ConnectWise Control
Your firstline workers drive the bottom line, define the customer experience, represent your organization, and are crucial to the success of your product or services. Yet, so often, we see organizations exclude these workers from experiencing the shift to the digital workplace. We have seen a huge gap and thus a huge opportunity to bring these workers into your most often used digital tools, like Microsoft 365. Empowering them with an online identity unlocks the potential for increased communication and collaboration, which will undoubtedly boost your bottom line.
If you operate in an industry like construction, retail, healthcare, longterm care, manufacturing or hospitality you need to get your firstline team into the cloud. Gone are the days of communicating via text, scheduling over the phone, or posting work schedules in the breakroom. Instead, drive higher levels of employee engagement and customer experience by doing things like putting Microsoft Teams in the hands of your firstline workers. Using tools like bookings and shifts to automate processes that happen often, empowering your team with corporate information at their fingertips, and utilizing productivity apps and analytics will help your team work better and faster than ever before. Even better – you can do it securely with the power of the Microsoft cloud.
Here’s what we cover:
- Connect your Workforce
- Digitize Manual Processes
- Accelerate Onboarding
- Empower with Devices
- Protect your Organization
Let’s dig into this webinar, please reach out if you have any questions!
Rebecca Zaagman:
All right, everyone. Welcome back to another Worksighted NXT episode. We’re excited to have you here.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. Welcome. We’re here to talk about a subject that we’re excited about and passionate about for a variety of reasons and we think you’re really going to enjoy.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a little bit more of a niche subject than we’ve used in the past.
Adam Devereaux:
How do you say it in Michigan?
Rebecca Zaagman:
I would say niche, I think.
Adam Devereaux:
Okay.
Rebecca Zaagman:
But I’m from Alaska. So maybe niche.
Adam Devereaux:
All right. We’ll go with that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So, yeah, we’re talking about firstline workers today. We’re going to use that term interchangeably with frontline workers. So firstline, frontline, we’ve heard a lot about this group of workers over the past year and a half, two years almost now. They’re the people that are literally at the frontline of our businesses. So think industries like retail, manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, construction, things like that, where you’ve got two different groups of employees.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So typically you might have a group of corporate employees that all work in a similar office. They’re typically on their computers most of the day. Then you have this group of employees that are doing the real work. I mean real work sounds a little funny. I’m in marketing, so I feel like it’s a little bit self-deprecating. But the work that your organization is paid to do.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So they’re going to be the ones typically that are interacting with customers, that are making products, that are providing services and goods, that actually drive the income, the revenue of your organization. So that’s who we’re talking about for firstline and frontline workers.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and really that term, there’s a shift away from frontline because of the war annotation of it, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right, yes.
Adam Devereaux:
But I feel like we all feel like we’ve been a little bit on the frontline for the last 18 months or so, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. Well, it’s really highlighted the importance of these workers in our world, in our society, because literally we can’t function without them. And so, what we’ve seen from here at Worksighted and industry-wide is that typically there’s this different technology strategy between the two. So the corporate office employees typically get a dedicated computer, a dedicated Microsoft account, email, access to a lot of different apps, communication. But a lot of time the firstline workers are left out of that and they feel a little bit disconnected, not empowered.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. So we’re going to dig into that. But first we’re going to pull up our agenda. One of you did call us out in a survey recently for last month. We did not follow our agenda. We rearranged it.
Adam Devereaux:
We didn’t think you were paying that much attention. So now we know.
Rebecca Zaagman:
And you were, and we appreciate that. So we’re going to pull up some slides here real quick and walk through that agenda. So, Adam, what are we going to cover today?
Adam Devereaux:
Well, first we’re going to talk about really new things. So we’re going to talk about, specifically with Microsoft 365 and Teams, what challenges that you’re able to solve and what new capabilities you can add to your organization.
Adam Devereaux:
We group them into five main areas. So there’s connect your workforce and connect to your workforce. Those are two different things that we’ll dive into. Then there’s really this larger story of digital transformation. More and more of what we do in our organization is within the digital domain and how do we get deeper and deeper into that digitization of work processes than we have been able to before, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yup.
Adam Devereaux:
Another area that we want to focus on is around employee onboarding. How do we enhance that? How do we accelerate that? How do we make sure that everyone is given access to this set of resources that they need to be successful in their job? Then we’re going to talk about devices, because that’s a big part of this as well. There are some cool new capabilities that allow you to consolidate and use a variety of really powerful devices out there. Then how can we do all of this while protecting your organization and making sure that your information and people are secure?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yup, absolutely. So that’s the big picture where we’re headed. But before we dive in there, we want to start with the why. Why does this matter and then why does this matter right now? So I think there’s a lot of opportunity out there for us to connect employee and organization. So that relationship that exists between an employee and an organization, employees to each other, employees to leadership, there’s a really big opportunity there.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. I think if we look at, I guess, the last two years and how COVID has affected the world, for us at Worksighted, we’ve really benefited from adopting tools like employee engagement, using Teams for social connectivity, but then other tools that we use as well for peer recognition and trying to maintain that social connection, the ability for people to connect to each other, but then for the organization to communicate out important things. That’s really key when there are resources that we’re …
Adam Devereaux:
We’ve been talking about it in the business environment, the business community about the importance of the people. I mean how many times have you heard the adages around that people are the most valuable resources and assets and everything else, which is a little condescending in some ways.
Adam Devereaux:
But the reality is I think, especially in the market we’re talking about here, there is a value of our employees that is core to a lot of the principles. But are we fully utilizing all of the tools and capabilities to be able to actually do that now? There’s new ways that we can really deliver on that in a way that’s across our entire organization. Whereas, before, it may have just been a subset of your people that these tools were enabled to.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yup, definitely. Then beyond that, it matters because automation is taking over the world. We’re trying to figure out how to do you things better, faster, more efficiently, how to use our people to do people, things, human things, empower them to do that better. So talking about the digitization of a lot of manual processes and how do we make the most out of our employees’ time.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. I think that’s an interesting point around efficiency, but also people know when they’re just being maybe used to get around for lack of investment in software and improving processes, when it feels like you’re just doing things manual because you can and they can pay you to do that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. That’s the way it’s always been done.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Adam Devereaux:
People often have experiences. So the organizations that have the best employee experience, the best process adoption, they’re setting the standard for what people expect in the workforce. So how do we enable that for smaller organizations that have struggled to be able to do this historically?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yup. Then we’re going to go into what has changed and why does this matter right now? So as we know, the whole world has changed since March of 2020. So a lot of things have shifted, have changed. Virtual and remote work has really disrupted a lot of the job market. A lot of industries are struggling to find people, especially in those lower wage jobs.
Rebecca Zaagman:
And so, for companies, there’s been some different challenges in order to enable this digital transformation. It has costed a lot in the past. There’s a lot of logistics that to figure it out, you used to have to buy somebody a personal computer and attach it to the server, join it to the server is the right term, and some things just doesn’t make sense for a retail associate. You don’t want them to be sitting behind a computer. They might not even have a desk to do it.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So the logistics of that just didn’t really make sense. So that has changed. We’re going to talk a little bit more about licensing options for Microsoft 365. It has enabled us to do a lot of different things with different types of devices, different types of sign-ons, identity.
Adam Devereaux:
We’ll get into the specifics of that, like the cost and ways that this can be done efficiently. But absolutely, it was just too much of a burden in a lot of us. It didn’t make sense to extend a business identity and these tools to everyone in your organization.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. So along comes the cloud with Adam term of device-agnostic cloud platforms. But-
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, you don’t need a windows laptop necessarily anymore. Like how do I give access to the employee handbook when it’s on a network share, but they don’t have a computer and a login? So where you’re sending it by email and then there are all these security concerns to their personal emails, now there’s secure, compliant with various regulations, like HIPAA compliant, communication platforms with Microsoft Teams that we can use to enable a variety of those sort of communications, and they work on just pretty much any device, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right. Yup, I’ve got teams on my personal cellphone. So if I go on a walkover lunch, I can still be connected if needed.
Adam Devereaux:
Exactly.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yup, absolutely. Outside forces. Right now with the competitive job market, companies are forced to provide a better employee experience. Hopefully that’s for the better of everyone involved. But we think technology can be that driving force for providing a better overall employee experience to our frontline workers.
Rebecca Zaagman:
We can’t be excluding them in the ways that we have in the past. We need to empower them. We need to connect them to the rest of the organization and give them the tools that they need to do their job well.
Adam Devereaux:
Well, and I think consistency is another side of this. We’ll talk about it on the employee engagement side. But part of some of these tools is tracking whether or not certain activities are taking place over your entire employee base. So how do you make sure that every manager is having those touch points with their employees and there’s an ability for every employee to reach the resources that they need to reach? So it creates this we want to do well by all of the employees, but how do we make sure that we’re doing it?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. So that’s the why and the what changed. We’re going to get a little bit into the how now. So before we do that, I do want to remind you all that we have a chat and a Q&A function here as part of the webinar. The awesome [Kristi Alvare 00:11:52] is hanging out behind the scenes and is happy to interact with you on the chat, if you have any questions or maybe ideas that you guys have tried out in your organization. I just did a poll and we’ve got people from manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, and other industries.
Adam Devereaux:
Before we get into the specifics, I’m curious, have you worked in the frontline, the in firstline worker role?
Rebecca Zaagman:
I sure have. Yeah, my family ran a furniture store growing up. So at eight years old, I was the greeter, welcoming the people. I almost tried to sell someone a velvet firecracker couch. That was my favorite. I got a tip for it. But I was really the front face.
Adam Devereaux:
You were the salesperson in that transaction.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. As I grew up through that, I worked as a cashier, as a salesperson as well. Then I was a server at a restaurant for a few years.
Adam Devereaux:
Would you say a valuable experience in a lot of ways, too?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Adam Devereaux:
Similar for me, I’ve worked in … Well, in a variety. I worked in healthcare, both in longterm care and in a clinical hospital setting, worked in retail before that, and in warehousing as well. All of that is absolutely part of who I am now. That’s part of why I have a passion for making lives better.
Adam Devereaux:
I mean that’s essentially what we’re all about here at Worksighted is bringing technology tools to improve people’s lives. This is a new area in which we can do so in a better way.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Absolutely. All right. So let’s go ahead and dig in. The first point we’re going to talk about here is connecting your workforce. So we are going to position Microsoft Teams as the hub of communication for your organization.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So that can look a lot of different ways. Every organization is going to use Microsoft Teams a little bit differently, but at the base of it, it can be your communication hub for one-to-one communication. So how do teammates connect with one another? We heard stories of people using Facebook Messenger to connect or personal cellphones.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So if they don’t have an email, they don’t have that identity, how do they connect with one another? How do they get people’s phone numbers, or is everything happening over text message or in the break room on a cork board?
Rebecca Zaagman:
So that one-to-one communication, top-down communication, “Hey, there’s a staff meeting coming up,” like if somebody doesn’t have a shared calendar that it pops up on, how do people know about those types of things, or important employee changes, handbooks, things like that? How do they get that information easily?
Rebecca Zaagman:
So Teams can be the base of that. For team-based communication as well, you can organize team structures, shifts, things like that. We also wanted to … Actually, I’m going to pop into a quick demo to show you some of the rest of this stuff. Here we go. Let me share my screen.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So really this is a walk the talk type scenario here, too. I mean, really for us, it’s been an organic adoption. But for Worksighted, Teams is our hub for communication. It is the default. That’s where you start your day. That’s where you almost clock in as a virtual business space right now.
Adam Devereaux:
But it’s also where all of those communication methods, you mentioned, live, where it’s like leadership to everyone. So there’s one-to-many, there’s group communication. There’s one-on-one communication. It really enables us to stay connected in this whole space in a way that we struggled with previously.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yup. Sorry, I was having a little bit of trouble there sharing my screen. Can you check and see if they can see it okay, Adam?
Adam Devereaux:
Nope. It’s on the slide.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Okay. Interesting. Okay, entire screen. Okay, there we go.
Adam Devereaux:
Looks like that’s loading now.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Awesome. Okay. So from connect to workforce, we’ve got a lot of different things that can happen right here in Teams. So we’ve got different teams and channels. So this one, for example, this is a demo tenant that we set up for a manufacturing facility.
Adam Devereaux:
So when you say teams and channels, how does that vary? So most of you probably already are fairly aware of Teams. But for those that maybe aren’t, do you mind just giving a brief overview of the interface and those different options?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah, absolutely. So over here on the left-hand side, you’ll see a couple different ways to interact with teams. So teams are going to be different groups of people that interact about something specific. So for this example, we’ve got a team set up specifically for plant 246. Under that team, we can have different channels that are going to be more topic-based. In this example, we’ve got the maintenance crew, production line 1, production line 2.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So these are actually shift-based groups. So the general channel is going to be something that’s relevant to the entire team. Then they’ve got ones specifically to their different teams.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and what we’ve seen in a lot of organizations, and for ourselves as well, is that you often have an all-company team. Then that’s what’s used for a lot of official communication. Then you have a lot of department or functional area-based teams under that. But how does that vary from chat?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. So chat is going to be either one-to-one communication or one-to-many communication. So you can see here I’m signed in as Megan. So Megan has a chat going with Alex Wilber and Isaiah Langer. But say I wanted to chat with Nestor, he’s online, I can see his presence right here, that green little dot, and say I want to chat with Alex as well. So you can have group chat as well.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So this really gives you an option to have both formal and informal communication with people. So I don’t have to have these people’s cellphone numbers to connect with them or do it over Facebook Messenger. As soon as I’m signed into Teams, I’ve got access to my entire team. You can actually give different roles, different options to see what they want to see in Teams. So you can really create a custom experience in it.
Adam Devereaux:
So I think there’s an interesting area we can dive into just a little bit, which is why chat versus posts versus email? Why do we want to add this on? We were just talking about it earlier, something that’s interesting as the idea of there’s a lot of communication that happens in teams that wouldn’t really happen over email. Speaking personally, I don’t really send emojis or gifs by email. It is gifs, by the way.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Team gif, team gif.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly. So the thing is is that but emojis and gifs … And it is a huge part of how we typically communicate on a more personal level these days, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah.
Adam Devereaux:
Emojis. It sounds silly, but it’s a big part of how you provide some clarity on your intent in written communication.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right. Also real human emotions.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly.
Rebecca Zaagman:
But I also think that informal communication, like for example here, this post congratulating Nestor on 15 years, if that was an email and then all these responses … You remember chain emails-
Adam Devereaux:
Oh, yes.
Rebecca Zaagman:
… reply-alls. You’d get so frustrated. Jeremy Miller, I don’t know how much you know him, but he was classic with the reply-alls. But it gives you the option here to congratulate Nestor on this.
Rebecca Zaagman:
The other thing I love is that you can interact with people you might never interact with on a day-to-day basis. So if I’m a retail worker in a store, without Teams, I’m only going to connect with the people that are in my direct vicinity working the same shift that I am. I’ll probably never have the opportunity to interface with the CEO or HR director.
Rebecca Zaagman:
But what can happen here is somebody from leadership posts something and I can like it. I can ask questions. I can interact with that. I can provide feedback. So then I feel more empowered as an employee because I know that my voice is being heard.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. I think lowering the barriers to communicate and collaborate is all the name of the game right here. That is what fully adopting Teams allows you to do. It gives you those multiple different communication methods that are appropriate for different types of communication.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Absolutely, yup.
Adam Devereaux:
I think we use chat, we use posts. We’re used to that in our personal lives, in social media, using whatever messaging apps we’re using. It’s really bringing a platform that enables that communication into your organization, but in a secure, also corporate way. It’s inside of that ecosystem.
Adam Devereaux:
You mentioned the people who are … There’s Facebook Messenger. People will still text each other and stuff out. That’s fine. That’s not what we’re talking about here. But that there just isn’t even a platform for that style of communication in a lot of organizations, or for those user that don’t have it.
Adam Devereaux:
So I would challenge people to think about it from the standpoint of have I had communication challenges? What do we as an organization want to be able to communicate to people and enable people to communicate, and what does improving that communication unlock and enable at that organization?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Absolutely. I mean even I’m just on teams and channels here, but obviously audio and video calls. You can move your entire phone system over to Teams. That really enables people to communicate more effectively.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Also sharing files. You mentioned, like where do we put the employee handbook? How do I access it if I don’t have access to an email? Is it just printed out in the break room?
Rebecca Zaagman:
So I’m showing on my screen here that there’s options for file sharing here. It’s really easy. You can send links, you can tag people, things like that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Another cool thing that is built right into Teams is this employee Ideas app. So this is a way to gather feedback from your team. It’s built in natively. You can just go to your little three dots here, type in employee ideas. Oh, I guess I already have it in. So that’s right here and you can add it to a team.
Adam Devereaux:
You’ll know when she clicks on that … So you go back to the three dots there and just start typing anything … Yeah. So you can see how many different … Go back to just employee. So you can basically connect lots of different third-party systems, lots of different cloud-based applications that you may be using and put it into the teams.
Adam Devereaux:
So if we look at some of the other teams that exist within this demo tenant, there are tasks, for example, that are being assigned to people. There are other third-party services. There are documents that are embedded in. There are lists. So those are lots of different ways that an organization can centralize and create that hub.
Adam Devereaux:
When we say hub, it’s like, well, if I’m going to launch something new, let’s say I want to use a new employee engagement or a recognition platform. We use something called Bonusly and that it actually has money attached to it. So every employee gets an allowance that they’re able to give away to other people in thanks and appreciation and recognition for what they’ve done.
Adam Devereaux:
That’s really been a powerful tool for us to have. So it’s like, well, how do you give them access to this? We’ll talk about this on the security side as well. But the skews, the licensing that we’re talking about, this cloud identity that we’re talking about creating for people, allows you to leverage that to get into other applications as well.
Adam Devereaux:
So a lot of times frontline workers do have different applications that they’re created inside of, but it’s all disconnected. They’ve got to login into this HR platform and they’ve got to login into this operational platform, and it’s not connected to their computer identity or their corporate identity. It’s just these separate logins that people have to manage.
Adam Devereaux:
Then using your Microsoft identity and the Team’s environment, you can basically centralize that access, make it easier and quicker for people to get to those resources and make it easier and quicker for you to deploy those resources to people as well.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Definitely, yup. So an example we have of that is this Ideas app. So this is a great way to source different ideas and feedback from your entire organization. So this example is around return to workplace. What are the things that we should do as an organization to make our offices more safe, to help people feel more comfortable coming into the office? And so, employees submitted ideas here. So have an in-office schedule, social distancing. Then other employees can come in and upvote the ones that they think are most important.
Adam Devereaux:
That’s pretty cool.
Rebecca Zaagman:
You basically can crowdsource information on what’s important to your employees.
Adam Devereaux:
So rather than the box in the break room.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right. Yup. So that is a lot of different things about how to connect your workforce with Teams. One of the other things I just wanted to show quick is the Who app in Teams. I thought I already had this added in, but …
Rebecca Zaagman:
So what this does actually gives an org chart in Teams. So you can see things like I am Megan Bowen in this demo tenant. So here’s all the people that report to me. So if I click into Debra, I can see all the people that report to her.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So this is pretty cool, just from an org chart perspective. You can see their phone number, what team they’re on, what’s their title. You can see their presence online. So you can see Megan, myself, I have a green dot. That means I’m online. I’m working. Feel free to chat me, things like that. But all these other people are offline.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So that’s actually a really powerful tool to see who’s available. We use it as our virtual check-in and checkout. I can see whether Adam is busy or if maybe he says, “Do not disturb.” He might be in a presentation or things like that. So we can quickly and easily see the status of our coworkers.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. It’s easy to underestimate some of those small little things, but those have been big enablers for some of our organizations. The Who bot is really pretty cool, but there’s-
Rebecca Zaagman:
Who bot.
Adam Devereaux:
It’s embedded in everything. So even if I just go to chat with somebody, it will show me their status. If I’m in a group chat and it shows me if people have read it or not. I can see status responses pop up. There’s just these really fantastic ways that it’s just embedded throughout the experience. We take it for granted, but it also just quickly becomes a part of how we connect with people and communicate and know who’s available for us to talk with.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Absolutely, yup. You can set status messages, things like that.
Adam Devereaux:
If, let’s say, I’m a manager and it’s now second shift and I’m not in Teams, so I’m away, it shows me as away, but somebody can still send me a message. I can see it the next day when I come in. It’s a way to enable that communication in a way that maybe somebody would be waiting to see you. So email seems very formal, getting back to that topic again. What’s really struggled is the informal water cooler hallway conversations. That’s what teams and chat and posts can really help enable as well.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Absolutely, yup. So it’s figuring out what’s the right information for a chat, what’s the right information for a post, what’s the right information for an email. So that does take a little bit of work defining what makes the most sense.
Rebecca Zaagman:
We’re still figuring it out here. There’s sometimes an email that goes out and I’m like, “Oh man, that really should have been a post,” or vice-versa, a post that maybe should have been an email. So definitely things to figure out. The other big thing we wanted to highlight here was the walkie-talkie functionality. So we’ve got-
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, it’s really cool.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. We’ve got clients, frontline workers, that carry three to four to five devices around at any given time. So they’ve got something … They actually have a walkie-talkie on their hip that they have to be available to at all times. They’ve got their personal cellphone, they’ve got a company device, they’ve got an iPad. It’s just getting crazy out there.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So what Teams can do is bring that all into one device, really streamline that process for people. So tell us a little bit more about Walkie Talkie.
Adam Devereaux:
So Walkie Talkie is named that because it works like a walkie-talkie, which is broadcast communication. So Teams enables you to do scheduled meetings, impromptu meetings, chat, blah, blah, blah, all the things we talked about. But Walkie Talkie is a newer capability. It’s been available on the Teams on Android for about, I think, nine months now and it’s in preview right now on iOS devices.
Adam Devereaux:
What it does is you basically … It’s an app that’s within Teams. As you can see on the screen here, you tap the screen on certain devices. You can set a hard button like the Samsung Galaxy Xcover Pro. But you hold that down and it beeps and you say-
Rebecca Zaagman:
Is that a quick product blog? Is this a sponsored webinar?
Adam Devereaux:
That’s a secret. You basically say whatever it is, “Hey, Smokey. Over … ,” and everybody that’s signed into that channel with the Walkie Talkie app will get that broadcast notification, regardless of if they’re in Teams on their device right then or there. So you can-
Rebecca Zaagman:
That stresses me out, just thinking that a walkie-talkie can come in at any given time, but there’s jobs where that’s absolutely necessary and you’re required to be available like that.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, absolutely. So that’s been an enabler when we look at, okay, we want to deploy these smart devices. We can use it as a cordless phone. We can use it with specific apps, like a wireless nurse call application. We can use it with Teams to enable corporate communication, shift one-to-one communication, and now also walkie-talkie capabilities.
Adam Devereaux:
We’re leveraging that infrastructure that you have in the building for wireless connectivity, but it can work outside of a network as well. So if I’m at home and I’m signed into that channel and my Walkie Talkie is on and you say something, I can hear it there as well.
Rebecca Zaagman:
You’re not out of distance.
Adam Devereaux:
There’s no distance limitation. It’s not using RF. It’s not like direct device. It’s all through the network and through the internet. And so, it can be really anywhere.
Rebecca Zaagman:
I’m thinking about when I used these walkie talkies as a kid and somebody else would be on the same channel as me.
Adam Devereaux:
100%.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Oh man. The memories. All right, cool. Well, we can totally geek out about this. We love this part about Teams and the opportunity there that that allows to connect and empower your workforce. But we’re going to-
Adam Devereaux:
We do have other webinars about Teams-
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yes, we do.
Adam Devereaux:
… larger overviews on Teams, or videos on our YouTube channel. There’s way more than we can talk about in this section right here.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. If you have any ideas about how you’ve used Teams specifically with your firstline workers, we’d love to hear them. Go ahead and put them in the chat. We can interact with that. We’ll shout them out to the team, things like that. So definitely know that we are not the only experts on this. We’re just pretty passionate about it.
Rebecca Zaagman:
All right, next up, we’re going to talk about digitizing manual processes. All right, thanks, Tammy. Thanks, Wendy. Thanks, chad. Looks like our presenting computer just crashed. So sorry about that. We’re going to work on rebooting that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Perfect. I guess here. All right, cool. So now we are talking about, going back to our slides, digitizing manual processes. So this is going to be taking those processes that we do on a daily basis that you think, “Man, it feels like a robot could do this.” I’ve had jobs like that where I’m like, “Man, I don’t think I actually need to be doing this day-to-day.” So things that might be examples of this.
Adam Devereaux:
Well, some of it may be collecting information. So a lot of times you need to get information from people and you want to track when it’s been selected. You want it to not be a paper form that somebody’s filling out and handing you, “Oh, I checked these things off.”
Adam Devereaux:
So there’s a lot of different ways that you can do that that we don’t necessarily have time to go into completely. But you do have the ability to, let’s say, create a form. I’ll just put one in general here.
Adam Devereaux:
For those of you that aren’t using Microsoft Forms, it’s something that’s similar to other form systems that you’ve used. So let’s say it’s something related to a clean check. We’re going to check if some space has been cleaned or is the way that it should look. Now with the form, it’s just like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms or anything else you can … And we have actually video specifically on Forms. It allows you to create specific forms. You can embed that again into a team and then have people fill those out at various times, whatever the reason may be.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So how might this have looked before this digitization? It might have been in actual paper form. It might have been-
Adam Devereaux:
It might have been paper. It might have been, “Hey, email me this.”
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah, or, “Do a visual check and let me know. Give me a thumbs up.”
Adam Devereaux:
Exactly.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So this empowers you to collect data, report on that data, make changes based on that data. So it could be super powerful. You can also turn that into an application that you can house right in Teams.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. And so, the Ideas app is already an existing one that we loaded in. So Employee Ideas is a power app. Power Apps, again, is something we have a video on, but exceeds the time slot that we have available here to really go into depth on. But here are some existing template apps that are made available by Microsoft. One, as an example, is the Inspection app.
Adam Devereaux:
And so, let’s say that we want to add this to a specific channel. It takes a little while to deploy ultimately, but this is an app that allows you to basically assign inspections to people. It will be something that they can interact with on both their personal on a device, as well as on a computer.
Adam Devereaux:
Another way that you can do this too is just by using Tasks. So rather than using a whole app that’s custom-purposed for that reason, you can also go into Tasks by Planner and To Do. Again, we have videos on this particular other topic. But it allows you to create team tasks. It allows you to create specific one-on-one assignments and publish different things that you need to track whether or not somebody has done.
Adam Devereaux:
That’s something that is pretty widespread. That’s something that there’s more examples that we can go into. But team and tasks really enables the potential for a centralized task management and to-do management system.
Adam Devereaux:
So you’ll notice in some of the channels that I had pulled up already. So this is what a planner would look like. You can create different buckets. I can create a task and say that, let’s say, it is a review draft sheet. I can assign it to a specific person, to Megan. Let’s say a specific start time or day that it’s due. Ultimately, this is something that she will receive notification of as well, and in her tasks, that she has this task.
Adam Devereaux:
You may be using this already for the purpose of working with, again, your employees that are within your organization. The question more is are there ways that if we give that frontline worker access to this and we have teams that are dedicated to communicating with them, can you use these tools in ways that are really powerful to interact with them?
Adam Devereaux:
I think the answer is generally yes. What we’ve seen is that sometimes it’s an organic thing. You can come up with a top-down adoption approach or a bottom-up adoption approach. You don’t even necessarily have to start with all of these different things at once. You can start just by getting teams into the environment. But identifying these different business scenarios and ways that you can use it to improve the overall ability, communication. It looks like our main cam is back up here. So I’m going to-
Rebecca Zaagman:
Test now. All right.
Adam Devereaux:
Testing, testing. Sorry about that. I think we’re back. Quick reboot.
Rebecca Zaagman:
As we always say-
Adam Devereaux:
You know how technology goes.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Even tech companies have issues at times.
Adam Devereaux:
Shut it down and turn it … Have you tried turning it off and back on again?
Rebecca Zaagman:
We did. That’s what we did. Thanks, Steve.
Adam Devereaux:
It worked.
Rebecca Zaagman:
He might be sweating back there, but he made it happen.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Awesome. Well, happy to be back here. All right, so …
Adam Devereaux:
Approvals. Let’s see. So we’ve talked really about using Forms, using Power Apps. The sky’s the limit there in terms of you can create custom applications and interfaces. Some examples of those are just replacing manual forms.
Adam Devereaux:
So some of the projects that we’ve worked on with clients already is utilizing Power Apps to take a manual paper-based process, convert it into something that they’re doing through a tablet, and add incredibly enhanced functionality, way better data collection, computerized timestamping. There’s a certain credibility to the data because it’s all being entered and you can time track things, as well as the ability to do things like GPS and take photos and have those be embedded right into whatever it is you’re uploading. There’s really some cool capabilities that, again, there’s another video on.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. We actually do have a Power Platform developer, Michael Rolen, on staff with us now. We’ve been hiding him for a while as he got ramped up, but he’s been creating some super awesome things and we’re excited to see how he can help enable our customers with Power Apps and the Power Platform. So definitely more on that.
Rebecca Zaagman:
But, yeah, so we’ve been talking about digitizing manual processes. A lot of the power from that comes in the reporting and data behind that. So you can use Power BI to … Oh.
Adam Devereaux:
Oh, sorry. I took the screen sharing back.
Rebecca Zaagman:
How rude. All right. Yeah, so reporting and data and the power of that. So you probably all know about that. You’re smart, business savvy people, but that’s what can happen. Did you show Shifts?
Adam Devereaux:
I’ve not showed Shifts, and I just wanted to mention approvals here a minute. So approvals, there’s a lot of different ways that you can do this. But essentially it’s the ability to create an approval process, which is like, “Hey, I need you to sign off on this document. I need you to approve something,” and you can send that to somebody in Teams. So they get that in a chat, for example, like, “So and so needs you to approve this. Do you approve, yes or no?” That can be a very powerful thing. But Shifts is a whole another larger area in regards to … So I’m going to go into this particular one here.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Microsoft has a really cool video on Shifts and how Ikea used it. There was a manager at one of their stores who just decided to try it out with her team. They saved something like … It was like $60,000 annually at each store. And so, it was just this one manager who tried it out and it worked really well for their team at a super large organization, obviously, like Ikea. So I can put the link to that in the chat.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and obviously I’m looking at this from a manager’s perspective here, where I can see my different groups of employees. I can see what are open shifts. You can even basically just click into, click and drag. You can create schedule copies. You can create schedule templates. You can add people to groups. You can have different views. It allows you to quickly adjust and keep your schedule up to date.
Adam Devereaux:
But from the employee perspective, it is their scheduling function, their scheduling application. That can be really powerful from the standpoint of not only seeing their schedule, but submitting requests, submitting trade requests with other employees.
Rebecca Zaagman:
She doesn’t see what we’re seeing right now.
Adam Devereaux:
Are you on screen? Yes, okay.
Rebecca Zaagman:
It shows over here.
Adam Devereaux:
And submit time off requests, et cetera, et cetera. So it functions as an independent scheduling application in that regard. But also again here too, we can see that here’s a request that was submitted to swap with someone else. Then somebody has to approve it.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. What I love about this is it gives the opportunity for changes for shifts, for the employee to actually have some power, some empowerment in their schedule. So, oh man, a doctor’s appointment on Thursday. I forgot to get that covered. What can I do? Instead of just sending a text or a note to my manager and then having to figure it out from there, I can solve that problem myself and be like, “Hey, Adam, can you cover me on Thursday?” or, “Can I switch shifts for you? I can do second if you can do first.”
Rebecca Zaagman:
As a manager, you can really hone that in, figure out what’s allowed, what’s not allowed, give it some boundaries so you don’t have people going all crazy on you. But, yeah, it’s really powerful.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. And so, with Shifts, some of you may see this clock-in functionality up here. It can integrate with different payroll providers so that you have actual integration natively into it. So your punch in/punch out, all that functionality can be done right within the application. That’s where you have employee time reports and mobile-based clock-in and clock-out. It can be location detection tied with that as well. So making sure that they are where they are supposed to be when they’re punching in and going on break.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Interesting.
Adam Devereaux:
But this doesn’t have to be the only time clock functionally. So this is a functionality, a really pretty awesome platform, that Microsoft has in place. But a lot of companies are using some other shift and scheduling application already. You can also integrate that again into Microsoft Teams and have that be someplace that people are going into Teams to get access to those things, simplifying Their ability to get into those functions.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Awesome. Well, we are only on 0.205. So I think we have to speed up here a little bit, Adam. A lot of this stuff is exciting and can really make a big impact.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So one thing we wanted to cover was the onboarding process and being able to accelerate that process. So a new employee starting day one, what does that look like and how can we make it better?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, absolutely.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So there’s things like giving access to teams gives them automatic instant access to the communication platform, to coworker contact information. We talked about in the past that might have looked like exchanging cellphone numbers or Messenger.
Adam Devereaux:
Right, or, “Hey, do you have the latest copy of the paper employee directory? Can you get me that?”
Rebecca Zaagman:
Oh, yeah, it’s something that is four years outdated.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, exactly.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So, yeah, instant access is huge. It’s a one-stop shop for navigation of company tools, files, and data. And you can actually deploy teams’ Microsoft identity through SMS. So we’ll-
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So it can be text-based sign in.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. So we’ll talk about that in the next one. But the thing we wanted to highlight here was just the ease of use. But we also wanted to highlight something called NEO pages, new employee onboarding, that’s built in SharePoint. So Adam’s going to demo that really quick. Of course, it can be built right into Teams. So I’ll switch over to your screen, Adam.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So if you’re interested in learning more about what Microsoft calls the NEO or new employee onboarding experience sites, if you search SharePoint Look Book, it will take you to where there’s a lot of modern SharePoint templates, including the new employee onboarding site templates.
Adam Devereaux:
There’s three different site templates. One is the new employee pre-onboarding, then there’s the new employee corporate onboarding, and then new employee department onboarding. So we have one loaded in here.
Adam Devereaux:
And so, you can see it here. This is essentially a SharePoint site that you would give access to that new hire. There’s different ways of doing that in an automated fashion based on groups and the like as well. It allows your department, in this case, to create a variety of resources that that person can click on and login to to see different resources that are assigned to them, different tasks.
Adam Devereaux:
So you’ll see, in this case, there’s an onboarding task list here. One of the things that they recommend is that you create a about me. So if we click on the getting started here, you can watch a video, see your checklist, make an introduction. If we go down here, here’s like a list that’s been embedded in here with the activities that should be done, or what your schedule is looking like. Then here’s an overview on create a new post, create a template, post something about yourself, create an introduction to your team.
Adam Devereaux:
This is all the very customizable. So this is just a template. Here’s leadership page, for example. So people can see specific people in the organization and information about them. The sky’s the limit in this regard.
Adam Devereaux:
Really, the idea here is that you can create and use the tools within Teams, and Microsoft has Viva as well, which is a whole employee experience platform that is the subject of a future video. But you can readily embed that into Teams as well. So you can see here, I have onboarding under the engineering general channel. It takes me right back to my view as a newly onboarded employee.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. So what that enables for new employees is they’ve got that one-stop shop, that one place to go to for information. It can guide them through that onboarding process and hopefully get them to a place where they are ramping up quicker, more efficiently, and they feel empowered to find the information that they need to go and find the right person that they need to go to when they have a question, things like that.
Adam Devereaux:
Well, I think that new employee experience is so crucial right now for many organizations. We’ve seen and heard tales on all ends of the spectrum in terms of both how it can be setting you up and setting that new employee up for longterm success and connection to that organization, or starting off on the wrong foot and creating a bad experience for them.
Adam Devereaux:
And so, again, what does technology excel at? Consistency, accessibility, creating standards. That’s what you can do using these platforms to really enhance that experience for a new employee who’s starting at the organization, and really make them feel like, “Wow. You really have your stuff together.” That’s what we want them to feel, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah, you care about my experience, too.
Adam Devereaux:
Exactly. Yes.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So we’ve been onboarding people now completely remotely that have never been to our offices. So where in the past we’ve had really important in-person experience in shadowing, going out to lunch, things like that. We’ve had to reshape it and say, “What does this look like from a virtual perspective?” And so, things like this page could be hugely beneficial to a new employee.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So I want to make sure that we continue going so we’ve got plenty of time for questions. Our next point is empower with devices. The things that we really wanted to hit on here was the fact that Teams and Microsoft 365 in general is deployable on a variety of different devices. So things like BYOD. So I can put it on my personal device and still interact the same way that I would if I logged onto it on a computer.
Adam Devereaux:
Yes, but you can also control that as an organization. So you can both enable or disable people to use their personal devices. So there’s a lot of flexible control around how people are granted access to these things as well.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah, even shared devices. So if you look on the slide right here, I think it actually might be on the next one under security. But as soon as a person goes off shift, they might lose access to Teams. So maybe you actually will only want to give them access to company information during their shift. So there’s a lot of customization and flexibility here to make it work for your organization.
Adam Devereaux:
We touched on this at the very beginning, but this is part of what is the why now, what has changed, and why is this something we’re talking about, is because there are a variety of devices that can be really purpose-built, like the new iPad that just came out. Pretty low-cost, pretty fantastic device. Put it in a rugged case. It’s something that you can deploy and make available for a lot of people at a pretty low cost.
Adam Devereaux:
But you can also utilize other existing resources. There’s really a larger shift to the way those devices are managed and deployed. You can use passwordless-based sign-in as well. Part of the challenge of provisioning these things is how do we … Somebody’s got to go in and set up the account and then give them the password and everything else. That can go away with some of the new tools, where it’s tied to something physical that you have. Maybe your name badge that you use to get into the building can also be what you use to sign into the computer.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah, that’s great. So let’s hop over to protect your organization quick. We definitely wanted to hit on the fact that this is more secure and safe than it’s ever been.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, absolutely. So with retention policies, with conditional access policies, if we look at it from a couple different perspectives, we’re putting more information into a system that is secure, like Microsoft’s list of compliance acronyms is-
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right. It’s very long.
Adam Devereaux:
It could fill this entire room. They have really the most compliant cloud out there in many considerations. That means it is HIPAA compliant and you can sign a BAA with Microsoft and really tailor the security of your information. There’s way more than we have time to talk about with information rights management, labeling, et cetera, et cetera, that can really help make sure documents don’t leave the organizational perimeter, but also give you more information and insight into what’s going on.
Adam Devereaux:
So the reality is that this communication and sharing is happening outside of your system, if you aren’t enabling it to be within your organizational systems. When it’s inside of, then there’s more visibility. There’s more intelligence, there’s more security controls.
Adam Devereaux:
Right now, if I email a document off to somebody, boom, it’s gone. I’ve lost sight of it. I have no more control over it anymore. But with really extending that organization umbrella to all of the employees and then building the right protections in place, we can really ensure that we’re protecting ourselves in ways that we weren’t able to before.
Rebecca Zaagman:
And even beyond Microsoft’s single sign-on, it actually gives us the ability to connect with different apps under that same secure umbrella.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, and potentially even automate provision. Now this is very dependent on what those other apps are. But more and more and more, other cloud services are supporting single sign-on technologies. You can use that Azure Active Directory account that you’re creating for these people, ideally through automation. So where the HR system, HR-driven provisioning user accounts are getting generated automatically based on certain conditions and qualities. Then we’re able to then leverage that identity to access other systems and just making it really simple and easy for people to get into all of those other resources, but also make it more efficient to deploy those resources and make it easier to, yes, at times revoke that access.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right, absolutely. Cool. So we did want to cover quick, before we pop into pricing, I do want to ask if there are any questions on this, any ideas that you’ve had or seen in your organization, or ones around that you’d like to share, we’d love to hear that. We do have a couple of minutes for questions. So feel free to pop that into the chat or the Q&A.
Rebecca Zaagman:
But we did figure that people would have some questions on pricing. So we’ll put the link in the chat. But, Adam, why don’t you talk us through these different levels of Microsoft 365 F Series?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. So this is a newer skew series. The family has grown, that there’s now the Microsoft 365 F1 and F3 are the big ones to talk about here. The big thing too is that the price has gone down.
Adam Devereaux:
So at $2.25 cents a user a month for F1. This is basically a security and identity-focused license that you’re able to give to these firstline workers in your organization, to give them access to Teams and Office applications, to SharePoint sites. It’s a little bit more of an ingesting information so that there’s some right restrictions and things along those lines.
Adam Devereaux:
But it gives them lots of full access, for the most part, to Teams and the resources you put in there. But it does not come with an email box, right? You do not get a mailbox. You do get a login. So you will get your username at whatever your org name is, domain name, but you don’t have an email box. So if somebody tries to email you, it won’t work.
Adam Devereaux:
That might sound like a limitation, but it’s actually pretty attractive to a lot of organizations to not have to worry about email security. If I’m not giving those people an email box, but I am giving them a company identity that I can leverage in other ways, I don’t have to worry about them clicking on emails that they shouldn’t click on, on spam. That is a security vulnerability, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right.
Adam Devereaux:
Then moving up to F3, it has those other capabilities, but also adds on email in a more limited kiosk type functionality. Now the big difference between Microsoft 365 F1 and F3 and Office 365 F3 is the Microsoft 365 also includes security and licensing for Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Azure Active Directory Premium.
Adam Devereaux:
So that is really key to this future as well, because now I can be managing these various devices and these mobile application management policies and everything else using that licensing I get from F1 and F3. I mean it starts to become a no-brainer when you price it out and think about the new capabilities and services that you can offer at that price point.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So, all right, we’ve gone over a lot today. Any questions that we can help answer? While you’re putting those in there, we did want to say …
Adam Devereaux:
So I have a question.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yes?
Adam Devereaux:
Why did Steve’s computer crash?
Rebecca Zaagman:
We don’t know. We’ll put in a ticket.
Steve:
Why? Why?
Rebecca Zaagman:
We’ll put in a ticket to the best IT staff or-
Adam Devereaux:
He’s going to be asking himself that for a week.
Steve:
Why does this happen?
Rebecca Zaagman:
So if you are ready to deploy Microsoft 365 to your firstline workers, schedule a time with one of our Microsoft experts. A way to do that is to talk to your account manager. We can schedule a time, identify what’s the right next step for your organization. So this is going to look different for a lot of different organizations. It could be a small switch, it could be a big shift for you.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, absolutely.
Rebecca Zaagman:
So, yeah, we’d be happy to talk through that. All right, we did have a question come in from Amy Johnston. “Are there demo environments that we could play around with? We’re probably switching at some point, but don’t currently have Microsoft. Would be great to play around with it.”
Adam Devereaux:
There is ways that we can set up, basically, trial licensing. So I would recommend that you work with us on … It would not take long, but we can set up a demo tenant, essentially, for you.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Okay. Awesome. Yeah, great question, Amy. I definitely want to try out the Walkie Talkie functionality and make sure I can bug Adam at any given time and he can’t ignore me.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah, that’s not quite how that works. I can unsubscribe.
Rebecca Zaagman:
No, no, no. I would like to-
Adam Devereaux:
Well, we should talk about urgent chat messages then, right?
Rebecca Zaagman:
That’s true. I can start marking that.
Adam Devereaux:
I mean that’s relevant there too, where you can set priorities on the chat message and say-
Rebecca Zaagman:
Why aren’t you responding to me?
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. Actually, this came out of the firstline space too because, in healthcare, they wanted the ability to continue to bug people. So you have normal priority, important priority, and now urgent priority. Urgent priority will continue to notify that person until they look at it.
Rebecca Zaagman:
That’s crazy.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. It’s pretty cool.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Awesome. Any other questions? We got a minute or two left here. We’d love to help out.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah. I just want to … Well, barring any questions, but I just want to circle back to what we talked about at the beginning, which in a lot of ways this is about empowering the organization to offer tools to people that they couldn’t offer before, and also to enable those firstline workers and all of the people within that organization to truly be citizens in this digital world and have the ability to communicate, collaborate, access resources.
Adam Devereaux:
One example that we had come up was recently with our EAP, in partnership with the organization that our employee assistance program is through, they’ve done these virtual meetings. It’s really a good way to raise awareness of those resources that you’re already investing in as an organization.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Right, yeah, and invite the rest of the team into the fold, for sure.
Adam Devereaux:
Yeah.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Awesome. Looks like we don’t have any other questions. So thank you everyone for sticking with us today.
Adam Devereaux:
Thanks for your patience.
Rebecca Zaagman:
We had some … Definitely some issues. So we’ll keep working on that. We just appreciate your time. Again, if you are interested in deploying this, have any questions at all, please reach out to your account manager, or email me, becca@worksighted.com, and we’ll definitely work to getting this enabled for you. So thanks, everyone.
Adam Devereaux:
Thanks, everyone.
Rebecca Zaagman:
Yeah. Have a great day.
