People are more connected than ever before. There are now more mobile devices than people.1 And people check their smartphones an average of 150 times per day. This makes just over 4.5 billion people connected to social technologies.2

1. Three Ways to
Better Connect
Your Workforce with
Enterprise Social
Published: July 2014
For the latest information, please visit
http://aka.ms/ConnectedWorkforce
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2. Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social
Table of Contents
The World Has Become a Giant Network. Has Your Company? 3
Employee Work Styles Are Changing 4
Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social 4
Three Ways to Connect Your Workforce 5
1. Connect Technology 5
2. Inform Employees 5
3. Engage Your Workforce 6
Case Study: Red Robin Empowered Employees to Make an Impact 7
Connect Your Workforce with Microsoft 7
Sources 8
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3. Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social
The World Has Become a Giant
Network. Has Your Company?
People are more connected than ever before. There are now more mobile devices
than people.1 And people check their smartphones an average of 150 times per day.
This makes just over 4.5 billion people connected to social technologies.2
These same mobile and social habits apply to your customers. The way they buy,
consume information, and interact with your business is highly networked and
connected. For example, every day over 400 million tweets are posted about
products, services, and brands.3 And by the time your customer approaches your
business, he or she is already 57 percent through the buying process.4
Now, when you think about your company internally, are your employees just as
connected and informed as your customers? Odds are, your workers are not as
networked. Studies show that 20 percent of a worker’s day is spent looking for
information.5 And one in three knowledge workers worldwide are disengaged from
their job.6
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4. Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social
Employee Work Styles
Are Changing
In addition to information silos and engagement challenges at work, the way
employees want to work is more diverse and distributed than ever before. Three
generations now fill the office, each with different work and communication styles.
According to Deloitte, baby boomers prefer in-person relationships, while millennials
value working from home. Millennials like spontaneous, multimedia communication,
while gen-Xers prefer email. And to further widen the gap, within the next five years
40 percent of these workers will be contingent workers or located outside the office.7
With the combination of a remote workforce and hyperconnected customers, how
do companies keep employees connected, engaged, and productive? A warning
from Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric (GE) and successful business
author, reads: “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on
the inside, the end is near.”
It’s time for business leaders and managers to ask, “Are my customers outpacing
my workforce?”
Connect Your Workforce
with Enterprise Social
What if you could work inside your company the way your customers do on the
outside? What if your employees could use the communication method that
made them most productive? What if you and everyone in your company could
work like a network?
You can, with Microsoft. Our comprehensive and enterprise-grade approach
is unmatched. We provide seamless social experiences across the familiar
applications your employees already use to get their jobs done. Enterprise Social
includes productivity applications like Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as project
and collaboration platforms like SharePoint, Yammer, and Lync. We’re expanding
our connected offerings to help companies work truly like a network.
Enterprise Social allows your workers to connect to conversations, documents,
and files that matter; be informed to make smarter decisions; and overall feel
more engaged in their jobs and company culture.
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“If the rate of change on
the outside exceeds the
rate of change on the
inside, the end is near.”
— Jack Welch, former CEO, GE
Enterprise Social allows
your workers to connect
to conversations,
documents, and files that
matter; be informed to
make smarter decisions;
and overall feel more
engaged in their jobs and
company culture.

5. Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social
Three Ways to Connect
Your Workforce
Let’s dive into how you can connect your workforce with Enterprise Social:
connect technology, improve information flows, and engage your workforce in a
common culture.
1. Connect Technology
First, customers have experienced a closer, more connected work environment
regardless of location or hierarchical structure. Almost 70 percent of users agree that
Enterprise Social improves collaboration across remote locations, and 83 percent feel
better connected to their team.8
Smarter connections with the Office Graph
One way Microsoft is investing in a connected network is through the Office Graph.
The Office Graph is a suite-wide intelligence fabric that discovers and make new
connections for you. It maps the interactions, content, and activity taking place
across all users in all workloads of Office 365: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,
and Yammer. It then uses machine learning to analyze these signals and derive
personalized insights tailored for each user. The Office Graph gives you a predictive
experience, helping you discover the most relevant information across Office 365
for the task at hand. It’s important to note that the Office Graph respects all access
permissions. Private content will not be surfaced to those who don’t have the
appropriate permissions.
Stronger customer connections with CRM integrations
We want your employees to easily connect to customer data and insights through
line-of-business applications. We’ve invested in a Yammer and Microsoft Dynamics
CRM integration and recently a Salesforce partnership that extends collaboration
beyond sales to your entire organization. Yammer conversations are now available
inline, making your existing business apps social. Yammer users who may not use
your business apps can still surface updates and collaborate. Going forward, we will
continue to drive deeper integration between customer relationship management
systems and Office 365.
2. Inform Your Workforce
Enterprise Social creates an informed
and empowered workforce. 80 percent
of Enterprise Social users report they are
more informed about what is happening
inside their organization than before
having the solution.9
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Almost 70% of users
agree that Enterprise
Social improves
collaboration across
remote locations,
and 83% feel better
connected to their team.8
80% of Enterprise Social
users report they are
more informed about
what is happening
inside their organization
than before having
the solution.

6. Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social
Collaborative teamwork with Document Conversations
One example of informed and collaborative work with Enterprise Social is Document
Conversations. Users may work on documents and interact with colleagues through
side-by-side social conversations surfaced and housed on Yammer. You’ll now be
able to engage with peers, get feedback, and iterate faster on ideas and deliverables
in context. We’re enabling Document Conversations by adding Yammer feeds to
documents, images, and even videos stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for
Business. Other investments for keeping employees informed include a rich single
user profile which will paint a holistic picture of the person, as well as Lync integration
within a document.
Information sorted and served through Delve
Office Graph insights will be surfaced
in Delve. Delve surfaces relevant
content from your network based on
your identity, your interactions with
others, and the topics your colleagues
are working on. This helps you stay
better connected and informed on
topics that matter most to you. We
present relevant content as content
cards in different boards such as “Trending around me,” “Shared with me,” or even
“Presented to me.” These boards are personalized based on insights learned from
each user via machine learning and dynamically updated. You can also search the
Office Graph based on actions and connections using natural language search.
In the People view, you can see insights about your colleagues and content that’s
relevant to them. You can also see not only a hierarchical view of your colleagues,
but the most relevant contacts generated automatically by the Office Graph, based
on interactions with people and content. For instance, you may open a content
card and view a document side-by-side with the Delve app. Our goal is to make
the Office Graph available ever ywhere you get work done. For instance, Delve will
initially be available as a web interface in Office 365, as a Windows 8 app, and on
mobile devices.
3. Engage Employees
With informed and empowered employees comes greater engagement and
productivity. McKinsey reports that organizations have the potential to increase
worker productivity by 20 to 25 percent when using Enterprise Social.
Empower employees to self-organize
One way to engage employees is through easily creating self-organized groups to
get things done. We’re unifying people, conversations and content across all Office
365 applications by providing a common set of assets in order to accelerate and
scale collaboration.
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McKinsey reports that
organizations have the
potential to increase
worker productivity by
20-25% when using
Enterprise Social.

7. Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social
Case Study: Red Robin
Empowered Employees to
Make an Impact
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Red Robin uses Yammer as an engine to drive business
transformation. By energizing its 26,000 team members and giving
them a voice, Red Robin has forged tighter ties across the business
and brought executives one step closer to customers. When the
company introduced a new burger on the menu, management was disappointed
by the lack of customer feedback on their Facebook page. Instead, they found
considerable buzz on Yammer, where restaurant managers shared feedback from
guests and ideas for improvements. Within weeks, Red Robin rolled out an improved,
kitchen-tested recipe–a process that would have taken months before.
It’s not just restaurant staff who feel more plugged in to operations thanks to
Yammer–it’s corporate executives, too. CEO Steve Carley uses the network for
everything from posting videos about business results to “liking” employee successes
singled out by Yammer’s Praise feature. “But the number one thing I use Yammer for is
to feel the pulse of the business from the perspective of front-line team members,” he
says. “That’s invaluable to me.”
Connect Your Workforce
with Microsoft
Over 400,000 businesses have chosen Microsoft and Enterprise Social to engage,
inform, and connect their workforce. Here is why they selected us:
• Familiar cloud tools – Consistent, familiar, and intuitive tools across the Microsoft
cloud solutions drive faster, lower-cost implementation and high user adoption,
which leads to improved productivity and business results.
• Enterprise-grade – Microsoft has the experience, global footprint, security, and
reliability that every enterprise should demand of cloud solutions. We’re the only
vendor with a diversity of cloud workloads to match the diversity of our customers’
businesses.
• Comprehensive and connected – Microsoft has the most comprehensive and
deeply connected platform for the cloud across customers’ datacenter, service
providers, and the Microsoft public cloud.
Start working like a network today to engage, inform, and connect your
workforce. Learn more about Enterprise Social from Microsoft at http://aka.ms/
ConnectedWorkforce.
“If you engage staff in
a way that shows their
opinion is important,
it’s extraordinary what
you learn—and the
excitement you generate.
That’s what working social
does for an organization.”
— Steve Carley, CEO, Red Robin

8. Three Ways to Better Connect Your Workforce with Enterprise Social
Sources
1 Cisco, 2013
2 Kleiner Perkins Caufield Buyers, 2013
3 Twitter, 2014
4 CEB, The New High Performer Playbook, 2014
5 Interact, 2013
6 Blessing White, 2011
7 Intuit, 2013
8 Yammer, 2013
9 Yammer, 2013
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