- Coming up, we look at updates to Microsoft Teams
for firstline workers and their managers across industries
including the customizable mobile experience.
For First Line workers that's configural by IT
using the updated admin center.
New mobile features relevant to firstline workers
such as a new smart camera,
the ability to record and share audio,
your location, and much more.
And the shifts capability that enables managers
to easily build shift schedules,
share daily goals, corporate content,
and also enables employees to easily review shifts
and make shift change requests.
(electronic music)
- So I'm joined today by Keara James
from Microsoft Teams, welcome.
- Thank you Jeremy, it's a pleasure to be here.
- So firstline workers, they really make up
a huge part of the workforce.
Recently I had general manager Laurie Wright
on the show highlighting our focus in this area,
but what specific about their needs,
and what are we trying to deliver here with
Microsoft Teams?
- So despite there being over two billion
firstline workers globally,
traditionally this area of the workforce
has been underserved.
From sales associates in retail stores
to warehouse workers and factory force,
these are the people are first with products
into performed services,
first to engage with customers,
and first to represent a company's brand.
But firstline workers often face unique challenges
with fragmented technology.
They often feel disconnected from their team and company,
they're using obsolete and outdated tools,
and it's often hard for them to receive
information and content.
And for managers of firstline teams this places
more burden on them to keep everyone on the same page
and they have to make sure that they're staffed
to meet the needs of the business.
- Right and this is something that we've all seen before,
when there's a technological gap or a need
people just find a way, right?
They use maybe consumer apps or other things
to stay connected.
We can all relate to these kinds of challenges I think-
cause I myself was a barista for seven years
through high school and through college,
so I know what it's like to not have
all the tools and technology to really help me.
- Same. I've been a retail worker
and I've had to deal with some really
antiquated processes.
So our focus is really to reverse this trend,
put these workers first,
and address these challenges with Microsoft Teams.
- Okay I know one of the biggest pain points
whether you're a manager or a firstline worker,
is really managing shifts and
understanding your shift schedule.
- It is.
In fact, shift scheduling is foundational
to the firstline experience.
As a firstline worker you're heavily dependent
on your schedule and when you have to be at work.
With Shifts, managers can easily plan
and distribute shift schedules.
And team members can easily review shift schedules
from their mobile device.
- Right, and this is one those often paper-based processes,
you might have a white board or something
in your break room and,
it's really hard to stay up to date
when changes are made they might get even lost.
- Exactly.
Shifts alleviates a lot of that stress,
and is available by default in your tenant.
You can access it in your overflow menu on web and desktop,
and on your mobile device you can access it
on your navigation bar.
- Let's start with the manager experience first in your PC
and then we'll move over to my phone and the
firstline worker experience.
- Of course.
So here's the Shift schedule I've built out
for Contoso Electronic Store.
As you can see here there are five different departments,
and one thing I really wanna call out are open shifts.
Open shifts are available for my team to take at will
because they're not individually assigned to anybody.
There are optional day notes here at the top of the schedule
and these notes are shared with everyone on the team.
And in this case I've added our sales forecast goals,
but you can use this space to communicate anything.
For example, a head's up that a district manager
is coming to visit the store.
- Okay that's great so tell me more
about how a manger can actually start to schedule
and assign some of these shifts to firstline workers.
- [Keara] So it looks like Joanna is available
on Saturday and because I'm expecting a lot of
foot traffic this weekend I wanna add a shift
to her schedule.
What you'll notice here is the opportunity
to customize the start and end times,
I can color code the shift with different colors
based on my preference,
and I can replace the start and end times
with a label if I want to. - Okay.
- Now what I really wanna do are add
responsibilities for Joanna for her shift.
I can simply add that in Shift Notes.
And then lastly, I'll add an activity
like a break or a lunch, and I'm gonna save that.
What you'll notice is that this edit is in italics,
which means that it's still in edit mode.
I can decide to share this edit with
everybody on my team or only the affected people.
- So now you have a mechanism really
to build a schedule that's always up to date
so all those changes as they happen,
they're in real time for anyone who's consuming
these shifts which is really cool,
and it looks really easy to use a manager.
- [Keara] It is.
You can easily copy and paste shifts with CTRL+C
and CTRL+V and other keyboard shortcuts.
You can easily move different rows up and down
which makes it really easy to customize
that experience for the manager.
And one of the more powerful capabilities we've added
is the opportunity to copy forward a schedule.
Either add a day, week, or month at a time.
You can include or exclude shift notes,
time off, activities, and open shifts.
- [Jeremy] Right this will save people a lot of time.
- Exactly.
And for example if I have schedule
that's in four week rotations,
I can make this really easy and share
that information with my team.
- Very cool. So it looks really easy
in terms of schedule management
and getting everything up and running but,
how easy is it for me as manager to then
share content out with my team?
- You can do everything in teams.
All of your team members are connected,
and Teams is literally your communication
and collaboration hub.
So let's go into the Teams experience.
What you'll notice here are the different
channels that are part of the Contoso Electronic Store.
I recently heard on a Teams meeting
that there's a new update to our bonus structure
And to ensure my team is up to date
I'm gonna share that information with them via Stream.
I'm gonna add a video,
search for the video,
and I wanna post to the channel about this new tab.
And that stream uploads into the Team's experience
with a really rich playback.
On top of being able to listen to the video
while in Teams I can search for different
things within the video.
And remember when I mentioned bonuses earlier?
- [Jeremy] Mhmm.
- Well I can find that marked where it
was mentioned by simply searching,
and there we have it.
And this is no doubt something my team
would be interested in.
So I'm gonna leave them a message so that
they can check out the six minute mark.
- So this is a really great overview
of the manager experience but why don't we
switch gears and have a look at my experience
on the phone as a firstline worker.
So in my case one of the greatest things
here with this is I can actually get to
all the content, we got a custom experience
here for my team that you can see
at the bottom of the screen.
And I've even got a nice tray with additional
functionality like the camera and other capabilities
within that that I can even personalize
if I want to as a user so it makes it very
customized for my own role and my own experiences.
Now one of the great things with Teams
is you can actually share files you just saw.
And if I go into my overall view
of all the different teams and channels I've got-
I'm gonna go ahead and go into onboarding first
cause this is what- something really important
especially if I'm a new hire into the team
and I can see my employee handbook,
checklist, brand values, all of those
great items that I can do to get up to speed
with the organization I'm in and if I go into
the general tab here's where I can actually
see that you've just posted the video
that you've just posted, the files there as well,
if I click on more I'll even see the tab,
and when I click on that it's gonna actually
open up for me, that video, straight from Stream,
and I can even play that right here on the mobile phone
so I've got all the access that you have on your PC
but on my mobile device in this case
to be able to consume everything you've shared with me.
Now all of the different files and everything
are here and I can also get to,
if I go back into Teams,
I can also get to all of my shifts.
And here I can see all the different shifts
that I'm scheduled to work on.
If I click into one of those I can see the shift notes,
I can see there's- looks like there's a product replacement
going on that I need to be aware of,
and also the day notes so I have all of that information.
And because I'm in Teams,
it's a great place to be able to do chat.
So here I can go ahead and start up a chat
with Nestor and here whether I want to type
with Nestor I can do that and type him a message.
I can also, if I want,
set up a video chat with him.
So here I've got a nice ability to call Nestor
and do a face-to-face chat.
And all of this straight from my team's
experience on my phone.
Something brand new though, and showing more
integration across the various Microsoft
and Office 365 capabilities is the ability
to annotate images.
So let me show you something brand new here,
so in my case I'm gonna go ahead
and share a photo with Nestor to make sure
that we're replacing the right product
on the shop floor.
So we can see it's a mini display port HDMI adapter,
and I'm gonna go ahead and flip that over
because I need the information actually about
the item number so I'll go ahead and take
the photo of that.
And now because I've got inking support
here with this I can actually annotate the image,
so I'll go ahead and I'll turn the blue pen on,
I can look at the SKU number and make sure
that's the right one from the notes that
needs to be replaced with the newer model,
or see if it is the new model on the floor.
So go ahead and hit check and now I can share
that with Nestor just to make sure.
Another great thing is if I'm on the shop floor
a lot of times I only have one hand free
so I can actually even record a message for him.
Hey Nestor, is this the right item
I need to replace from the shop floor?
And now he'll be able to get that message
and I don't have to type anything on my phone.
- Exactly, and it's good to be able to get help quickly
and should they not be able to answer right now,
they can listen to it on demand later.
- Right and one more part here that I need to actually
do as part of this replacement is make sure that we
get a replacement part sent from a nearby supplier.
So to do that I'm gonna go into my Teams view,
and I'm gonna go and look on the inventory chat team,
and here in this case I actually want to share
the location of our store to make sure they
can actually come to us and give us a replacement part.
So this is something that we used in the past
with this channel so here I'm gonna go ahead
and click on the ellipses here, I'll see location.
Now that's gonna use GPS and actually
triangulate my location.
So I'll select that and now I have the ability
to send that out to make sure that my supplier
can make it to my store.
- This could be really helpful when you have to
keep track of a lot of moving parts.
- Totally.
So something else that's brand new here
is the ability also to use the smart camera.
In this case I've got a crumpled
receipt here from a customer that
wants to return an item and I can see here
that if I select document it's actually
gonna use some of the capabilities
within Office Lens to be able to
straighten this crumpled paper out
and actually crop it down to a nice straight image,
and I can see the text very cleanly
and very easily and now that's-
that can be shared out with my team.
In this case I'm gonna share it out
with the north store and then they
will have that receipt to be able to
save in their records.
- And the best part about it is that
the image isn't stored locally on the device.
- Right and the great thing is,
if I go into my gallery on the local device,
you can see I've got some images here
maybe from my social media activities
but I don't have the picture of that receipt,
because it might have customer information
so it's kept secure.
- Exactly.
- So one of the other great things
here as well is I can do one of the biggest
pain points and challenges that I remember
even when I was working as a barista,
swapping shifts with people and my colleagues.
So here in this case, I know on Monday
I've got a doctor's appointment,
so I wanna go ahead and go into my shift there and swap.
So here I can see all of my different
team members that are available.
And it's nice cause it's queried those down
to the folks that can actually work during that shift,
and I'm gonna ask my friend Alex here
if he'll swap with me,
let him know that I've got a doctor's appointment.
Now when I go and ask for that shift swap
it's gonna actually ask Alex, in this case,
and our manager to approve that request.
- Yeah it's awesome that you have this new capability.
Let's swing back over to my device
so I can show you one final thing.
Now as a manager I can share my appreciation
for a job well done.
You can share a badge with your teammates and colleagues.
I'm gonna select the coaching badge.
I wanna recognize Debra because she helped
mentor Diego during his shift.
I'll add a quick note,
I'll be able to preview that badge,
and I can just simply hit send.
Now everybody is aware of the job well done for Debra.
- Great stuff.
So that's a really rich manager and firstline
worker set of connected experiences but,
now as a Teams user I know that there also
a broader set of experiences that I could have seen as well,
and that IT plays a role in terms of customizing
and tailoring those experiences in terms of what I can see.
- Exactly.
And now, with our new customizable Teams mobile experience,
IT admins have the opportunity to apply
a pre-packaged policy or apply some of their own
custom policies.
What you'll do is navigate to the Teams in Skype
for Business admin center,
and under the Teams dropdown menu,
you can select app setup policies.
If I wanted to create a new custom line
I'd add that under new policy,
but I already have some set up
so lets just dive into those.
First I'll check out our cashiers policy.
What you'll see here is an experience tailored to them.
I'll simply just wanna move up shifts
so that's more easily accessible,
and I'll hit save.
- [Jeremy] Now this is gonna customize
kind of the bottom tray experience as to
what icons I see and what functionality I have.
- [Keara] Right, and what I wanna show you
is the manager experience.
Managers aren't on Shift so they don't have
that shifts capability.
However they do have to approve and
validate a lot of things. - Makes sense.
- So I wanna add a third party app, ApproveSimple,
and add that to the navigation menu.
I'll hit add,
save it,
and in a couple hours they'll see that pop up.
- Alright so this is a really great overview
in terms of all the new firstline worker
capabilities from Teams,
from the manager side to the end user experience
for the firstline worker.
All the way to what IT can do to customize
those experiences but, where can I go to learn more?
- Get started using Microsoft Teams.
If you have Office 365, it's included in many
of the suites and you can start with Teamwork
in the admin controls.
You can also get the mobile apps
from the app store and Google play.
- Thank you Keara.
Of course keep watching Microsoft Mechanics,
hit subscribe if you haven't already.
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time,
and goodbye for now.