In 2021 many companies faced the consequences of not focusing on employee engagement and satisfaction, when a whopping 18% of employees left their jobs! Kat Olsen gives her insight into how Microsoft Viva and Rapid Circle’s 5-step process can help you make strides into rapidly improving your employee experience.

Many businesses are motivated to improve their employee experience to increase retention and avoid disengagement, but these aren’t the only reasons to invest in employee experience. There are plenty of benefits to reap, including:

• Companies with highly engaged employees have 21% greater profitability.
• Organisations with high employee satisfaction are 89% more likely to meet organisational innovation goals.
• Organisations are 48% more likely to meet customer satisfaction goals if their employees are satisfied with their employee experience.

So, how can companies create a better employee experience? An option to enhance the existing communication and collaboration capabilities of Microsoft 365 is to incorporate employee experience platforms such as Microsoft Viva. Microsoft Viva offers a crucial feature of linking employees to the necessary resources and tools required for their success, all through a unified platform. Additionally, Viva’s extensive integration with other Microsoft products, including Teams, results in a smooth and productive workflow.

At Rapid Circle, we believe that improving employee experience starts with adopting a people-focused mindset. That’s why we’ve developed a 5-step process to support our customers on their employee experience journey:

1. First, we use the Gallup Employee Lifecycle (Attract, Hire, Onboard, Engage, Perform, Develop, and Depart) as our framework. This takes a holistic approach to understanding the problems and needs of employees and the organisation. Which enables us and our customers to understand the interconnectivity of challenges as well as to prioritise the identified opportunities for improvement.
2. Next, we host a series of inspiration workshops to demonstrate the full capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Viva, tailored to the interests and maturity of the organisation.
3. We bring everything together and co-design an integrated solution that addresses key focus areas, using tools and technologies highlighted in the inspiration sessions. We use our ’10Ps for Teams design’ framework to create purposeful collaboration spaces with clear guidelines for communication, collaboration, and coordination.
4. In collaboration with our customers, we create a plan for implementing the integrated solutions to a pilot group or scaling the solutions across the organisation. We also design a tailored change management approach to ensure employees are aware of and empowered to use the new technologies and solutions.
5. Finally, we provide hands-on support and advisory for implementing the employee experience uplift solutions.

With the rise of digital transformation, organisations are leveraging technology to drive employee experience and create a more engaged and productive workforce. But it’s important to remember that employee experience isn’t just about new tools and technology; it’s about understanding the problems employees face and using technology as an enabler to implement integrated solutions.