ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR EXECUTIVES

How to Work Like a Network: For Today’s ExecutivesYour guide to leading a more innovative and responsive organization with Enterprise Social

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR EXECUTIVES

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

IntroductionPart One: Break Down BarriersPart Two: Building a Legacy with SocialPart Three:The Feedback to Go Forward

Table of Contents

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Enterprise Social describes a new way of working that taps into the power of human networks. It’s an approach that brings the essence of consumer social networks—connecting with others, rapid information sharing, and easy discovery—to the enterprise. By connecting individuals to a dynamic network of people and information, Enterprise Social enables employees to respond faster, accomplish more, and keep your business moving forward together.

The Microsoft vision for Enterprise Social is to empower organizations to work like a network by delivering seamless social experiences across familiar applications people already use, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Yammer, SharePoint Online, Lync, and virtually any other application or service that matters to your company.

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR EXECUTIVES

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. You’re watching the competitive landscape constantly evolve, and opportunity is everywhere for organizations that want to keep growing and remain profitable.

For you as a business leader, this evolution presents challenges too: low employee engagement that undermines productivity; inefficient collaboration that hampers innovation; and higher expectations from customers who are more connected and technologically savvy than ever before.

What can you do to keep control of the reins and guide your company? Enable your organizations to work like a network with Enterprise Social technologies.

The ubiquity of social media cannot be overstated—and it’s growing inside the enterprise. Forrester Research analyst Philipp Karcher says, “We see improving adoption every year as Enterprise Social becomes a standard component in the employee toolkit.” If Enterprise Social is part of the toolkit, then you are the master craftsman.

Ninety-three percent of business leaders agree that Enterprise Social tools stimulate innovation within their companies.

—Jared Spataro, General Manager, Enterprise Social at Microsoft

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ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR BUSINESS LEADERS

The objective of this e-book is to show you how Microsoft Enterprise Social can help you lead your organization more effectively. It‘s your guide to using Enterprise Social technologies to engage employees, foster innovation, and attract and retain more customers. First it defines Enterprise Social and shows the value of these solutions for today’s executive leaders. Second, it presents three ways that Enterprise Social can help you and your leadership team.

Finally, it shows you how to get started working like a network.

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Break Down BarriersPart One:

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The Value of Enterprise Social for Executives By applying the power of Enterprise Social to your business, you can:

• Boost employee engagement and empower individual employees to make an impact on the business.

• Foster innovation and unlock creativity by removing barriers to collaboration.

• Increase customer loyalty to help drive business growth.

With Enterprise Social, you can find the right information instantly without the need for time-consuming searches; keep your workers connected no matter where they are located; enable productive conversations among your employees, customers, and partners; and empower everyone in your organization to make better decisions faster. Enabling everyone associated with your company to work like a network can help you, as an executive, address some of your most significant challenges.

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With Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies, you can:

• Listen to conversations within your company on Yammer.

• Gain insight on sentiment outside your company with Microsoft Social Listening.

• Adapt to employee and customer needs quickly by collaborating and by using Office 365 productivity tools.

• Find valuable internal information and make connections with Office Delve.

“As a manager, you’re better able to hear real-time feedback. You’re able to make quicker decisions. And then, those quicker decisions lead to better growth in business and sales.”

—Bryan Goode, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Yammer

and Enterprise Social, Microsoft

Building a Legacy with SocialPart Two:

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR EXECUTIVES

You are already accustomed to the business world moving at breakneck speed. We know that the multitude of social tools can seem overwhelming, or even risky. You’re not alone. The Wall Street Journal reports that the majority of North American CFOs have focused more on the risks of social media than the benefits.

But we know you are not one to shy away from what is new, especially if ignoring it will impact your bottom line. With Enterprise Social, you have an unprecedented opportunity to get raw, unfiltered information—which will help inform strategic business decisions—straight from employees and customers.

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“It’s scary to send an email directly to the CEO of a company. Very few people would actually have the nerve to go do that,” says Bryan Goode, senior director of product marketing for Yammer and Enterprise Social at Microsoft. “And yet, the bar is really low for a front-line worker to post about a customer experience, which the CEO can see. That means a lot more feedback for the senior executives.”

That means you can focus on listening to your people while also being nimble, sharing information, and getting products to market faster. With Enterprise Social, the range of tools helps you create a legacy of valuing human capital while growing your business. You can have your cake and eat it too.

Listen to and Engage Your EmployeesAs you know, there are fewer people working from the office on a strictly nine-to-five schedule. More employees are working remotely, gaining the benefits of working from home, flexible hours, avoiding traffic, and staying productive while traveling. But this lack of physical presence can impact employee engagement, which impacts your bottom line. In the

“We want people who’ve joined us fresh out of college to have access to senior management. A platform like Yammer is perfect for us, since a new employee can post something on Yammer and it shows up on our CEO’s screen.”

—Wilkie Wong, Chief Financial Officer, Esquel Group

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR EXECUTIVES

United States alone, Gallup estimates that active employee disengagement costs organizations $450 billion to $550 billion every year.

You don’t want that dead weight. Enterprise Social establishes tighter connections between executives and employees at every level of the organization and across all locations, and gives senior leaders a better understanding of what employees want and need. As a business leader, it’s on you to help employees feel more connected, valued, and motivated to do their best work.

In the compelling organizational leadership book, Leaders Eat Last, best-selling author Simon Sinek writes, “The effort required by a job is not in itself stressful, but rather the imbalance between the effort we give and the reward we feel.”

It’s not rocket science. The more valued people feel, the more they want to give.

A Two-Way StreetFoster a more connected company culture, share company news, and encourage multidirectional conversations among employees by posting a Yammer Announcement. Employees can respond directly to the same conversation thread and start a discussion with executives and other employees.

Clear as GlassBuild trust through increased transparency about key decisions and updates. Use Lync to host executive Q&As across multiple office locations. Or use Yammer to host “executive YamJams” where employees can ask questions and get real-time responses from senior leaders.

A Direct LineGive employees a voice by establishing and maintaining a direct channel for people to share ideas, offer honest feedback, and surface issues with senior management. Create a Yammer Group for employees to connect with your executive leadership team, and encourage senior leaders to regularly post messages and updates in the group.

Give Them a Round of Applause Regularly offer positive feedback for good work and good ideas. Yammer lets you see and “like” posts; the Praise feature lets you recognize individuals for a job well done. Informal recognition goes a long way toward making all employees feel more valued and appreciated.

Connect from AnywhereStay connected to employees and conversations—even when you’re out of the office. The Yammer mobile app helps you maintain a consistent presence among employees and jump into key discussions despite busy travel schedules.

Ways Executives Can Increase Employee Engagement

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And this isn’t just coming from the top down. The floodgates are open, so employees can communicate more freely among themselves too. Yammer offers a “Praise” feature that encourages peer-recognition programs. “It’s good for the person getting recognized. It’s also empowering for the person doing the recognizing to be able to say, ‘You really did something great for me and I want to say thank you,’” says Bryan Goode.

Adapt and Respond Faster to Foster Innovation

Businesses today must be extremely nimble and responsive to stay ahead of the rapidly shifting market. But how do you accomplish that with so much on your plate?

Think of any monumental feat of human engineering: the great pyramids of Egypt, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China. Nothing epic can be built without the collective power of many people working together.

But the labor itself is not enough. Those workers also need to trust each other enough to tackle new problems together. “Leaps of greatness require the combined problem-solving ability of people who trust each other,” says Simon Sinek in Leaders Eat Last.

“There’s no question Yammer has helped us reduce the time it takes to go from a new idea or call to action to execution. It accelerates innovation.”

—Gregory North, VP, Business Transformation, Xerox

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A platform like Yammer makes ideas more visible and provides a place where employees can build on previous suggestions—without reinventing the wheel or creating and endless chain of ‘reply-all’ messages.

“In a social forum, you get a lot of that building effect. And it becomes a conversation versus just a one-way communication,” says Goode.

Enterprise Social removes the communication and collaboration barriers created by physical distance, departmental boundaries, and organizational hierarchies to help executives lead high-performing teams, foster innovation, and take ideas to market faster.

Razor-Sharp FocusEvery quarter, post a Yammer message to employees outlining three or four core business priorities. This helps employees understand how they can contribute to the business and gives them an opportunity to ask questions.

Making the SpaceYammer Groups let employees create dedicated workspaces for collaborating on anything—from product development to marketing campaigns. Because group conversations are open by default, senior leaders can easily see project updates or jump into a conversation to offer direction.

Grassroots FeedbackPost a question in Yammer to crowdsource ideas from across your company. Ask employees to share ideas for new products, advertising concepts, HR improvements, and more.

Finger on the Pulse The Yammer feed helps you get a quick reading on what various teams are working on, and Delve lets you discover relevant files and documents generated by employees.

Ways Enterprise Social Can Help Your Company Adapt and Respond More Quickly

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ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR EXECUTIVES

Another way to say this: If you ask for teamwork, you’ll get it. And it will likely be very valuable. Bryan Goode says, “I was planning a presentation to a pretty big audience, so I asked for feedback from people in Yammer. I got some incredible ideas that will make for a much better presentation. I was able to effectively tap into everybody’s different perspectives and intellects.”

Grow Customer LoyaltyCustomers don’t want to hear a sales pitch. Your audience is savvier than ever, and will have likely already researched your brand, products, and reputation before direct contact is even made. They want to be informed, entertained, and above all engaged through personalized experiences. Enterprise Social helps you build a customer-centric culture that does a better job of meeting their needs—which makes your company indispensable to them.

Networked companies—those that use Enterprise Social—experienced a 20 percent improvement in supplier, partner, and customer satisfaction.

—Yammer Business Trends Customer Survey, 2013

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Timing is everything if a customer is going to feel heard and valued. You can find out about any concerns right away with Enterprise Social. On Yammer, if there are any issues or incidents, you are able to find out and respond much faster than through traditional channels. “Within an hour or so of the sales rep posting that escalation, I was able to respond to it, and they were able to get their answer back to the customer. In the past, that would have taken weeks,” says Bryan Goode.

Your business will also benefit by knowing the exact specifics of an issue. In the past, if a customer had feedback, it might be slow to filter through various departments, or it might be watered down by the time it arrives. But with Enterprise Social, you are hearing directly from the source.

“In other means of communication, somebody else aggregates it for you and puts their own flavor on it. And that runs the risk that you play this telephone game where you don’t really hear the direct feedback. It’s filtered and edited, which is sometimes not useful.”

You can keep track of what’s top of mind with your competitors, partners, and customers with Microsoft Social Listening. “It’s a great way to keep tabs on different conversations happening outside our company,” says Bryan Goode.

“Yammer lets us engage our employees and partners in a way that is not only compelling for them, but best of all, creates value for our members.”

—Greg Moran, SVP and CIO, Infrastructure and Operations,

Nationwide Insurance

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Keys to Growing Customer Loyalty with Enterprise Social3

How Do They Feel?

Use Microsoft Social Listening to track social sentiment and identify emerging trends that impact your business.

Faster Than a Carrier Pigeon

The Yammer mobile app connects remote employees to headquarters and provides a quick and easy way to share what’s happening on the ground.

Crowdsource

Share market research reports broadly using Microsoft OneDrive for Business. Facilitate discussion and determine action items through side-by-side document conversations.

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The Feedback to Go ForwardPart Three:

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In order to run your business well, you need consumable, actionable data. “Every business leader I’ve ever met wants more information. They want more feedback from customers and from their front-line people,” says Bryan Goode.

A sophisticated Enterprise Social solution does exactly that. It should help you listen to important feedback so you can make data-driven business decisions. In the end, this will lead to better engagement, happier employees, a more innovative business culture, seamless collaboration, and improved customer loyalty. And that is the kind of legacy a business wants to build.

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Microsoft is a longtime and trusted partner for IT. Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies enable companies to engage, inform, and connect their employees, partners, and suppliers, and were awarded the top position in Gartner’s 2014 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. There are three primary reasons that more than 400,000 organizations have chosen Microsoft Enterprise Social technologies to improve their business:

• Enterprise-grade technology built for business – Microsoft offers companies the experience, global footprint, security, and reliability they expect from enterprise cloud solutions.

• A comprehensive and connected platform – Microsoft offers a comprehensive and deeply connected platform for delivering seamless social experiences across many familiar applications as well as customers’ data centers, service providers, and the Microsoft public cloud.

• Familiar and intuitive user experience and applications – Microsoft provides consistent, familiar, and intuitive applications across its cloud solutions to drive faster, lower-cost implementation and high user adoption, which lead to improved productivity and better business results.

To work like a network and learn about tools that help you engage employees, foster collaboration, and grow your business, visit www.enterprisesocial.com.

ENTERPRISE SOCIAL FOR EXECUTIVES

www.enterprisesocial.com