The Flow has a people centric approach where it identifies the goals of your organisation and the people who work for it. To do so, it uses an employee experience journey. Managing partner Benny Van De Velde explains how it works.

Today, companies face major challenges in terms of hybrid working. Microsoft conducted research into the hybrid working paradox, which shows that 70% of those questioned want to retain the flexibility they had during covid. But just as many also want more contact with their colleagues.

So, in addition to the cosy workplaces they have been setting up in recent years, companies will have to develop a digital version where flex workers can do the same things they do in the office. One way to do that is through an employee experience platform. That's already possible through a tweak in Microsoft Teams. Most people only use that application for meetings. We can set up Teams as a hub by attaching additional applications to it so that it becomes multifunctional.

Employee experience journey

For the design of the platform, we sit down with various stakeholders within your organisation. Together we work out an employee experience journey using a discovery assessment. Via separate design workshops we try to inspire you and capture what is going on. What is there in terms of applications, and how can we combine them with your journey?

Within this assessment, we also look at the digital maturity of your business. It is the core of your user adoption and the journey we take. Through a digital maturity scan we not only want to get a picture of your organisation, but also of how digitally mature your employees are. The advantage of this is that you can provide very targeted training for your employees. The more mature employees can be stimulated with teasers or a webinar. People who are less digitally savvy need more support. You will have to provide extensive training for them, and The Flow can help you with this.

Microsoft Viva

Besides the whole digital assessment of your organisation, the development of your employees is also important. Microsoft has therefore designed Microsoft Viva, which currently consists of four modules.

• Viva Connections is a kind of interactive dashboard. You can think of it as an enhanced intranet that you can integrate into Microsoft Teams or your own experience platform.
• Viva Topics scans your environment and documents. Using artificial intelligence, it gives suggestions about certain topics. For example, if you are looking for a certain topic, it will suggest chats, documents or people who can give you extra info about the topic.
• Viva Learning is a central place for learning within Microsoft Teams. It allows managers to offer different learning modules to their employees.
• Viva Insights, on the other hand, is the one that is very interesting to us at The Flow because it provides insight into your employees' behavior based on data. Within Insights, you have three main target groups. The personal assistant gives you an overview of the emails you get and who your direct colleagues are. Here you can check who you haven't talked for in a long time. Managers might benefit more from the organisational overviews where they can check whether their employees are able to schedule enough focus time, how qualitative their meetings are, and whether there are enough coordination moments between managers and employees. Finally, Viva Insights also offers the ability to use it as a maturity meeting by expanding it further with data sources. With data from your CRM system you can thus also start measuring the effectiveness of your sales. For managers who like to see their employees in the office, this is an alternative way to keep in touch with the team while they work from home.

At The Flow, we use Microsoft's technology as a means to achieve and solidify organisational and employee goals. So you can think of the employee experience platform as a piece of automation that gives you insights into your business. This way, you can keep your employees happy and give them additional experiences, which is, after all, the ultimate goal of the entire employee experience journey.