How to optimize the employee experience
with Teams?

Our Hands-On Tips for Enhancing Your Collaborators' Employee Experience (EX) with the Microsoft Teams.

The employee experience (EE), or how employees perceive their job and their company throughout their time with the company, is a key concern for employers.

Recognizing the impact of a good employee experience on motivating, attracting and retaining talent, 80% of organizations consider it to be one of the most important aspects of HR strategies (source: Forrester).

In a context of digitalization and the rise of hybrid work, the technological environment plays a key role in improving the employee experience.

The famous Microsoft Teams collaborative platform is of course one of the technologies that can optimize the employee experience. In this article, Mozzaik365 explains how.

Teams takes on the Employee Experience Challenges

In the wake of the health crisis, the world of work is in turmoil. Already affected by the "War for Talent", employers are now faced with a wave of "Great Resignations" and, in some sectors, with recruitment difficulties.

But that's not all. Team engagement is also at an all-time low, taking the form of a real "quiet quitting" movement. According to the Gallup Institute, only 6% of French employees are engaged at work. This low motivation is probably linked to the deterioration of the mental health of workers, 41% of whom are in a state of psychological distress (source: Empreinte Humaine).

💡To go further, discover our article on the "Quiet quitting", the Great French resignation

In this context, the employee experience appears to be a major issue for organizations. Employees who feel satisfied with their job and their company have a level of commitment 16 times higher than those with a bad EX and are 8 times more likely to stay in their job over time (source: McKinsey).

When it comes to the Digital Workplace , the notion of the employee experience is essential. The attention paid to it, via the user experience, right from the design of the digital work environment ensures that employees can access their software and work platforms without friction.

Well aware of the positive impact of a good employee experience, Microsoft goes beyond the user experience and focuses on providing solutions that allow companies to face the various challenges of the employee experience. Among them, the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform, integrated with Teams, provides concrete answers to optimize the EX.

So, in practice, how do you boost your employees' experience with Teams? That's what we'll look at next.

Create a strong corporate culture

Corporate culture is an important lever for improving the employee experience. A vector of meaning at work and cohesion between employees, it also determines the managerial practices at work in the organization.

As a leader or HR professional, you can use Teams to develop an organizational culture that ensures a good employee experience. There are several ways to do this:

Rely on the MODA application by Mozzaik365 to create Dashboards dedicated to internal communication in Teams in order to amplify the scope of information you want to disseminate to employees;

Share messages in Chats and Teams to effectively reach out to employees and allow them to dialogue and express themselves about the latest news;

Focus on authentic internal communication by talking about your values on a daily basis through your organization's team channels;

Use the Praise application in Teams to build a true culture of recognition within your organization by sending badges between employees and between managers and employees;

Use the Viva Connections and Viva Engage applications in Teams to showcase your corporate identity, spread your corporate culture, and encourage employees to build community and collaboration.

Attracting new talent

According to a Willis Towers Watson survey, 84% of employers surveyed believe that a positive employee experience is a key factor in a company's ability to retain and attract talent. And for good reason: employees who feel good about their jobs and their companies are the best ambassadors for them.

Using Teams within your organization can help you improve the employee experience for your talent and, in turn, make them promoters of your employer brand. This collaborative platform is designed to provide a good user experience and, beyond that, to optimize the employee experience.

Better yet, thanks to Microsoft Teams and especially the Viva Engage application in Teams, your employees can contribute to your organization's communication. More specifically, they can:

Participate in the promotion of your employer brand internally, via your corporate social networks;

Improve your reputation with third parties, by relaying content on their own social networks from Teams. This is what we call Employee Advocacy.

Get employees to adopt the tools provided by ISD

In a context of digital transformation and the rise of telecommuting, the technological environment in which employees are immersed on a daily basis has a significant impact on the quality of their employee experience .

Microsoft Teams allows you to create a digital workspace that is conducive to the development and productivity of teams. With this application, it is indeed possible to centralize the IT tools that employees need to carry out their missions, and thus encourage the use of these solutions.

In concrete terms, to facilitate the adoption by your talents of the different software provided by your IT department, think of :

Pin the corresponding links in your Teams channels to make these tools available to employees without requiring any additional effort on their part;

Use the MODA application by Mozzaik365 to create a personal Dashboard for each employee, grouping the shortcuts to the software and sites that are useful to them on a daily basis so that they can open them in one click;

Set up an "IT Help" team with a dedicated channel for each software so that your employees can help each other before calling your IT department.

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Improve communication between headquarters and the field

Facilitating communication with field teams is necessary to improve the employee experience. Why? Facilitating communication between employees in the office and those working on site or on the road simplifies the work of all stakeholders. Better still, it helps build trust, a sense of belonging and commitment to the organization.

Implementing Microsoft Teams within your organization is a good way to connect employees at headquarters with those in the field. The Teams application is indeed accessible on different media: computer, and also Smartphone and tablet. It can therefore be used by all employees and allows everyone to receive internal information, interact and have a voice.

Maximize productivity and individual organization

Optimizing the employee experience increases employee productivity by 5 to 15% (source: CarrefourRH). Similarly, helping talent get organized and avoid wasting time and energy on unproductive actions also contributes to their job satisfaction.

Microsoft Teams is the solution you need to maximize the productivity and personal organization of your employees and, consequently, improve their EX. On Teams it is indeed possible to :

Use the MODA application by Mozzaik365 to provide each employee with a personal dashboard gathering their tasks, emails, calendar and shortcuts to all their practical tools in order to make all these elements immediately accessible;

Use Viva Topics, a kind of corporate Wikipedia, to help employees find the right information at the right time and save valuable hours when they need to do research.

**Better "Onboarding" of newcomers**

Onboarding is a critical step in the employee journey. The experience that employees have when they are welcomed and integrated into the organization has a major impact on their willingness to stay on and to get involved in the company.

According to a Bersin by Deloitte study, 4% of employees leave their job after a bad first day, and 22% of turnover occurs in the first 45 days after an employee joins the organization (source: LinkedIn)

Microsoft Teams is your ally in "Onboarding" your talents and offering them an optimal employee experience as soon as they are hired. In order to improve the integration of new employees, it is indeed possible to :

Set up Dashboards Teams dedicated to the Onboarding of new recruits, from their welcome within the organization to their rise in competence;

Use the Viva Topics app in Teams to provide new employees with all the information they need when they join a current project;

Use the Viva Learning application in Teams to provide a customized training program for new hires, helping them acquire the skills they need to start their jobs and encourage their progression within your organization.

📢To go further, discover our ultimate guide to successfully Onboarding new employees

Develop talent and move them through the company

The development of their skills contributes to the improvement of the employee experience. According to researcher Estelle Morin, learning new skills is one of the factors that gives meaning to work and has a positive impact on employees' mental health (source: Estelle Morin, IRSST).

Here again, the Viva Learning application in Teams can be mobilized to offer a personalized training program to employees, increase their skills, maintain their employability and open up career development opportunities.

Ensure employee health

A good employee experience is of course only possible if the basic needs of the employees are met. Therefore, protecting the physical and mental health of employees and ensuring their well-being is a prerequisite for them to feel positive about their job and their employer.

Today, the psychological state of French employees is worrying, to say the least. According to Empreinte Humaine, professional exhaustion affects 35% of French employees and cases of severe burn-out are three times more numerous than before the Covid-19 crisis.

To combat this deterioration in employees' mental health, Microsoft has launched Viva Insight. This application, which can be used in Teams, provides personalized advice to employees to help them combine productivity and well-being at work: reminders to take regular breaks, planning concentration time to work without being disturbed, etc.

In addition, Viva Insight uses data to deliver recommendations to managers and decision makers. The objective is to enable them to adapt their managerial practices and organizational policies in order to preserve the well-being of their employees.

Advance projects as a team, even from a distance

According to a study conducted by Asana, French employees waste "66% of their working time on 'work about work' (superfluous meetings, follow-up activities, etc.)" The result, for 82% of them, is "difficulties in disconnecting from work" and even, for 70% of respondents, at least one episode of Burn-out.

Working efficiently and not wasting time on unnecessary or unproductive tasks is therefore a major contributor to a better employee experience.

Microsoft understands this and offers solutions that allow team projects to move forward efficiently, even when teammates collaborate remotely. The Teams application offers the possibility to :

Create structured teams, bringing together all project stakeholders around project-related contacts, resources, history and communications, carefully organized and prioritized in different channels;

Use videoconferencing meetings and all associated tools (Microsoft Whiteboard, Excel Live, Meeting Notes, etc.) to improve the quality of exchanges and take full advantage of these meetings.

💫To go further, check out our guide to optimizing project management in Microsoft Teams

The final word

Complemented by Microsoft Viva and, soon, by the MODA application by Mozzaik365, Teams is establishing itself as a true employee experience platform.

Teams offers relevant solutions to address the various employee experience challenges faced by organizations, from attracting and retaining talent to maintaining employee well-being.