 Hey everybody, this is Christian Buckley with another post tweet jam interview. I'm talking today with a fellow Microsoft 365 Office Apps Services MVP Zoey. Hello. Hi, Christian. Good to see you again. Well, this is a great discussion, and I know that you're involved with Vivo's great to have you participate in the tweet jam, of course. This is a topic which we've covered earlier this year. We talked about with the addition of goals into the Viva Suite, and we talked, I think, another time earlier this summer about the employee experience and what that looks like. So it was more kind of a holistic view of employee experience. We kind of started things off with this tweet jam. The topic was specifically around engage. So the topic, the title was improving the employee experience with Viva Engage. So the first question, though, was very broad. So how does culture impact the hybrid workspace? So I think culture is super, super important. And actually, I was really interested that one of the other respondents said that they don't think it matters as much because we're all working remotely. And I have got a completely opposite view to that because I think it's more important than ever that you have a strong culture when you don't have the opportunity to bring people together. So as we start to embrace hybrid work, that culture is crucial. I think you need to know who you are as an organization, what your purposes and what you care about. And that needs to be apparent in everything, all of the communications across the organization. Agreed. Having worked in multiple companies and for the last 12 years, I've been the remote employee. I got acquired by a company in Boston, which got acquired by one out of DC. So I've been remote for a long time. It was the CMO for a company in Barcelona with all that. And what I've experienced with those, as well as being a consultant, and if you've ever been anybody out there a consultant, whether you're sitting in office or not, if the culture does not support that collaborative spirit, you're fighting to make sure that you're in the loop that you're connected. And so you're almost fighting against some of those cultures that just aren't set up for the hybrid environment. And so I would often find projects that I own, a meeting happened. What do you mean a meeting happened? Why did no one call me? It was like, well, it would have been 6 a.m. your time. I'm like, okay, did not have that meeting until I'm awake and I can participate. So definitely cultural impact there. Yeah. So the second question was, why should organizations focus on improving the employee experience, which is kind of an add-on to what we're just talking about? Yeah. So for me, I think employee experience is absolutely a business imperative. I think it's the right thing to do to look after people and to make sure that they feel included and supported and heard within the organization. I think it's the right thing to do to make it easier for them to do their jobs and be effective, to be more productive and more efficient. I think supporting well-being through employee experience is super important because we've all seen the impact of remote work and millions of meetings in our diaries and non-stop notifications. So that digital well-being thing as well, I think, is super important. And actually, if you get the employee experience right, then you can create a differentiated employee value proposition that makes it easier for you to find good talent and to keep the good talent that you've already got. I saw somebody had a hashtag called the burnout is real. That's part of it. Why do I think companies? Well, one thing, guys, I do think that more companies are not just spinning the cycles, talking about employee experience, that they're actually thinking about it and looking at their processes and saying, what can we do that's different? I mean, I personally haven't experienced the having new hires come in, drop out, like you have the, what are they calling it now, the quiet quitting. I've not personally experienced that. I know that we've seen a little of that in our organization. But I certainly talked to people that want to make sure that, hey, what I'm doing is impactful. Yeah, but a lot of our jobs, we have to sometimes do things that we're not passionate about, excited, but it needs to be done for the business. But when you have a thoughtful employee experience and you're looking at, you're reaching out and talking with connected people like, how are you doing? What else can we do? You're just going to improve it overall and you're going to reduce the number of people that are burning out and that are turnaround leaving. Yeah, I think that quiet quitting is, it's really toxic. And I have seen examples of where that's allowed to happen. And it just creates an even more toxic culture then because you've got other people who get frustrated when they see people just hiding and not getting involved and not pulling their way. And the whole thing just feeds on itself, I think. Well, I think that's again, going back to culture. It's a management culture that your job is not just processing paperwork. You are, you should be looking at and talking to your people and one-on-ones on a regular basis to understand what's going on. What can we change in the mix of how the team works? And ultimately, so I did a post out on LinkedIn talking about one of my favorite business books, which is by Marcus Buckingham called First Break All the Rules. I don't know if you've read that, Zoe. Fantastic book, but it's all about finding people's strengths and building teams around strength to strength. And so I mean, that's a longer play. You can't just do that overnight, but when you're building a team, you're managing people, you'll get more out of people if you're leveraging their strengths. Yeah, 100%. So question three was specifically getting into engaged territory. So are enterprise social networks or ESNs essential to the employee experience? Why or why not? So in my view, I think this completely depends on the type of organization. And I've seen examples personally, where I've worked and with clients as well, where they've worked, where they've not been used, or where they've been implemented and just kind of left to become this, I don't know, desert full of tumbleweed if you like. And I think for me, there needs to be a really clear engagement strategy. So what channels are we going to use? What are they going to be used for? And one of the things that can impact it is definitely the size of the organization. So with Yammer or Engage for instance, where I've seen this done best tends to be bigger organizations that are more geographically dispersed. And it allows you to create communities of interest or communities of practice or even just social groups that are outside of the place where people are doing their work. And I think that's super, super powerful. But if you don't know what you're using a platform for and you don't have a mandate or a purpose, it will just become a free-for-all. Right. I've seen a best practice that I saw. I really liked it at one organization that they actually created. It was a PDF. It was a document that kind of walked through their best practices for the tools. And so for example, like in Site App Point, we have our SharePoint-based formal intranet. We have Yammer that we do, the communities versus the site. So and then for the day-to-day project work, it's all within Teams. And so the three work really well together. We have a place for that. I'm interested. I'm excited for Engage to have an even deeper integration of the social components across these things. But this other company put together just a quick guideline that says, here's how we do it. Here's kind of the purpose and here's examples of each of these. They even went so far as to say, when you're collaborating and co-editing on a document, here's what we do. And use the comments here. Here's how we do project management. It was just a high level. It was like four or five pages to walk through that as part of the orientation for new employees. It's fantastic to have that defined up front. So people aren't asking that question of which tool and when. Yeah. I think that's super, super helpful. One thing that I saw in an organization where I worked was they were using Yammer quite extensively as it was then before Teams was ruled out. And then what happened? Because they didn't have clear guidance on what to use when. When Teams was launched, everything just kind of all the conversations and the communication migrated into Teams. And that created more silos in the business because where things have been open and searchable before, they kind of went into these little hidden pockets where only a few people had access. So I think it's super helpful to have that guidance. I've actually, I've been redirected a couple of times where it was, the conversation is like, where should I post this thing inside of Teams? I'm not finding the right place for it. And somebody reminded us like, well, it should be out on Yammer. And here's why. I'm just like, yeah, of course. So we all need that. That's actually another statement about the need for ongoing community management in general for all of those platforms, just to gently remind people of things. Well, that kind of feeds into the next question. The question for for organizations not yet using Yammer or another ESN, why should they consider Viva Engage? So these ties back again to having that really clear engagement strategy and understanding whether it will provide a service that will work within your organization. Like you said, I think Viva Engage with bringing that into Teams will provide that deeper integration. And I found it super helpful getting things in my activity feed, for example. So I can see the latest cat photo in the community that I'm in without having to go and find it or work related updates as well, which is super helpful. But yeah, I think I think start with the engagement strategy, work out what tools you need and then determine whether the social network or Yammer Engage feeds into that. Yeah, I think too, because there's a lot of people asking that questions like, well, do I have to be using Yammer to be able to use Engage? Do I really do? Or we're not of the appropriate side. There were a number of comments that talked about size of organization for these. And I think that's completely realistic. I had a conversation like two years ago with somebody when I was a consultant, so it was like two and a half years ago, where they said, well, we're a company of like 10, 12 people. Like, do we really need to have a formal intranet? Do we need to be using Yammer as well for these things? Because we just kind of do everything within Teams. I said, look, there's no right or wrong answer if that meets those needs. I've seen use cases. I've seen companies that are smaller that have been able to really leverage the other tools. But for others, it's just a lot of overkill. As long as you recognize, like you get growth to a point where you realize, you know, we need to have this structured formal intranet for these purposes. And then it makes sense to have the social components. I think Engage will help with more of that transition as companies grow. But I think that's why a lot of companies are expecting Microsoft to tell like, at what size and when should I start using these other tools? And Microsoft will never say that. Use what makes sense. Yeah, I think the point about growth is super important because I have seen organizations where they start off and maybe everything is in one team and they don't actually put the right amount of thought into thinking, okay, if we grow and if we start to scale, how much of this do we need to unpick then to actually get something that's more workable and sustainable. And if the plan is to grow in scale, I don't think there's any harm in starting to think about some of these things fairly early on so that you make good decisions. But it all comes back to having a strategy, knowing what you need to do and and planning early on, I think. Well, question five, talking about, you know, planning and why the value of this. And I realize it's brand new. In fact, the announcement Mark Cashman just made yesterday that Viva Engage is now generally available. It's out there. How does Viva Engage or how will Viva Engage improve adoption and engagement and the overall employee experience? So for me, I think anything that brings stuff into teams, into the place where work gets done and that makes it easier for you to stay up to date with news and things that's happening in your organization has to be a good thing. So like I said earlier, when teams really took off, a lot of traffic moved away from other social networks like Yammer. Bringing that into teams, I think will actually start to make those communities a little bit more apparent and will actually increase the usage and adoption of those and the benefit that we're able to get out of them, which can only be a good thing really. And it will allow people to stay in the flow of work while they're doing that. So they're not context switching to other apps. We heard that phrase a lot yesterday, in the flow of work. So I always just refer to it. It's putting it in context to work. That's what in the flow of work means. And I love that aspect of it as well. I would always use the example of, so I have my five projects. I have five teams that I'm in. I'm doing work and I'm collaborating with those people. I have other experience. I have other personal things that I'm doing or if I'm at an event and I have side conversations that might not be perfectly aligned with my five projects, but to be able to go in and add and I make the comparison, I think it's a fair comparison to like using Facebook with that, all the ads and all the crap there. Being able to go in and share photos and links to things. And I did a personal blog post on my site and I want to share that with people at work and tie it in, tag it across these different projects and at mention other people. All of that is bringing that level of engagement. It's expanding beyond our job descriptions of here's what I'm doing. Here's all of my other life experiences that I'm bringing to the workplace and making that more a more holistic story of me as an employee and where I can add value and find other people that have similar passions around that. So I love that separation, like it's still the social activity. It's not clouding up, bogging down my project work, but it's in context. It's in that flow of work. I'm able to do both of those things. Yeah. And I think coming back to the point around being able to bring more of yourself in, that's super important from a cultural perspective. Because when we all work in a physical workspace, you talk to people at the water cooler and you share what you've been doing at the weekend. You might show them pictures of your family or your holiday or anything that you're interested in. And one of the things that we're missing a lot is that level of connection with people. So I think creating a space that's like you say separate from the project space to share that and allow people to see, you know, to post about the stuff that's important to them really helps from a cultural perspective as well. To another, I just had a, we had a user group meeting last night. We had somebody presenting on kind of what's going on in the VR AR world. And I can completely see how that becomes an option. Like do you want to have this meeting in teams? Do you want to have this meeting in VR and have those elements as well? Just again, it's about getting that engagement, getting people to participate. Well, the sixth question, does the use of Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage replace the need for a formal intranet? Kind of answered that. Yeah, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I think, again, each of these things has a different purpose. And for me, when I think about an intranet, I think about, it's more test driven. If I go to the internet, I'm looking for corporate news, I'm looking for information on how to do something or a process or information about me and my employment and maybe benefits or something like that. So having that front door into all of these systems that is searchable and allows you to get to where you need to be, I don't think we'll ever get to a point where we don't need that with the tiny exceptions. Well, I think there are smaller companies that will save rival sales. Like, hey, we're eight people, we need that kind of structure, but we can leverage teams to be able to do that and be that catch all. But there will come a time and it's shared point behind the scenes. So it's storing in the right way. But that you may say, we need to have something that is structured and built around. You can still have it within teams with the Viva Connections to get to those locations. But you'll find that as you grow, it becomes more important to have that structure, have that single place to go to for that. If I'm looking for latest templates, if I'm looking for guidelines around certain processes, the go to market strategy and all of our planning is all within that intranet. Those things, they don't belong in teams except where we're implementing those pieces. We're leveraging those tools around projects. But again, I'll go back and say, Microsoft will never tell you, yes, you have to have an intranet or no, you don't need to have an intranet. It's the do what makes sense for your business. Yeah, 100%. And for me, I think the separation is, the internet is where you need to go to find stuff. Viva engages the social and community aspects of sharing and teams is where the work gets done. Yep. Well, the last one, I always like to ask these questions and you may not have three things, but what are three things Microsoft can do to improve on the Viva suite? So this was a really tough question that I took a little bit of time to think about this last night. And I obviously love Viva, I'm part of the Viva explorers, and I spend a lot of time kind of talking and sharing about the platform. One of the things for me, though, that I'd really like to see is better integration and alignment between the different modules, because when you go to talk to a customer about this, it can be really challenging sometimes to explain how all of these things work together. And, you know, they kind of see them in a very modular perspective. And it's also challenging as well, because it tends to be different audiences who are interested in the different modules being implemented. So being able to demonstrate the value better across the platform, I think, would be super helpful. And I also think the conversation needs to move more, and things like this will help, but the conversation needs to move more from, this is a specific module that does this technical stuff, to actually how this forms part of a much bigger conversation around that employee and workplace experience Yeah, I think some of the best conversations were kind of served up over on the work lab blog that Microsoft produced. And if people aren't familiar with work lab, if you go search for Microsoft one word work lab, you'll find the blog. But it was a lot of that was around employee experience was kind of showing the reasoning, the research behind why Microsoft created the Viva Suite, why they're focused on this more holistic view employees and collaboration and the modern workplace. A lot of people don't like that phrase the modern workplace what that actually means. I think that's an improvement over calling everything, you know, business 2.0, or those kinds of things. But, but yeah, it's a great resource to go in and check out. And of course, there's some of those similar assets out on the Microsoft the adoption website. So great resources out there as well. But yeah, I mean, other things we can we can kind of nitpick around different tools and things. But I think you nailed it about having consistency across them. And yeah, right now I mean six soon to be I don't know timeframe for sales, but seven modules that we know of and there will be more happening. And so yeah, I think it's there's certainly an opportunity for MVPs to be talking about how they all come together and connect. A couple of us were talking made the comment about as like the whole inner loop outer loop conversation needs to be refreshed based on Viva stuff. Yeah, interesting. I'll give that some thought actually. It is an interesting point though around how many modules there are and what Microsoft might have ready ready to buddy the messaging a little bit, you know, if we'll have so many different modules that are released underneath available. I lost some of your audio there. So I'll see you how on the edit that is. So if I your last couple statements, if you could restate that. Yeah, so I was just saying it is it will be interesting to see as Microsoft release more Viva modules, how they all fit together and what this means. You know, in terms of that wider Viva conversation as well, because I do I do wonder if it's going to muddy the waters a little bit when we're talking to colleagues and clients about about Viva and the benefits. Yeah, well one thing guaranteed is Microsoft will muddy it and it'll get bigger and it'll be a lot thrown out and but eventually the messaging and positioning will catch up to that. Again, I, you know, referencing the inner loop outer loop. I love that description, but that took that was like on the third or fourth iteration of messaging till they came up with that one. So well, so I really appreciate it. Great discussion. Thank you again for participating in the tweet jam. And thank you all for participating. Again, this is done via Twitter. Hence the tweet jam. It's open to anyone can participate. It's usually towards the end of every month. We'll be back on September 27th for the next where we're going to be talking about building what it was that what did I title it here going to scroll down building an information governance strategy from scratch. So that should be a fun one as well. So thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Zoe. Thank you.