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Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise SocialPublished: July 2014

For the latest information, please visit http://aka.ms/ConnectedWorkforce

Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social

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Table of Contents

The World Has Become a Giant Network. Has Your Company? 3

Employee Work Styles Are Changing 4

Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social 4

Three Ways to Connect Your Workforce 5

1. Connect Technology 5

2. Inform Employees 5

3. Engage Your Workforce 6

Case Study: Red Robin Empowered Employees to Make an Impact 7

Connect Your Workforce with Microsoft 7

Sources 8

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The World Has Become a Giant Network. Has Your Company?People are more connected than ever before. There are now more mobile devices than people.1 And people check their smartphones an average of 150 times per day. This makes just over 4.5 billion people connected to social technologies.2

These same mobile and social habits apply to your customers. The way they buy, consume information, and interact with your business is highly networked and connected. For example, every day over 400 million tweets are posted about products, services, and brands.3 And by the time your customer approaches your business, he or she is already 57 percent through the buying process.4

Now, when you think about your company internally, are your employees just as connected and informed as your customers? Odds are, your workers are not as networked. Studies show that 20 percent of a worker ’s day is spent looking for information.5 And one in three knowledge workers worldwide are disengaged from their job.6

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Employee Work Styles Are ChangingIn addition to information silos and engagement challenges at work, the way employees want to work is more diverse and distributed than ever before. Three generations now fill the office, each with different work and communication styles. According to Deloitte, baby boomers prefer in-person relationships, while millennials value working from home. Millennials like spontaneous, multimedia communication, while gen-Xers prefer email. And to further widen the gap, within the next five years 40 percent of these workers will be contingent workers or located outside the office.7

With the combination of a remote workforce and hyperconnected customers, how do companies keep employees connected, engaged, and productive? A warning from Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric (GE) and successful business author, reads: “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”

It’s time for business leaders and managers to ask, “Are my customers outpacing my workforce?”

Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise SocialWhat if you could work inside your company the way your customers do on the outside? What if your employees could use the communication method that made them most productive? What if you and everyone in your company could work like a network?

You can, with Microsoft. Our comprehensive and enterprise-grade approach is unmatched. We provide seamless social experiences across the familiar applications your employees already use to get their jobs done. Enterprise Social includes productivity applications like Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as project and collaboration platforms like SharePoint, Yammer, and Lync. We’re expanding our connected offerings to help companies work truly like a network.

Enterprise Social allows your workers to connect to conversations, documents, and files that matter; be informed to make smarter decisions; and overall feel more engaged in their jobs and company culture.

“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.”— Jack Welch, former CEO, GE

Enterprise Social allows your workers to connect to conversations, documents, and files that matter; be informed to make smarter decisions; and overall feel more engaged in their jobs and company culture.

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Three Ways to Connect Your WorkforceLet’s dive into how you can connect your workforce with Enterprise Social: connect technology, improve information flows, and engage your workforce in a common culture.

1. Connect TechnologyFirst, customers have experienced a closer, more connected work environment regardless of location or hierarchical structure. Almost 70 percent of users agree that Enterprise Social improves collaboration across remote locations, and 83 percent feel better connected to their team.8

Smarter connections with the Office Graph

One way Microsoft is investing in a connected network is through the Office Graph. The Office Graph is a suite-wide intelligence fabric that discovers and make new connections for you. It maps the interactions, content, and activity taking place across all users in all workloads of Office 365: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Yammer. It then uses machine learning to analyze these signals and derive personalized insights tailored for each user. The Office Graph gives you a predictive experience, helping you discover the most relevant information across Office 365 for the task at hand. It’s important to note that the Office Graph respects all access permissions. Private content will not be surfaced to those who don’t have the appropriate permissions.

Stronger customer connections with CRM integrations

We want your employees to easily connect to customer data and insights through line-of-business applications. We’ve invested in a Yammer and Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration and recently a Salesforce partnership that extends collaboration beyond sales to your entire organization. Yammer conversations are now available inline, making your existing business apps social. Yammer users who may not use your business apps can still surface updates and collaborate. Going forward, we will continue to drive deeper integration between customer relationship management systems and Office 365.

2. Inform Your WorkforceEnterprise Social creates an informed and empowered workforce. 80 percent of Enterprise Social users report they are more informed about what is happening inside their organization than before having the solution.9

Almost 70% of users agree that Enterprise Social improves collaboration across remote locations, and 83% feel better connected to their team.8

80% of Enterprise Social users report they are more informed about what is happening inside their organization than before having the solution.

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Collaborative teamwork with Document Conversations

One example of informed and collaborative work with Enterprise Social is Document Conversations. Users may work on documents and interact with colleagues through side-by-side social conversations surfaced and housed on Yammer. You’ll now be able to engage with peers, get feedback, and iterate faster on ideas and deliverables in context. We’re enabling Document Conversations by adding Yammer feeds to documents, images, and even videos stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. Other investments for keeping employees informed include a rich single user profile which will paint a holistic picture of the person, as well as Lync integration within a document.

Information sorted and served through Delve

Office Graph insights will be surfaced in Delve. Delve surfaces relevant content from your network based on your identity, your interactions with others, and the topics your colleagues are working on. This helps you stay better connected and informed on topics that matter most to you. We present relevant content as content cards in different boards such as “Trending around me,” “Shared with me,” or even “Presented to me.” These boards are personalized based on insights learned from each user via machine learning and dynamically updated. You can also search the Office Graph based on actions and connections using natural language search. In the People view, you can see insights about your colleagues and content that’s relevant to them. You can also see not only a hierarchical view of your colleagues, but the most relevant contacts generated automatically by the Office Graph, based on interactions with people and content. For instance, you may open a content card and view a document side-by-side with the Delve app. Our goal is to make the Office Graph available everywhere you get work done. For instance, Delve will initially be available as a web interface in Office 365, as a Windows 8 app, and on mobile devices.

3. Engage EmployeesWith informed and empowered employees comes greater engagement and productivity. McKinsey reports that organizations have the potential to increase worker productivity by 20 to 25 percent when using Enterprise Social.

Empower employees to self-organize

One way to engage employees is through easily creating self-organized groups to get things done. We’re unifying people, conversations and content across all Office 365 applications by providing a common set of assets in order to accelerate and scale collaboration.

McKinsey reports that organizations have the potential to increase worker productivity by 20-25% when using Enterprise Social.

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Case Study: Red Robin Empowered Employees to Make an Impact

Red Robin uses Yammer as an engine to drive business transformation. By energizing its 26,000 team members and giving them a voice, Red Robin has forged tighter ties across the business and brought executives one step closer to customers. When the

company introduced a new burger on the menu, management was disappointed by the lack of customer feedback on their Facebook page. Instead, they found considerable buzz on Yammer, where restaurant managers shared feedback from guests and ideas for improvements. Within weeks, Red Robin rolled out an improved, kitchen-tested recipe–a process that would have taken months before.

It’s not just restaurant staff who feel more plugged in to operations thanks to Yammer–it’s corporate executives, too. CEO Steve Carley uses the network for everything from posting videos about business results to “liking” employee successes singled out by Yammer’s Praise feature. “But the number one thing I use Yammer for is to feel the pulse of the business from the perspective of front-line team members,” he says. “That’s invaluable to me.”

Connect Your Workforce with MicrosoftOver 400,000 businesses have chosen Microsoft and Enterprise Social to engage, inform, and connect their workforce. Here is why they selected us:

• Familiar cloud tools – Consistent, familiar, and intuitive tools across the Microsoft cloud solutions drive faster, lower-cost implementation and high user adoption, which leads to improved productivity and business results.

• Enterprise-grade – Microsoft has the experience, global footprint, security, and reliability that every enterprise should demand of cloud solutions. We’re the only vendor with a diversity of cloud workloads to match the diversity of our customers’ businesses.

• Comprehensive and connected – Microsoft has the most comprehensive and deeply connected platform for the cloud across customers’ datacenter, service providers, and the Microsoft public cloud.

Start working like a network today to engage, inform, and connect your workforce. Learn more about Enterprise Social from Microsoft at http://aka.ms/ConnectedWorkforce.

“If you engage staff in a way that shows their opinion is important, it’s extraordinary what you learn—and the excitement you generate. That’s what working social does for an organization.”— Steve Carley, CEO, Red Robin

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The information contained in this document represents the current view of Microsoft Corporation on the issues discussed as of the date of publication. Because Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information presented after the date of publication.

This white paper is for informational purposes only. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, in this document.

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© 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Sources1 Cisco, 2013

2 Kleiner Perkins Caufield Buyers, 2013

3 Twitter, 2014

4 CEB, The New High Performer Playbook, 2014

5 Interact, 2013

6 Blessing White, 2011

7 Intuit, 2013

8 Yammer, 2013

9 Yammer, 2013