BUILDing an evolution of tools, teams, and workplaces together

Every time we hear a story about how Microsoft tools are empowering someone to access their education, succeed in their job, run their organization differently, or improve their life in some way, it inspires us to innovate. We were excited to share some of that inspiration at Build earlier this week.

There has been no shortage of these types of stories over the past year. And along the way, the focus of innovation has shifted from simply enabling a new work paradigm toward reimagining what we want work itself to be. Teams has been right in the middle of it all, and we are constantly working to solve challenges for people and identify new trends to support in the product.

Here are some themes we’re seeing — and how we’re empowering developers to bring their ideas to this inflection point in technology, as the ways that people work and the tools that support them continue to grow and change together.

Remote and virtual work are helping close the disability gap

Hundreds of millions of people around the world are living with a disability that impacts their daily lives. To help empower people no matter what challenges they face, Microsoft has prioritized accessibility as a key objective across the company. We always want to be building with inclusion in mind, and we know we can always improve. 

Participating in our Ability Summit earlier this month gave us a chance to share our progress and get new ideas for ways to empower the disabled community at a time when our notion of the workplace is fundamentally changing.

It’s been enlightening to see the impact that virtual meetings, in particular, can have in this area. People who are deaf or hard of hearing, who have cognitive challenges, or experience anxiety have expressed that they feel more productive and engaged if they have the option of joining a meeting via Teams.

To build off this feedback, we’ve been doubling down on accessibility with features like the immersive reader, transcription and translation services, CART integration, or the ability to pin a sign language interpreter in a meeting so everyone can follow along.

Improving these services in Teams can help close the disability gap in the workplace and enable more people from this underrepresented talent pool to participate fully in their careers.

Transparency is driving cultural and organizational change

The model of channels in Teams is encouraging open communication and transparency, which can have the effect of flattening an org structure and promoting more collegiality. And this may have a long-term impact on how organizations are run.

With Teams channels, everyone with access to the channel can see how the group is approaching a given issue. In our team, we have a few confidential projects, but there are a lot of things that pretty much anybody can check out and contribute to.

This broad visibility allows us to tap into the collective thinking of a much larger group. In the past, getting that kind of fresh perspective may have meant using a heavy business tactic such as an org change, with all the accompanying churn and stress. 

Building on this concept, we have a feature in SharePoint called SharePoint News, where we encourage our team to post monthly updates that everybody can see. This is helpful if you want to align among different groups.

It's also helpful for trying to drive culture change or making people feel safe in giving tough feedback. There is a bit of culture norming that comes when you have a level of transparency that gives people safety to say, wow, our status reports don't have to be this rosy. There’s no way that everything is green.

This has really changed the way credibility is built at Microsoft, where it’s now more about the humility and grounding that you share across the organization so everyone can learn. Reports and reviews moving up the chain are not as filtered as they used to be, and that kind of clarity can be a real benefit for any company.

Hybrid work is helping to keep valuable talent in the work force

Recently my colleague Jennie Locati shared some intriguing thoughts about the great equalizer that remote work has the potential to be as part of a hybrid workplace future. She points out how one of the biggest benefits that we can take from this experience is the opportunity to attract and keep a more diverse group of individuals in the workplace. The flexibility that a hybrid environment provides can enable people who otherwise may have been excluded or opted-out a chance to pursue their career ambitions and goals.

This is helping to solve one of the toughest decisions that many women and parents are faced with — whether to step away from their careers, sometimes for years, to focus on family. It’s also one of the most intractable problems for companies who have to watch talented people leave and take all their skills and institutional knowledge with them. 

The experience of the pandemic is leading us to reevaluate what work/life balance means and drive ongoing change for the better. The social contract between companies and workers is different in many ways than it was a year ago. Taking this opportunity to reevaluate culture and work styles can really pay off in terms of increasing retention, improving diversity, and empowering the next generation of workers.

At Build, we’re showcasing the enormous new opportunity for collaborative apps

Software development starts with the end-user, and so in the past, business apps were generally built for individual productivity or for a specific workflow.

But as we design for a new way of working across boundaries, devices, and networks, our customers and partners are increasingly looking to use Teams as a platform that integrates apps and business processes at the point of collaboration. This helps users stay in their flow of work and gives them the flexibility to work from anywhere through a single, cloud-connected, secure workspace.

As this continues to evolve, there will be exponential combinations of processes and gaps to address in the new category of “collaborative apps” — and with 145 million daily active users, many of them using Teams for hours a day, the Teams platform represents one of the biggest opportunities for developers over the next few years.

We’re making that opportunity more accessible in Teams and the Graph by leveraging standard JavaScript development patterns and solving the complex challenge of building robust, enterprise-grade security. We’re also extending the opportunity to innovate and empowering citizen developers with PowerApps.

At Microsoft Build this week, we offered a closer look at what we're doing with Teams and the Graph as a platform and how it all ties together to create a massive new opportunity for collaborative apps.

It’s a combination that’s going to be pretty magical in terms of helping developers build great apps faster than ever before. And it's an incredible opportunity to target valuable user scenarios where the users actually live.

So our message at Build is to go build the next generation of collaborative apps on Microsoft Teams in the Microsoft cloud, and three things will happen: First, users will be more productive because they stay in the flow of their work. Second, IT will get more control because they have a common security and deployment control plan.

And, lastly, developers will have the biggest opportunity we’ve seen in years to contribute to a rapidly growing ecosystem — magnified by all of these sweeping global trends in how, where and why people choose to work. 

You can see why we're so excited for the new future of work and we're grateful you are on this journey with us.