Why modern, flexible work culture needs a ‘digital fabric’ for people to thrive

People really do love working more flexibly.

A recent Stanford University study has looked at US data back as far as 1965 and found that, since then, the number of people working from home has doubled roughly every 15 years. Microsoft’s annual Work Trends Index research, which surveys more than 40,000 people around the world, showed a 7% increase in hybrid work in 2022, up to 38%. And more recent data, from the last quarter on LinkedIn, shows that while only 14% of jobs were advertised as remote, they attracted 52% of the total applications.

There has clearly been a major shift and increase in demand for flexible work, which if embraced can help both employee and employer, as Nick Hedderman, Senior Director of Modern Work at Microsoft UK, explains:

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“Staff now appreciate that work and life can be better integrated, with the flexibility it takes to manage those daily challenges, from dropping the kids off at school in the morning or walking the dog at lunchtime, to being at home for story time at bed time.

And businesses benefit too because they’re still getting more out of people. Microsoft data showed people are working longer, spending an average of 42 more minutes per day using Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook and Teams after February 2020. Simply because they’re spending less time on a mundane, hour-long commute.”

Plus, as recent Gallup research shows, when employees feel more engaged (perhaps because they’re empowered to work how they choose) profitability goes up 23% and staff are at least 18% less likely to leave.

Although it might not always feel that way for managers who don’t have the data and insights about their own organisation. Microsoft’s Work Trends Index also found while 87% of staff feel they’re more productive when working flexibly or remotely, only 12% of business leaders feel the same way. This ‘productivity paranoia’ might be understandable for managers overseeing emptier offices, but the data shows it’s just not accurate.

So, business leaders are having to find a balance between the benefits of being together in person for creativity, connection, and knowledge sharing, and the need to enable seamless communication and collaboration between people working in different locations, at different times.

New tools on top of a digital fabric can deliver best of both worlds.

Which is why Nick Hedderman believes firms will benefit from taking a new approach:

“In this new way of working, we need a ‘digital fabric’ that’s connects everyone in the organisation together, wherever they are, and whatever their role - whether people are on the frontline serving customers or if they’re office based. This fabric must be compliant, secure and always-on, so people can communicate and collaborate, and do so asynchronously, when needed.

Specific tools can then be built on top of this fabric to enable a better employee experience.”

Microsoft Teams, for example, is a tool that helps everyone in the organisation collaborate – they can start a live document, post it in a channel, and mention specific colleagues to ask them to contribute. This democratises how people work and makes it easier to share expertise. Teams is also great for instant messaging, meetings, and telephony – just calling someone, and it’s increasingly being used for automation, bringing tasks like doing expenses or professional learning, right into the flow of work.

The right technology can help organisations keep up with staff’s evolving needs, too, says Hedderman:

“We spend a lot of time talking to employees about what they want from technology going forwards, and they answer us very clearly. They want to work flexibly, while staying connected to the company mission and purpose, to understand what’s happening in the organisation, and hear from leadership. People want to be able to form special resource groups to be part of something important, to get help staying up to date with their learning. And managers need more data and insights about what’s happening at a broader organisational level.”

All of which has been built into Microsoft Viva, a new employee experience platform that helps bring an organisation’s communications, knowledge sharing, learning resources and insights, all into one place, using tools that people are already familiar with, like Microsoft Teams.

How the right cultural approach can be supported by tech.

Much of what companies can do to get the most out of flexible working for everyone, is cultural.

To begin with, leaders must embrace it – act as role models and prioritise proactively making it work, by creating a culture of permission for everyone to do the same. A shift from measuring hours to measuring outcomes is also recommended, where managers focus on recognising people’s work rather than their location or time spent online. And it’s essential to enable team level discussion and agreement, rather than top-down edicts that are one-size fits all. Instead, each team or department can agree their own approach to flexible work, because there’s so much variety in what will work, for different functions.

A degree of selflessness is also required to create an inclusive culture and support younger generations in person. The Work Trends Index found that 80% of younger staff still want face-to-face connection in an office - to help them learn from more experienced colleagues.

Nick Hedderman also explains that processes can now be automated to support these kinds of cultural strengths:

“If staff are encouraged to keep learning and empowered to make time for it, Viva Learning can further enable this by integrating digital knowledge networks into the flow of work. For example, if someone is working in a project channel in Teams, just by hovering the cursor over the project title, they can see an automatically generated topic card, which shows who key people working on the project are, so they can message them instantly, as well as seeing links to further resources and files, making them much easier to discover.

Viva Learning can show you the most relevant internal training courses, on your personalised home page, and automatically block time in your calendar for study, should you have a couple of hours free during the week.”

Similarly, if an organisation has a strong focus on managing wellbeing, Viva can offer helpful reminders to nudge staff in the right direction, by sending a weekly email that helps them book focus and break time in their calendar for the week ahead, at the press of a button. When focusing, Teams notifications are automatically switched off to prevent distraction and improve productivity.

Viva can also remind staff at say, 6pm, that it might be time to wrap up – with a useful summary of the day and a link to a relevant Headspace mindfulness meditation to help them start to wind down sooner. This makes it much easier to bookend the day, so people log off and rest properly when working from home.

The future is exciting, and helpful!

We are entering a new era of AI, and it’s important to understand that, just like Teams and Viva, it’s being designed and utilised as a tool to help people work more efficiently, and effectively – allowing us more time for creativity, and removing more of the mundane from our daily lives. Microsoft has a long-term partnership with OpenAI, which is focused on accelerating AI breakthroughs. As OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, Microsoft’s Azure cloud services power all OpenAI workloads across research, products and services. Microsoft’s goal is to democratise breakthroughs in AI through Azure to help people and organisations be more productive.

“Nobody likes taking meeting minutes and having to email around a list of actions afterwards”, says Nick Hedderman, “so tools like Teams Premium enable colleagues to just focus on the conversation, and the notes and actions for each person can be automatically generated and shared after the meeting, along with a searchable, and instantly translatable transcript and video. This is the exciting capability of AI to take boring tasks off our plate, enabling us to focus on more enjoyable, important creative and growth-focused work. When it comes to how modern work is evolving, there’s a lot to look forward to.”

To learn how collaboration and employee experience technology is getting better at facilitating and supporting people’s productivity and wellbeing, you can read more about Microsoft Viva, here.

And to find out how to empower create more purpose, growth, and clarity for your organisation, download Microsoft’s new eBook, ‘The People-Powered Workplace’.