Deploying Microsoft Places at Microsoft with our works councils

Our strong partnership with our works councils has led to the successful deployment of many Microsoft 365 Copilot applications, including one of the latest, Microsoft Places.

Places is a workplace scheduling tool that uses AI to make scheduling in-person meetings and working in hybrid work environments easier for you and your colleagues. It helps hybrid and non-hybrid teams align and manage schedules so they can know when the best times might be to collaborate in person or hold on-site meetings. It does that through location tracking, which can be turned on and off.

We are Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and before we deployed Places globally here at Microsoft, we consulted with our works councils, groups of our employees who work in various geographies that advocate for the interests of employees in their region or country. One of the hot topics for works councils in today’s workplace is the introduction of AI into many areas of work. More and more, we’re being exposed to new ways of working with AI and we’re still learning how to use it in responsible ways. Many still have questions about its use around privacy. Initially the way Places uses AI has brought up some questions for our works council countries.

“It’s actually a very simple product, Places, but it touches on something that has huge interest in a number of works council countries, which is the aspect of tracking people’s location,” says Allan Hvass, regional experience lead for Microsoft Digital. “So even if technology is simple, it’s a high, high-interest topic.”

{Read and download our guide for deploying Places at your company.}

Works councils provide a ‘golden opportunity’

While we at Microsoft Digital serve as Customer Zero, meaning our internal usage and feedback is used to shape the product before it’s launched to the public, we partner with works councils to help inform our product groups of potential concerns. One of the keys to our strong partnership with our works councils has been being transparent with the purpose and benefits of the features we plan to roll out and being proactive with our communications. We work closely with them to ensure that everyone feels heard and protected when it comes to employee privacy.

Being proactive and starting conversations with works councils early has its benefits, according to Daniel Yaun, a senior product manager for Microsoft Digital.

“It’s a golden opportunity for us to have an open and transparent dialogue with works councils and for us to understand what the concerns are,” he says.

Part of the conversations around Places with works councils involved detailing the benefits of enabling location sharing. Being clear about the benefits, such as knowing when coworkers are in the office, seeing the availability of meeting spaces, and enabling in-person collaboration, helped relieve some of the concerns raised by employees.

“In a hybrid work environment, we needed to be clear about what the value is for employees,” Hvass says. “We had to be very strong on the message of why it is a great benefit for me as an employee to be part of this and share my data. What I can gain from it and how can I help my colleagues, versus just being used for tracking whether I show up at a physical place or how many people are in a building. Otherwise, people would find ways of opting out rather than opting in.”

In the end, having a strong relationship, communicating clearly, and proactively and incorporating feedback into the final product has served us and our customers well.

“It’s really beneficial that Microsoft has a very mature process on the work of council engagements,” Yuan says.

Making a better product through works councils reviews

Aside from acting as the voice of employees in various geographies, one of the more valuable roles our works councils play is as an extension of Customer Zero. We listen to their concerns and work with product groups to incorporate their feedback to make sure the product meets their requirements.

The things that made the rollout of Places with our works councils successful were:

• Having an established framework for working with works councils that has been successful and is repeatable
• Having the ability to manage the release of certain functionality to specific markets
• Moving the product to an opt-in model
• Providing a full explanation of what the technology was doing

Jason McWreath, a director of business programs for Microsoft Digital, says there was an initial issue where collaborators could see each other’s locations across country boundaries, which had not been approved by all works councils. This raised privacy concerns and required a product update.

By acting as Customer Zero and partnering with global works councils, we heard the feedback and took that back to the product group to address the issue.  We updated Places to allow for specific targeting. This change enabled granular management at the country level, where the feature could be turned on or off for individual countries based on works council approvals. Getting approvals from works councils also allowed for Places to be updated after it was deployed.

“Instead of looking at it like these are more requirements that we need to consider, it’s more about what we can learn to enhance the product and make it more globally applicable for more customers by introducing these enhancements the works councils have raised,” says Jason McWreath, a director of business programs for Microsoft Digital.

Due to continued privacy concerns for everyone globally, location sharing became our most debated feature and we had to address the varying privacy regulations of works councils countries. By giving employees the default opt-out feature, it enables employees to choose whether they want to share their location and it has helped the product meet the requirements for global works councils approvals.

The feedback we receive from works councils around AI and other technologies not only helps us effectively deploy products externally, it also helps improve products for external customers. And now that several Places features have been approved by most work councils, we can bring new features such as the ability to locate someone where they’re sitting in a room or know whether a colleague is in a building based on Wi-Fi access, to works councils for review.