.

Don’t we all feel like part of a big Future-of-Work-Experiment?

We don’t know yet which working model will work best for what type of company and employees.

Companies don’t know what comes next.

Leaders are a long way from knowing how it will work.

Microsoft 365 and Teams are great solutions for office-based employees. But what about your frontline workers—the ones who aren’t sitting at a desk with a computer at their fingertips?

I hope you catch my idea.

Let me ask you a few questions to reflect upon. 

What is one of the last competitive edges any business could sharpen?

Your product?

Anyone can copy your product in shorter and shorter periods of time.

I reckon all businesses out there are driven to achieve higher business results.

Here business results mean anything your organization wants to achieve.

This could be purpose-driven or profit-driven.

As more digital tools enter the workplace, organizations should pay particular attention to the actual, not promised, productivity within their workforce. According to PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2022,  one of the biggest challenges they identified is the need to improve what is often called the “employee experience.”

Companies are quite adept at managing how they communicate their messages outside the company and towards their target customers.  They have entire departments and teams of experts that strategize an external communications strategy and implement this through a well-thought-out communications plan.

But what about internal communications? This is the act of conceptualizing and implementing a communications strategy targeted towards your own employees. This often does not receive the same attention and focus that external communications receives.

But why is this the case?

2021 was the year of resilient operations management.

Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to building software for desk workers. If you’re looking for a way to bring all your workplace tools together and create cool workflow automations to make your team’s day-to-day life easier, then understanding how to integrate Microsoft with other workplace tools is a must.

Connecting people in the workplace and helping teams work together more efficiently is at the core of our mission. When Beekeeper first set out seven years ago, we were determined to digitalize traditional top-down communication channels.

We wanted to make information easily accessible to everyone, regardless of their location. In many cases, Beekeeper also enabled employees to give direct feedback to company management for the very first time.

Over time, it became clear that top-down communication channels like bulletin boards and newsletters are only the tip of the communication pyramid. For operational communication that’s truly transformative, information must also flow from the bottom-up, across departments, between functions, and diagonally into different teams.

How are you coping during this period?

What are you discovering about yourself and each other that you could not see before?

What have you lost during this time but are not missing?

These questions and others trigger new conversations and collaborations between many members of the group.

𝗢𝗰𝗰𝗮𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗿. 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝗱𝗯𝘆𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆𝘀, 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗼 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀.

We were conditioned by experts that we need non-authentic, anonymous, low-trust workplace surveys to tell us what we should talk about.

And whilst we were in the building, we didn’t buy it but we went along with it, right?

But no longer! Long and static employee surveys are dead, replaced by authentic conversations between people who choose the topics, not the survey authors.

In the Enterprise Social Room, we began this extraordinary conversation and re-imagining a future where conversations across physical locations and hierarchies became part of the ‘new normal’.