TalkTalk, one of the UK’s leading connectivity providers, has become the latest major company to embrace flexible working and is using Microsoft Viva Suite as a tool to help improve the employee experience.
Viva is an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources and insights directly in the flow of work. Powered by Microsoft 365 and experienced through Microsoft Teams, Viva creates a culture that empowers people and teams to be their best while working from anywhere.
TalkTalk is launching Viva Connections, giving thousands of its staff a personalised destination where they can discover relevant news, conversations and the tools they need to succeed. It will also roll out Viva Learning to help staff discover and share professional training resources in the flow of their day-to-day work, as well as track their learning progress.
TalkTalk will also make Viva Insights – a productivity and wellbeing tool that empowers individuals, teams and organisations to achieve balance, build better work habits and improve business outcome – and Topics – an AI tool that automatically identifies, processes and organises content into easily accessible knowledge – available to staff at a later date.
Ian Turner, Talent Director at TalkTalk, said: “TalkTalk has been investing for many years in digital workplace tools. With Microsoft Viva we can further develop a fantastic employee experience that helps us attract and develop top talent at TalkTalk. The growth of the platform, including a new module powered by Ally.io to help people and teams build alignment and achieve better business outcomes, is exciting as we build a seamless experience for all employees.”
Viva is the latest Microsoft tool adopted by TalkTalk to support staff as they help 4.2 million landline, broadband, TV and mobile services customers as well as more wholesale broadband customers than any other provider in Britain.
The move builds on the success TalkTalk has seen with other Microsoft services and unlocks new innovation and productivity by embracing tools beyond the Microsoft 365 suite.
Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams have been used to ensure employees could continue working throughout the pandemic, and will remain part of TalkTalk’s tools as staff split their time between their home and the office.
Microsoft’s tools and services helped TalkTalk keep staff connected to each other, creating a culture of inclusion by empowering every employee to contribute ideas and share feedback on a range of topics.
Teams is used for monthly, company-wide, live events with Chief Executive Tristia Harrison, which are also recorded and hosted in Microsoft Stream. TalkTalk has fully migrated its voice platform to Teams, while there are also an average of 120,297 private chat messages, 2,864 calls and 1,817 meetings every day on the platform. TalkTalk’s headquarters in Salford also has 32 meeting rooms equipped with Microsoft Team Rooms to enable people to either join in person or remotely.
“The pandemic forced us to adapt how we worked. We took the opportunity to redesign our headquarters in Salford and Teams is now a critical part of our meetings experience there,” Turner added. “It’s enabled seamless collaboration among our teams, whether they are sitting next to each other or some are working from home.”
To support flexible working, TalkTalk built a booking app in just a couple of weeks using Microsoft PowerApps to ensure a “safe, structured, gradual and flexible” return of colleagues back into the office. It has handled more than 74,000 bookings so far.
Microsoft Managed Desktop is being rolled out, ensuring that end-to-end device management, updates and security monitoring allow employees to securely and safely access the TalkTalk network.
Meanwhile, corporate news, events and senior leadership blogs are all posted on SharePoint, which attracts nearly 10,000 hits a day, and shared with employees via Yammer, which is also home to TalkTalk’s employee networks focused on families, neurodiversity, LGBTQ+, wellbeing and women in tech.
Power Automate handles business critical processes, while all reporting from existing systems has been moved to PowerBI, which is now TalkTalk’s strategic reporting solution.
Nick Hedderman, Senior Director of Modern Work at Microsoft UK, said: “TalkTalk is one of the world’s leading telecommunications companies, embracing the interconnected suite of tools within the Microsoft 365 portfolio to help employees meet the needs of its customers. Microsoft Viva, used alongside Microsoft 365, gives TalkTalk crucial insights to help experiment and create new ways of working in a hybrid way, that will improve their employee experience and business outcomes.”
To find out more about Microsoft Viva and how it can unlock insight in your organisation, click here.
