Creating a Culture of Success: Digital Tools for Employee Thriving

An interview with one of our speakers at the 15th Annual Customer Experience Management Summit, 25 - 26 September 2024, Rainers Hotel Vienna.

What if enhancing employee experience could unlock unprecedented business performance?

1. How has the shift towards remote or hybrid work models influenced your strategies for maintaining an effective employee experience?

The shift to remote and hybrid work models has led us to prioritise our digital communication and collaboration tools, which are part of our end-to-end employee experience platform, ensuring that all team members feel connected and informed regardless of where they work and what kind of device they use.

We use Artificial Intelligence, for example, for meeting summaries of the discussed topics and agreed action items, recognising that employees may have different needs and challenges when working from home. This has helped our teams to maintain a positive work-life balance.

In our frequent check-ins we focus on progress towards achieving our team and individual goals, and certainly on wellbeing, adapting to the nuances of remote and hybrid work model dynamics.

2. What metrics or indicators does your team use to measure the success of employee experience initiatives?

We use employee engagement and pulse surveys to understand how employees feel and use collaboration data insights to understand what they do. We then correlate these insights at an aggregated level and take proactive actions, addressing the most important opportunities and challenges for our organisation. This is how we unlock engagement, productivity and agility to achieve sustainable business performance.

The employee thriving metric helps us to measure the effectiveness of our employee experience initiatives. At Microsoft, we define thriving as “to be?energised?and?empowered?to do?meaningful work.” This is the core aspiration we have for our employees, one that challenges us to push ourselves every day so every employee can feel they’re pursuing that sense of purpose.

3. What are some of the biggest challenges you face in enhancing employee experience, and how have you addressed them?

Some of the biggest challenges in a global organisation like ours are creating clarity and alignment on purpose, engaging everyone with personalised communication across channels, living a growth mindset and a culture of learning. We addressed them by implementing innovative communications and community capabilities and bringing goals management and learning into the flow of work with our employee experience platform, Microsoft Viva.

We foster a sense of community and belonging among employees working onsite or remotely through virtual communities, hybrid team-building events and regular check-ins to maintain our strong culture. We have been running, for example, culture hackathons and recognising employee and team achievements through leadership appreciation and digital badges.

We managed to keep employees motivated and engaged also by bringing goals management and learning opportunities in the flow of work, right in Microsoft Teams where they collaborate day to day. The personalised and seamless learning experience for everyone in the organisation and on both mobile and desktop devices fosters living a growth mindset and a culture of learning.?

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Short speaker BIO:

As a dynamic customer-obsessed leader, Svetla Scheiber leads international teams to achieve new higher standards, influencing strategy and execution, and realising value for customers, business and people at speed and scale. Result-oriented and highly collaborative driven, she is passionate about driving AI transformation and managing change across global organisations, transforming business capabilities with best-in-class technology that makes it possible to reimagine the Employee Experience and ensure Connected Customer Experience.

She inspires customers and teams to unlock engagement, productivity and agility to achieve sustainable business outcomes.