How the Microsoft technology stack supports your employees’ happiness 

Despite being subjective, the weight and breadth of happiness at work can largely be improved and maintained if employees have the right tools to do their regular jobs exceptionally. Microsoft enables both tech conversations and tech engagement within businesses by offering team members turn-key solutions for:

• Peer-to-Peer communication (audio, video, written)
• Data and knowledge gathering and exchange
• Automation in tracking, management, and decision-making 
• Discoverability of information and sound reporting
• Project roundtrips and progress monitoring 

Microsoft improves work quality

The Microsoft suite has improved the way we work and collaborate by offering us staple tools for our digital office, business, and research needs.

How? Microsoft 365 integrates the Office suite with Outlook and Teams to deliver a unified work experience for your digital office and digital project needs. As a result, work quality can be improved significantly by:

• Increasing the speed of conveying information
• Sustaining round-the-clock collaboration on assets
• Tracking workload, work progress, and work bottlenecks 
• Automating decisions, forms, and workflows

Improved work quality translates into happier and more productive employees, namely employees that want to contribute to your business welfare. Investing in technology means investing in your employees, which dovetails back to your business. 

Microsoft supports employee satisfaction

Happiness and satisfaction go hand in hand. If your employees work and connect with their peers with ease, then employees can use their focus and skills into building assets and knowledge for your business. On the flipside, if your employees waste time or feel lost when trying to figure out what the next step should be, they will lose their focus and get little or moderate work done. In time, this will affect your employees’ morale, which will lead to all sorts of quitting, vocal or silent.

• Employee satisfaction increases if the technology employees use makes them feel comfortable with:
• Projects and tasks
• Time management
• Schedule predictability
• Workplace dynamics

To this end, Microsoft technology helps your employees:

• Work anytime, anywhere, which means more work-life balance
• Switch devices, which means more operational flexibility
• Focus on methodology, best practices, and results, which means higher levels of achievement
• Learn adaptively, rather than amass descriptive knowledge
• Develop their unique skills, rather than focus on processes and infrastructure limitations 

Peer-to-Peer communication

Lean agendas make people happy. Why?

• Less time for wandering aimlessly, more time for focus
• Better visibility over project goals and progress, less guess work
• More productive work hours, fewer blind spots, fewer superfluous meetings

Data and knowledge gathering and exchange

Happy employees can collaborate, meet, and devise plans via fully integrated platforms that support virtual meetings, sharing, and knowledge repositories.

Collaboration precedes productivity. Collaboration requires any business to give its workforce everything they need to work together and produce their best results, across teams, across locations and across devices. Microsoft 365 enables you to combine the capabilities of multiple tools and platforms to create sustainable work networks. 

Automation and technology integration

Happy employees know that they are involved in exciting projects they can contribute to and develop without wasting time on pointless meetings, repetitive tasks, and overly complicated agendas.

Sometimes, complexity cannot be avoided. It is well known that complexity takes more time to resolve and that it is the most likely context where human error can creep in. Failure to master complexity can lead to frustration among employees. Have no fear! The Microsoft Power Platform is here to assist with:

• Common, repetitive tasks where you need to control variables
• Complex tasks with a lot of information overload
• Contextual workflows with multiple decision trees
• Forms and other sign-off workflows where time to market is crucial

Discoverable information

Happy employees can find what they need without chasing SMEs, hunting information in 10 different tabs or feeling lost because of insufficient processes, templates, or workflows.

Microsoft provides employees working in remote or hybrid settings with access to files, folders, and information snippets irrespective of the application they use at a particular point in time. How? Outlook, Office, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams are interconnected and accessible from any point of entry. Employees can easily discover quick links, redirection, and search features that can help them chase any salient information in minutes.

Moreover, by powering intranets, SharePoint can help businesses build focused hubs of knowledge that need to be disseminated to large or specific target audiences. 

Self-development

Happy employees are empowered employees who can self-manage or find easy ways of improving their daily performance and skill set.

Microsoft 365 enables employees to discover information and build knowledge via SharePoint, OneDrive and a powerful, enterprise search. Everyone thrives when the system is built for self-service.

Moreover, employees can use the Viva module to:

• Analyze how they fare in their daily activities and adjust based on metrics that Microsoft aggregates automatically (Viva Insights)
• Access learning resources provided by the company or by third-party vendors (Viva Learning)
• Learn about the latest project updates or news fed automatically by the system (Viva Topics) 

Takeaway

Happy employees are productive and loyal, as they feel comfortable working for a business which values their time, skills, and personal growth. Microsoft technology drives workplace happiness by:

• Facilitating communication and collaboration on its ubiquitous 365 platform
• Providing individuals with insight about their daily or regular interactions
• Offering discoverable information, as well as interchangeable and hybrid Office support
• Automating tedious, repetitive tasks to make room for innovation
• Integrating email with project management and virtual meetings