration project, visit our website, or contact us.