The precedence for strong employee experiences is at an all-time high. Business leaders need to determine how to improve the employee experience and what solutions will help them get there. If your organization leverages Microsoft 365, your search might be over.
Microsoft 365 has an entire suite of applications, including ones designed to improve communication, collaboration, and the overall well-being of your employees. Over the next few weeks, we’ll tackle how specific Microsoft 365 solutions can help you improve a solution weekly.
Readers who are interested in understanding the employee experience across the entire digital workplace should download our definitive guide to EX with Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva!
Kicking things off is SharePoint. There are many ways that SharePoint can improve the digital employee experience (DEX), primarily due to its ability to fit most corporate communication and collaboration needs through customizations and integrations. Add to that the continued front and back-end innovation the application goes through, and you have a clear DEX enabler.
In this blog, we highlight:
We have put together 10 benefits of SharePoint personalization that can impact the employee experience. The two types of benefits represent the front and back end of your personalization capabilities with Microsoft 365 that can better your digital workplace and employee experience.
In addition to the benefits, we’ve included 5 solution ideas from our latest eBook to showcase exactly how SharePoint can be leveraged to strengthen EX.
Simplify and improve employee experiences by presenting information (top navigation links, news, quick links, and more) relevant to particular groups or users within the organization. Out-of-the-box features included with SharePoint modern are audience targeting for content, rollups, and even things like navigation experiences that make it easy for anyone to find information.
Another way you can create a targeted audience experience is by leveraging Waypoint My Links.
Idea – Waypoint My Links
Personalization is a key part of navigation success in today’s digital workplaces. Yet there is no way to manage your own links within Microsoft 365 or SharePoint today. With this enhancement to custom navigation, users can create, organize and leverage promoted and personalized links of their choosing.
Many vendors have additional personalization features that enable more user control and subscription-like models. Moreover, some have invested further in ensuring the data you target (such as AD attributes) is always up to date and reliable.
Developing richer personalization is made easier by leveraging SharePoint Online’s audience capabilities, deep permission control, rich AD integration, and industry best practices for Microsoft 365 development. This offering is particularly compelling when coupled with AD groups based on dynamic membership.
One way you can leverage rich personalization is by creating Employee Departmental Onboarding sites. Continue reading for more information.
Idea – Employee Departmental Onboarding Site
Set new hires up for success by connecting them to their division or region teams. Share departmental announcements and news, welcome new hires, and build community and culture among workgroups by customizing the Department onboarding site to fit your organization’s needs.
What does it do?
Here, users need to learn about departmental leadership, culture, goals, and resources. Use the departmental onboarding site to provide access to communication channels, training guides, and events relevant to new hires. Consider associating departmental onboarding sites with existing department portals if you have them.
Pre-populated content:
Enable a new level of organization, personalization, and access to all of the apps and services that matter to them from anywhere in your digital workplace by leveraging the Microsoft 365 app launcher and the Microsoft App Bar.
Keep staff connected with real-time updates on system alerts, personal reminders, and communications (new emails, group likes, etc.) from anywhere in your digital workplace by leveraging the Microsoft 365 notification bell/pane.
The App Launcher, App Bar, SharePoint Home, Office Home, and many other Microsoft 365 experiences provide quick access to personalized and dynamic navigation to get back to recent documents, sites, and work you have been performing.
Idea – Waypoint Improved Megamenu
Enhance your SharePoint Intranet navigation with the Improved Mega Menu solution. Set preferred languages and target specific groups. Organize and categorize your departments and groups by headings that work for your organization.
Aggregate and keep employees informed on important activities for them to know by accelerated custom development and Microsoft 365’s integration capabilities (Power Automate & Azure Logic Apps).
Enforce quality is maintained with a highly configurable set of publishing and approval features via both built-in publishing and Power Automate capabilities.
For example, you can easily request a team with the following solution.
Idea – Request A Team
The app supports the organization’s need to tailor Teams templating and enhance the Teams request process. End users request teams via a form that collects info such as business justification, while approvers can manage requests and builds can be automated. This includes the ability to reference existing teams as templates during the request process.
What does it do?
As a starting point for building your own Teams or PowerApp based request and provisioning solution this app enables organizations to capture additional information or adjust the provisioning process and further tailor it beyond what is available out of the box.
Enable rich page authoring experiences that provide content contributors with re-usable and configurable controls, components, sections, and design/templating support.
Increase the number of engaged employees with liking, commenting, easy sharing, and other key capabilities in pages, news, and sites. This can be further enriched with pre-built integration between Yammer, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Stream. All solutions provide internal communications with features that will make their job a little easier.
Idea – Champion Management Program
The Champion Management Platform enables organizations to adopt, onboard, and maintain Champions, allowing everyone to discover Champions right where they collaborate. Hold organizational-wide tournaments promoting adoption themes and more.
What does it do?
Administrators can nominate and approve employees to be champions, champions can nominate their peers to be a champion, and employees can earn or be assigned digital badges that can be displayed automatically as an overlay on their profile image. Employees can search for, discover, and find champions via leaderboards that encourage employees to get connected to the champions in their organization.
Tournament of Teams enables the organization to create and conduct tournaments for anyone in the organization to use to drive healthy usage habits and skilling on the areas of focus. Users also gain access to tournament-specific badges once they complete the tournaments.
Focusing on employee experience can feel challenging when looking at all the different applications available. While we hope this blog and series will help make it easy to improve employee satisfaction through SharePoint, our eBook is based on solution ideas.
Gain access to another 10 SharePoint solution ideas and many other ideas for all of Microsoft 365 in our latest eBook.
