Improving the employee experience is a critical priority. Line-of-business leaders cite it among their top initiatives for their CIOs, according to Foundry’s “State of the CIO Study 2022.”

But what does that mean in today’s hybrid workplace? How can CIOs and IT leaders begin to shape that experience so that collaboration happens seamlessly, regardless of physical and virtual location?

“It starts with understanding how people use the collaboration tools they’re given,” says Ron Xavier, Microsoft Center of Competency leader in Kyndryl’s Digital Workplace Services Global Practice.

For example, are they using multiple solutions for videoconferencing, juggling them all day long? Do they have access to OneDrive yet continue to send attachments via email? Or maybe they have set their office phone to ring through to their personal smartphone rather than use built-in voice capabilities of their collaboration solution.

These scenarios are common yet inefficient for users as well as the business.

Leverage the tools you have

Microsoft 365 and, more specifically, Teams offer a direct line to improving the employee experience. The Microsoft Power Platform enables you to easily build a digital workplace that transcends the physical office and remote work.

Teams provides a collaborative hub for all the data and apps that constitute the natural flow of work for every type of persona and job function — including frontline workers, marketing staff, IT personnel, HR managers, customer service agents, business analysts, and more.

“Teams is core to how you work each day,” Xavier says. “It’s one tool to help you manage your work and your life.”

Consider the experience: In one digital canvas, Teams unites email, voice calls, chat, video meetings, file sharing, calendars, and whiteboarding. That digital canvas drives internal innovation and client cocreation. It integrates with everyday business apps such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, ServiceNow, and Atlassian. You can also bring in the Power Platform, which uses low-code development capabilities to enable workers to build their own workflows and solve business problems. They can also create virtual assistants to help with common team, department, or divisional tasks.

“Teams integrates everything, so workers simply open their device and get to work,” Xavier says. “If they decide to work onsite, they can use the Teams hoteling integrations to reserve a desk. If they’re working remotely, it offers a powerful collaboration platform to ensure an inclusive, equitable experience.”

How Kyndryl fuels collaboration

Kyndryl, a Gold Microsoft Partner, helps enterprises build and manage their digital workplaces. Using its deep expertise in Microsoft 365 and Teams, Kyndryl takes a data-driven approach to create a holistic employee experience.

“We provide services for the end-to-end life cycle of the collaborative workplace, including device procurement, implementation of the digital workplace platform, integration of apps and capabilities, and managed services for ongoing support and management,” Xavier says.

Kyndryl’s adoption services complement the implementation of the platform and its various components to ensure that organizations realize the value from their digital workplace experience investments.

“We take an attribute-value-pair persona approach and tie that to productivity platform analytics to determine the usage of the platform and its capabilities,” he says. “We can then tailor adoption paths going forward.”

For example, Kyndryl can provide gamification of education and training exercises for Microsoft apps or other learning paths that fit with roles or job functions.

“The desire is for Teams to fuel collaboration and innovation in a new hybrid work world and become the hub for work and life,” Xavier says.

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