Casual interactions are a natural way for humans to connect, especially in an office environment. Whether it’s grabbing a coffee in the kitchen first thing, or throwing around concepts over the office water cooler, some of the most creative, profitable business ideas have come from these interactions.
Last update: 1st November 2022
In this blog:
For many people, Microsoft Viva’s appearance in our daily working lives has become quite familiar, but there are still the finer points of the full Microsoft Viva offering that could do with a closer look. In this blog, I’m focusing on Viva Topics and I chatted to ClearPeople Director & Co-Founder Gabriel Karawani to provide an overview – and a review – of Viva Topics.
Consumers, industry associations and governments are increasing their calls to businesses to account for and reduce their environmental impact, and to contribute to sustainability efforts. The need for change is real and immediate, but you may well be wondering how you and your organisation can make a practical difference when it comes to challenges as vast as climate change and addressing inequity of all types. But as with every need, solutions emerge, and here’s how technology can help.
ClearPeople is a completely virtual company. We all work from home, which provides us with work/life balance and reduces our carbon footprint by removing the need to travel to an office every day.
These are fantastic benefits, but it also means that we are now individually responsible for our environmental impact - we are now in charge of reducing our carbon footprint in and outside of working hours; we’re now Chief Procurement Office and Energy Efficiency Monitor.
Our carbon footprint as a business has been dispersed to individual homes. And with the cost of energy being one of the biggest contributors to rapidly rising inflation in the UK, and our impact on the planet in stark focus, now's a good time to review our personal behaviour, consider energy choices and find ways to save money and benefit the planet.
Remember the TV series The Office? While I imagine most of us can relate to the portrayal of a workplace where no one is very happy and the ways of working are archaic, the world of work today is fortunately quite different. The seismic shift that has had to take place as a result of the pandemic has seen rapid and widespread changes to the way we work.
According to an Employee Well-being Report by Glint, employee happiness is higher than pre-pandemic levels. Compared to their peers at other organizations, employees at remote work-friendly organizations were 14% more likely to agree they feel safe to speak their minds, and 9% more likely to report that their leaders value different perspectives. A rather different picture to The Office thankfully.
The key to this is culture, and one of the most powerful tools an organization has for building culture – particularly when many employees are not in the office or are frontline workers – is technology. Creating an intranet, a robust digital hub where people can find and communicate essential information, is a fundamental step towards creating an effective, engaging and productive workspace to replace The Office-era workplace.
A successful intranet is one of those important factors for a company's success. The uptake of Microsoft 365 technology has been so widespread and rapid since the advent of Covid-19 (about 1 million companies worldwide and 70% of Fortune 500 firms use Office 365), and as ClearPeople is a leading Microsoft global partner with extensive and long-running experience with SharePoint, this blog considers the use of SharePoint Intranet in particular, although the considerations for design and implementation are applicable to any intranet software.
