In February last year, 40% of South Africans wanted to continue working from home full time. By June last year, 50% still were, according to media reports.

But employers naturally worry about productivity. And employees are concerned about the quality of the environment to support them.

We continue to work with hundreds of enterprises as they gear for remote offices and support their hybrid work environments.

How can you help employees?

By far a standout requirement is for meaningful data to feed the organisation. Productivity, customer and employee communication, employee wellbeing and employee effectiveness must have data.

The pandemic destroyed all our former work models. Nobody knew what was going to work. We could not foresee the pressures of the home environment. We also couldn’t imagine the pressures that employees would put themselves under. But time has passed, we’ve endured the challenges, and we’ve been busy developing solutions.

Learn more here

A 25-year veteran of global teams and virtual teamwork says the biggest challenges in hybrid work environments are communication, coordination, connection, creativity and culture. Martin Haas’s article in Harvard Business Review pulls few punches as it outlines the challenges. He acknowledges that many people in the HR game know these hurdles well. The solution, however, is the difficult part.

What’s required today

Employees and managers have found an urgent need for tools that help them be proactive, that eliminates the early performance management challenges that cropped up during the lockdown and the resources spent on strategies that were implemented and supported but which had to later be changed.

People also found themselves working many more hours per day than was usual pre-pandemic. Unhealthy and even toxic scenarios see people working 14-16 hours a day. That leads to burnout, stress and employee churn.

The right tools for the job

Microsoft Viva is an employee platform that integrates into Office 365. It provides insights into how people communicate, learn and interact with the software. Its real power derives from its integration into Office 365. The Insights module, for example, can analyse collaboration data from Azure Active Directory, then use AI to recommend improvements.

Key has been the ability to proactively track, monitor and remediate how people interact. It impacts employees, customers, suppliers and data. Integration into the Office suite has also been instrumental to its market success.

Create more advantage

But getting the most out of your Viva deployment means establishing the proof of concept upfront in your live environment. It also means connecting the value proposition with the ability of the network and SharePoint or on-premise tools to maximise the full potential.

It could be a labour-intensive process fraught with technical complexity and high costs.

With decades of experience in this field, we were able to streamline deployments to be cost-effective and fully supported so we can drive the business case for you, so you can ratchet up the return on investment.

It sounds simple and straightforward, and it is for customers – because we’ve taken the complexity out of it so you can leverage more of the benefits, quicker and more reliably.