Solve Chronic Information Overload With Microsoft 365
In the digital era, communication is easier than ever. However, it’s a case of “too much of a good thing” — many of us are drowning in a constant influx of notifications, emails and chat messages.
The problem isn’t just annoying on an individual level. It’s also bad for business, leading to disengaged and frustrated employees.
The 2023 Microsoft Work Trend Index found that 64 percent of people “struggle with having the time and energy to do their job — and those people are 3.5 times more likely to also struggle with innovation and strategic thinking.”
Several aspects of the modern workplace can contribute to information overload. Remote work gives employees flexibility, but it also can be difficult for them to truly separate from work. Especially when companies err on the side of too many modes of communication and too many applications, an all-too-common problem among today’s organizations.
Part one of this series explores some contributors of chronic information overload. Here, let’s dive into some real-world solutions.
You Need A Modern Workplace Strategy
Both the root cause and the solution for information overload lies in the modern workplace.
Lacking a modern workplace strategy, employees will suffer from too much information coming at them around the clock. But with a strategy for what technology to deploy and how to use it, employees will have the tools needed to quickly get the information they need, when they need it, and tune out the extra noise.
Michael McNett, co-lead of Centric Consulting’s Modern Workplace practice, recommends starting with an employee survey to uncover the source of information overload.
“Once you understand what’s causing ineffective communication and collaboration, start to align business use cases to the appropriate tools and applications,” he says. “Then establish guidelines and principles around how to communicate as an organization. You’ll want to turn on only the features you need to facilitate communication, and then educate employees on how to use them. If you just flip features on with no training, you’re not going to see the ROI.”
Invest In One Comprehensive Communicaton Platform To Solve Information Overload
Business leaders know integrating multiple tools into one comprehensive system is key to improving the employee experience. However, a Centric Consulting survey found that 59 percent of leaders lacked a fully integrated employee experience platform and nearly 40 percent had outdated, irrelevant or no employee experience tool at all.
We were in the same boat years ago, before we invested in Microsoft’s suite of collaboration tools. I talk about this in my book, Office Optional:
“We felt the positive impact immediately. Our productivity increased, and we became a more connected, cohesive organization. We immediately saw a 25 percent reduction in email traffic. Instead of flooding everyone’s inboxes, we were connecting through more effective mediums. We started using video calls, resulting in fewer misunderstandings. We were sharing messages through threaded workstreams, improving transparency … Suddenly, collaboration was nearly effortless, and we were completing projects in half the time.”
Of course, that was before AI exploded onto the scene. The technology has only improved since we first integrated with Microsoft Teams, and we’re continually discovering new ways to work better together and cut down on the noise distracting people from the deep thinking work that fuels innovation and creativity.
How Microsoft 365 Improves Communication and Reduces Noise
Let’s do a quick dive into Microsoft 365 to illustrate how one integrated suite of tools offers a number of ways to solve chronic information overload.
Microsoft Teams, a cloud-based, unified communication software, acts as the digital headquarters for a company, allowing remote and in-person teams to seamlessly communicate and collaborate. Microsoft Teams allows companies to create channels and Teams to organize communication, helping reduce unnecessary noise, helping employees focus only on what matters, and bringing relevant information from key systems and applications directly to the end user in the flow of their day-to-day work.
Microsoft Viva is Microsoft’s employee experience platform within Teams. There are a number of cool features within Viva that can help combat information overload:
- Viva Insights provides insights on collaboration and meetings, such as meeting habits, amount of 1:1 time spent with team members, time collaborating, and more. Viva Insights can also help employees protect time for breaks or focused work, improving their flow of work. These insights can help employees analyze, understand, and take action on this information from an individual, group, or organizational level.
- Viva Engage allows users to separate social information feeds from work-related feeds.
- Viva Topics uses AI to curate knowledge around key topics, making information easier to locate.
Viva Amplify, the newest application launched by Microsoft, helps users to create, publish and analyze their communications in a single hub. This tool provides an organization with centralized campaign management, multi-channel publishing, and reporting capabilities to empower corporate communicators to connect with every employee.
In a blog post, McNett shared how Viva Topics can help accelerate knowledge sharing among employees:
When mentioning the “Modern Workplace” topic within a new team member onboarding channel, our new employees can view the Modern Workplace topic card in the message. Then they can click on the card to access the full topic page to get the complete information about our practice, such as key leaders, documents, experts and relationships to other topics they may want to know more about.
Microsoft Copilot is an AI assistant. Copilot can help cut down on noise in many ways, including automatically aggregating and prioritizing multiple alerts and then suggesting actions to take in response; summarizing large documents or groups of documents; and retrieving only the most relevant data in response to the end user’s queries. All of this can help save users from wading through tons of content and help them create new content more quickly and with higher quality, all from within the flow of their work as it embeds directly within the traditional office applications.
The Human Element
Technology alone can’t solve all your information overload problems. You’ll also need a strategy to communicate and educate employees on the tools available to them. Here are a few ideas for how education can tackle too much communication and ensure the tools you add to the mix don’t inadvertently contribute to the problem:
- Discuss Teams (or general communications) etiquette, tackling topics like expected response times and when to avoid messaging people directly.
- Educate users on ways to control their experience. For instance, turning off notifications during meeting times or off hours or using the “Do Not Disturb” option for deep thinking work.
- Educate users on how other tools, such as Microsoft Viva Insights, can help users to automatically reserve focus or learning time on their calendar and to help develop and share best practices for communications and collaboration across their team.
- Educate users on when to use private chat versus group chats versus channel conversations within Teams.
The Organization
Without the right training and change management strategies, new tools can make information overload worse. It’s wise to put guardrails in place to ensure your tools don’t just add another layer of noise to the work experience. For example:
- Establish policies that define communication and information-sharing guidelines and expectations across the organization.
- Establish a culture of open communication where people across the organization, no matter what role or title they have, are encouraged to help others communicate more effectively.
- Frequently communicate across the organization with tips, best practices, and recommendations about how to improve communications.
With the right tools, used in the right way, companies can tackle information overload, helping employees access the information they need, when they need it, and empowering them to control the interruptions to their day so they can tackle the truly impactful work.
If you want help modernizing your employee experience, Centric Consulting’s team of Modern Workplace experts can help. Contact us to learn more and get started.
Centric Consulting is an international management consulting firm with unmatched in-house expertise in business transformation, hybrid workplace strategy, technology implementation and adoption. Founded in 1999 with a remote workforce, Centric has established a reputation for solving its clients’ toughest problems, delivering tailored solutions, and bringing deeply experienced consultants centered on what’s best for your business
