Three Microsoft 365 technologies to enable your hybrid workplace

Hybrid work is here to stay and in a holistic organizational context that can mean many things. There will certainly be businesses where this means everyone is in the office together a few days a week and all work from home others, but such neatness might not work everywhere and might not even be ideal. The reality is probably a lot more messy with flexibility meaning that workers who had traditionally been in an office together 9-5 Monday through Friday now work together asynchronously in relation to their location, their hours, their days, or a combination of all of these factors.  

Microsoft is all in on enabling this new way of working with a view of the modern workplace that is focused first on collaboration powered by technology rather than physical or temporal alignment between workers. The late Tony Hsieh of Zappos famously engineered the company's buildings to enhance creative collaboration by forcing "collisions" between workers - the idea that by having everyone enter and leave by one entrance, they will organically engage with colleagues they otherwise would not have done, and take that opportunity to enhance business relationships that enable them to get more things done. When I open an Office document and see the faces of my coworkers who are in that same file pop up at the top of my screen, I think about this being almost like a digital version of one of Hsieh's "collisions". The modern workplace is about taking these physical paradigms and making them work no matter where workers are located or when. 

For Microsoft 365 users the development of Teams is at the forefront of enabling this flexible, collaborative first view of modern work, but this itself is built of many blocks that are constantly evolving to deliver work experiences that promote engagement and drive productivity without any of the traditional limitations that were the norm in workplaces in years gone by. 

So whether your organization's productivity philosophy is based on promoting "collisions" or some other view of enabling co-working, what are the key technologies you should be thinking about when planning how to replicate your collaboration culture for a hybrid and flexible way of working?  

1: Teams Rooms 

During periods when the majority of office-based workers were working mainly from home, a computer running Teams and a webcam was all that was needed to connect people virtually in meetings (if you could find a webcam in 2020!). But as we increasingly shift to having groups made up of some people who are together and others apart, that Teams experience can be de-valued for everyone. 

Front row in Teams Rooms. Image from Microsoft Techcommunity blog.

Teams Rooms through a combination of specialized hardware and software, enables your physical meeting rooms to become venues for hybrid meeting experiences where those who are in-person can collaborate with those who are remote in a seamless experience. 

If you are challenged by how to integrate remote participants in meetings while ensuring that those who are in-person have an experience that is enhanced by technology and not reduced, upgrading some of your spaces to Teams Rooms might be the answer. 

2: Power Platform 

Flexibility in how workers do their job to maximize their productivity might mean using different tools to those that have been used before. Power Platform gives everyone the capability to add a level of automation and customization to the processes they are involved in using Microsoft 365 and many other 3rd party platforms.  

Last week I looked at how to turn a SharePoint list into a simple app using Power Apps. These technologies give individuals and teams the capability to deploy tools that make their work processes easier without the complexity of procuring new systems or involving IT.  

Teams and departments within organizations have always built out internal and cross-organization processes to help them achieve their needs in a consistent way. Doing this effectively for colleagues who might be working from anywhere requires a different tool set and Power Platform goes a long way to fitting into many needs.  

3: Loop 

I have written before about Loop components that have been made available in Teams. However, this is just a start to what is likely to be a technology that revolutionizes how Microsoft Office tools are used. The goal is to bring information from across Microsoft 365 to where you are working by deploying synced components across different locations. An example would be the ability to view and interact with Dynamics 365 records within Teams chat.  

The opportunities that will arise by giving users the ability to collaborate on virtually anything where that collaboration organically occurs should not be underestimated. Those who spend most of their time in Teams won't need to invest efforts in learning lots of different systems to be able to gain and add value in relation to data and content that is being worked on. Information will be where you left it, in sync seamlessly, and accessible in the most ideal way to different users across your organization.    

In our in-person offices value was gained in the ability of team members alongside one another to surface their work or processes. Similar opportunities do not necessarily arise organically when team members are working apart, so technology that focuses on what information is needed as opposed to how it is accessed or where it is stored can help to break down knowledge barriers between colleagues.   

Bonus Item: Security, Identity, and Compliance Technologies 

This is a massive suite of complementary technologies from Microsoft, ranging from Azure Active Directory to Microsoft Defender for Cloud - listing them all and all of their capabilities is outside of the scope of this post and would be a significant body of content.  

Hybrid, flexible, and remote working, creates a different set of security challenges than purely onsite working, or even 100% working from home. Managing authentication and authorization, securing data, and monitoring how disparately located workers are interacting with each other is more challenging for every organization. 

Attached to many Microsoft 365 SKUs is access to a useful subset of their security oriented products that can help to mitigate the new security considerations that our new ways of working might bring up. It is vital that in the rush to deploy new technologies that help with these changes to how we work that security and compliance considerations keep pace and respond. The best processes or most effective collaboration do not make up for a costly data breach.

Title image credit: Photo by Jason Strull on Unsplash