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STEPHEN ROSE: Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode
of "Inside Microsoft Teams."
I'm your host, Stephen Rose. Thanks for joining us.
Got tons of great feedback when we asked all of you
what would you like to see for season 7,
and thanks for taking time to respond back to us.
What we heard is,
we want to know about
a wider range of products and projects--
not just Teams but all the things that attach to it,
from Power Platform to SharePoint to OneDrive
to Teams Rooms, NTRs, et cetera.
And one of my favorites was,
"I want to learn more about frontline workers."
So, this week we're kicking off the first in our series
of "Double-Clicks." These are shorter, 15-minute shows
that will each week deep-dive into one of these topics,
and we'll have several of these.
And this is our first for frontline workers
because you asked for it.
We're going to talk about planning and deploying.
But I don't really understand the difference
between an information worker and a frontline worker.
There's some nuances there,
and I thought who's a good person
to help walk us through this?
And I thought of one of my coworkers
and my friend, Zoe Hawtof. So, Zoe is joining us today.
Hi, Zoe! Thanks for joining us on the show. How are ya?
ZOE HAWTOF: Good! Thanks, Stephen.
Thanks for having me.
STEPHEN ROSE: Absolutely.
So, what is a frontline worker,
and how is that different from an information worker?
Because sometimes these get lumped together,
as well yeah, if you work for a manufacturing company
you're a frontline worker
or maybe you're an information worker.
So, how do we look at the difference between the two
and guide ourselves through that initial conversation?
ZOE HAWTOF: Yeah, so unlike, maybe you and I, right,
where we're sitting behind our laptop today,
maybe at home, maybe in the office,
we characterize frontline workers
much more based on less of the creation of their information
and more the consumption.
And a lot of that is tied to either
them doing task-oriented work or service-oriented work.
So, they're the people who are standing on a retail floor
as your sales associate. They're a nurse in a hospital.
They're manufacturing operator who's on the plant floor.
And they're really focused
on either the task or customer at hand
rather than making sure they respond to the latest email
that's come to them from their colleagues.
And so, when we think about frontline,
it's really that mobility,
and it's really focused on delivering the front end
of the business, whether it be completion of a task,
or really working with customers
and being the front of people's brands.
STEPHEN ROSE: And these can also be shared devices
that we often see with this.
I know if you go to work in a retail store,
they hand you a phone device
and that's where you're figuring out what's in the back
and what other stores have things and things like that.
And I know we can leverage Azure Active Directory,
which allows that easy signing in and out.
But is that one of those aspects is,
you generally don't have your own PC.
It's a device or a shared device,
and if it is your own device,
you're probably using it off hours for personal stuff
but also for things like scheduling
and communicating and things along that line.
Would that be correct?
ZOE HAWTOF: Yeah, we see a mixture of devices.
While we'll sometimes see frontline managers
having a dedicated device like what you and I have, right?
We tend to see frontline workers
doing either shared devices, where they clock in, clock out,
hand it over. Or, they bring their own device
and they use that while on the job.
So we see a mixture of it,
but fundamental to everything as you said,
is really that identity piece
and making sure that they have access
to the right information but also restricted
in the right ways.
STEPHEN ROSE: And that can create a lot
of problems and pain points
because you have high turnover in retail
and you're looking at a mobile device versus a laptop
and sometimes a personal device.
Some may be corporate owned, some may not.
And as we're looking at that,
then do you think about how to deploy Teams
and what parts of Teams to give people differently
from an information worker as we look at a frontline worker?
ZOE HAWTOF: Totally, yeah.
When we talk to IT pros about deploying the frontline,
like you said, turnover is a huge aspect
but also just the size, right?
We tend to see an industry's ratios of 10:1 frontline worker
to information worker.
So, not only do they have turnover
that's either seasonal or just the natural part
of the frontline employment,
but they're so big that it makes it
a tough deployment problem.
So, the innovation that we've really been leaning into
is, how do we connect?
So we're not only bringing in the right information
from your systems like your HR systems,
but also how do we help you doing auto provisioning,
both onboarding and offboarding
so that you're not having to lean in there
every time one of your thousands of frontline workers
potentially moves on or is a natural turnover.
STEPHEN ROSE: So, let's talk about auto-provisioning,
and then I want to go to a demo in a minute.
But, how is that different
from the way that we're provisioning Teams today?
ZOE HAWTOF: It's the same process.
What I would say is that
the most important thing that we want to hit on
is bringing in the right frontline information
that might not be as pertinent for provisioning
an information worker.
So, we think of three-core information as really essential.
It's the role, their location, and their department,
which can be very applicable for information workers
but is especially important for frontline.
And so we've made a lot of investments
connecting to HR systems like SAP SuccessFactors,
as an example.
STEPHEN ROSE: Got it.
ZOE HAWTOF: To have that bidirectional flow
of information, yeah.
STEPHEN ROSE: So, static structure, working with templates,
and being able to support those 3P apps.
All right. Let's take a look at a demo.
ZOE HAWTOF: Like I noted,
it's really important about bringing
those three attributes--roles, departments, and locations--
because then you can map the frontline real world
into the digital world.
And as I was noting, and Stephen was also noting,
we can easily do that by integrations
with the human capital management systems you already use,
like Workday and SAP.
You can all do that through auto-provisioning
with Azure Active Directory.
So, I'll walk through a couple,
just a quick way of how to get it connected,
and then from there I'll walk through
how to go even further into the Teams structuring.
So, to initially set this up,
the IT admin goes to the Azure portal,
which is something you probably have already been using,
and you just click on one of your supported HR systems.
So, in this case, we're going to
click on "SAP SuccessFactors,"
and from there you can choose to provision user accounts.
So, you just enter your SuccessFactors credentials,
and then, upon validation
of a successful connection being established,
you'll just get a notification.
After that, you get provision logs
that let you check the status of the sync
in case everything has been added successfully
or if there have been any issues.
So in this case, it was all success of connecting
your SAP SuccessFactors with AAD.
And then finally, you go to the user section,
which is also within the same Azure portal,
and you can see which workers have been onboarded
onto the HR system.
So, what this really allows you to do
is, you can automatically sync and maintain accuracy.
So, your HCM system serves as a system of record
that will automate any downstream workflows with confidence.
So you can easily both onboard and offboard
your frontline workers
to make sure that you are staying consistent
across all of your different systems.
So now, we're going to talk about bringing that information
from the HCM system into your Teams structure
and creating a Teams environment
specifically for your frontline.
First, prepare the two .csv files,
which can be imported directly
from your HR management system.
So, this one is about a hundred test tenants.
You have to fill in that team name
as well as define it as public or private
and provide a template.
In this case, it's blank, so it's a generic Teams template.
From there, the user CSV shows that it's 10 users per team
and that the first two teams have three owners
and seven members.
From there, the PowerShell shows the deployment command,
which takes three inputs, the team CSV location,
the user CSV location, and email ID for notification.
And finally, the confirmation email
will show a successful deployment.
In the Teams admin center, you see the teams created.
So let's look at the first team.
We see that there have been 10 users added in successfully,
which is seven members and three owners.
Once the IT pro deploys,
they can stay notified regarding the success
of their deployment.
So, they can easily make sure
if there's any necessary corrections
or redeployments necessary,
they'll be notified of that need.
STEPHEN ROSE: And I know we're going
to be doing other episodes
and going deeper, but of course,
before you do any of this,
it is really important to audit and survey your workers,
understand what features they're going to need,
train them on how this is going to work and come together
so that once you push this out, they're ready for it,
they understand it, and of course,
you see the success with that.
ZOE HAWTOF: Yes, we see a lot of success from customers
who go in and really speak to their frontline managers
or their district managers of operations
to really see how their teams work together
to really help figure out what does that structure look like
member to owner, and how should we think about
making sure the right environment is created from the get-go
for the frontline that can be scalable.
STEPHEN ROSE: And vice versa, we've also heard of
a lot of frontline workers who have gone to management
and said, "Hey, we're using this feature,
saw this plug-in, we think this would help."
And it's really that back and forth
that can do it when the end users feel
they have a stake in it, that is really critical.
And that's something that you've heard again and again,
and you folks did a blog on it,
which we'll talk about in a minute.
But that's also really key point,
that there's listening on both sides, correct?
ZOE HAWTOF: Totally, yeah.
This is the only way to go forward
is to actually understand the pain points
that both our IT and our admins have
as well as our frontline workers and managers.
Because in the end, we're all trying to solve
for the same problem, but coming together
is the best way to really figure out what that is.
STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome.
So of course, go to docs.microsoft.com,
click on "Teams," and you'll see a lot
of what we just talked about today.
You have a great blog:
We'll put the link in the window
on how Microsoft Teams empowers your retail workers
to do more with less.
But it's not just about retail workers.
It really applies to any variety of frontline workers.
Anything else we should point folks to
before we say thank you and close out this episode?
ZOE HAWTOF: Yeah, there is some great documents
on both the auto-provisioning and connecting it
to your HCM systems as well as deploying Teams at scale,
flow from CSV to PowerShell to the admin center,
that are also available on learn.microsoft.com.
STEPHEN ROSE: Perfect.
Zoe, thanks so much for kicking off
our "Double-Click" series,
and we're excited to have you back
because you and I are going to be talking about
communicating and collaborating,
some of the cool things that you can do with Teams
in a later episode, so I'm looking forward to that.
So we would love to have you back.
ZOE HAWTOF: Me, too!
No, I'm excited to keep chatting with you
and with everyone around
how we can keep empowering the frontline,
and our admins and IT that are behind it all.
STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome, and we're listening, of course.
Use all of our vehicles: social media, UserVoice,
all of those to let us know what we're doing right,
what we're not doing right,
and how we can always do it better.
So again, thank you, Zoe, for joining us.
I want to thank all of you on this special episode,
our new "Double-Click" series on "Inside Microsoft Teams."
Reach out to us, email, Twitter, however you like:
We're listening, and thanks for joining in.
Share the episode if you like it,
and we'll see you on our next episode
of "Inside Microsoft Teams."
We'll see you there.
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