CoSitive Vibes EP2 - Are you in the loop?

You probably heard about Copilot Pages within Microsoft Loop. For those who would like to catch up on those great features, please have a look at our official videos below.

In this episode, I would like to share my very own personal experience on how I use Loop everyday. I am very far from using all the available features but today, I couldn't imagine working without loops. It has become an essential tool that is helping me gain efficiency!

How do I usually start?

Usually, I often start in a Teams chat or an email. A very classic case is when I need to ask a group of people (the people usually in a group chat) information that I need to gather and consolidate. A case where you would maybe kick off a simple Excel table and then ask people to fill the table with their information. The challenge with the Excel is that it is still a very static experience. The reason why, very often, loop is better suited, is that it is very easy (in one click) to generate a component (that could be a table, a checklist, a voting table, etc.) compared to the multiple steps & clicks needed in an Excel file stored in OneDrive and then shared with people.

Then once the loop is created, it is embedded directly in the chat as an interactive component, with all the people contributing directly within the loop, and the information up-to-date at any time. You can share it in a recap email, put it in a OneNote or access it in the browser (through loop.microsoft.com) or on your mobile with the loop app (iOS, Android) and the live component will be up-to-date across all the tools, regardless of the channel you are choosing to access the information. That's where loop is becoming powerful.

Workspaces to get things organized

Loops are now everywhere. When you take meeting notes from Teams, it creates a loop. When you click "Edit in Pages" from Copilot, it creates a loop. People tell me that loop is great but that they are quickly lost. Don't panic, there's a way to get things organized.

First, go to loop.microsoft.com where you have a full interface to search, navigate through your recent loops, the meeting notes and get notified if you have been "looped" in.

Then, you can use loop workspaces if you need to use multiple loops. It is ideal for project management that requires multiple workstreams. The way I use workspace is to centralize in one single place multiple loops that may have been created elsewhere, and where I have been invited to. From a loop, I use the option "add to workspace" to do so. Typically, I use a workspace dedicated to my Executive Office for all the coordination work my team does. I have one dedicated to the Leadership Team and another one only for my boss, so that they have all the loops they need in one single place. Don't hesitate to explore the templates that will help you start very quickly.

When do I mostly use loop?

Agenda

When I send a recurring event from Outlook, I use loop component for the agenda in the invite. I update the agenda directly in Loop and I do not need to send an update of the meeting with the latest agenda, as it's already up-to-date. I do not spam the Leadership Team or my communities any more.

Project management

Each time I need to do project management or coordination of virtual teams (event management, tracking actions, etc.), I use loops to coordinate everyone as I can use tasks to assign actions to people (and they will be notified in their tasks app), I can reference any deliverables we need to produce, we can comment, mention people, so that we do not always need to be in a call to make progress, and it helps us work offline.

Exec visits

We have very often important Executives visiting our subsidiary. Their chief of staff share with us a template agenda (either in OneNote or a Word document) to build the sequence of their visit hour by hour (all the customer, partner and internal meetings, buffer time, transfer time, with owners, location, timing, etc). But working in Word is quite painful during the planning phase. My team is now using loops with a table to construct the agenda, using dynamic columns like status (scheduling, confirmed, etc). We are using the loop shared with our internal teams so that everybody can contribute and move around the puzzle and then when things are locked, we are finalizing the Word document. It gives us lots of flexibility and my boss, again, is able to see how things are progressing at any time.

Gathering info from multiple people

I often ask the Leadership Team to send me info, insights or nominations. I often use tables in loop to consolidate what they push. Instead of them answering 1:1 by chat or email and me losing a lot of time consolidating, with the risk that I miss their response, they simply fill the table I provide in a chat and they are done. And also, they see that their peers are making progress, so it pushes them to answer me quicker. Our Exec admins use a lot the loops for information consolidation. Like a doodle, to find a date, or to see who will be on vacation when, etc.

Centralizing all useful loops with workspaces

As I explained earlier, I have a workplace for my team, for the Leadership Team, for Corine De Bilbao , for the community of Business Managers to put in one single place all the loops they need. For the weekly 1:1 meetings I have with my reports, I use a loop in the Outlook invite for the topics we want to discuss. Week after week, without needing to update the invite or sending extra messages, I drop the topics I want to discuss and they do the same on their side (for information/for decision/for action). I have created a workspace just for me to list all the 1:1 loops in one single place. See below all the workspaces I use.

3 key features to remember

Link settings

Don't forget to click on "settings" when you copy link to loop

You can decide to create a link and restrict access, only give view rights, or even put an expiration date to the link.

Lock page

I often use "Lock Page" when I want to prevent people to modify the page by error.

Copilot

Use Copilot to start from scratch or to recap what you have in your loop page.