Enhancing flexible work with AI: How we’re using Microsoft Places to empower our employees

The advent of flexible work has changed the way we think of the workplace here at Microsoft. Like other enterprises, we’re focusing on how we can coordinate, modernize, and optimize our approach to the fast-changing world of modern work.

Microsoft Places, now generally available with Teams Premium, is our new AI-powered flexible workplace offering that our internal IT organization, Microsoft Digital, helped build and has been piloting internally at the company as Customer Zero.

Our employees are using Places to ensure that there are spaces available to achieve their purpose for the day, and to understand who might be in the office to help them do it. This means that they can more easily book flexible workspaces, have more meetings in person, and boost their in-person collaboration. Our managers are also using it to optimize where work happens and to get key insights that they can use for long-range planning.

“We’re a fully hybrid company here at Microsoft,” says Nathalie D’Hers, corporate vice president of Microsoft Digital. “Places is helping our employees work effectively when and where they choose to work.”

Integrating Microsoft Places into our AI-powered workplaces

According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, more than 70% of employees at companies like ours want flexible remote work options to continue, and 66% of business decision-makers are considering redesigning physical spaces to better accommodate hybrid work environments.

Maintaining connection in the flexible work environment, however, can be challenging as employees told us finding the right day to work in the office and coordinating in-person meeting times needed improvement.

This shift highlights a growing expectation among employees for flexible work schedules and locations, a trend that’s reshaping traditional workplace norms.

Remote work can lead to feelings of disconnection among employees, as they miss spontaneous interactions and informal conversations that often happen in a physical office. Microsoft’s research supports this, indicating that a significant percentage of employees feel isolated and disconnected from their teams, which negatively impacts morale and productivity.

The traditional office setup, where employees had designated desks and predictable schedules, has given way to a more fluid and dynamic environment. This shift has brought about several challenges, including the need for better space management, efficient scheduling, and enhanced collaboration tools.

“Flexible work has changed the way many people come to the office and use space,” says Jason McWreath, director of business programs with Microsoft Digital. “Understanding more about our colleagues’ presence in the flexible workplace is critical to understanding and fostering connection. We want to build tools and strategies to help our employees make decisions about when to come in and where to go. This is about meeting our employees’ needs and the needs of the organization in a flexible environment.”

McWreath understands that the shift to flexible work isn’t a temporary adjustment but a fundamental change. It also demands change for the processes and technology that Microsoft is using to support a productive workplace, wherever that place might be.

Part of that transformation is why we developed and implemented Places, which our team in Microsoft Digital helped build and that we’ve been testing for eight months across the company.

Improving presence and connection with Places

Places is part of the Microsoft 365 suite of solutions, but that isn’t how it began.

Microsoft is a large company, and, like other enterprises, we have challenges and needs that are unique to our culture and organizational dynamics. To solve these challenges and fulfill these needs, we develop internal solutions. Places was initially one of these.

“Places started as a solution to improve the employee experience here at Microsoft,” says Daniel Yuan, a senior product manager at Microsoft Digital. Yuan and his team have been working with Places from the beginning. “We developed the solution that eventually became Places to address the evolving needs of the flexible workplace—we wanted to enhance the experience our employees have when they physically go into work after many employees had shifted to working from home much of the time.”

Today, our employees need to do things like figure out how to get the most from their occasional visits to the office. When they go in, they want to know the best way to move from building to building so they can meet up with as many of their fellow hybrid colleagues as feasible.

We didn’t get there overnight—our need was huge. We manage 36 million square feet of office space in more than 600 global locations across 110 countries with 116,000 employees coming into the office at least once a week. Juggling who was working where was a big task—we needed a solution that would meet our needs at our scale.

Our internal development team created capabilities such as seeing who will be in the office, booking spaces, and eventually reserving places to work. Scaling these capabilities to meet our room booking and mapping needs involved significant knowledge sharing and collaboration between different teams within Microsoft, and as the functionality grew, so did the opportunity to meld these efforts together, which we did. The result was the creation of Places.

Capturing the value of Places in a flexible workplace

From its beginnings as an internally developed solution, Places has evolved into an AI-powered workplace app designed to support flexible work environments. Places enables more confident decision making about with who, how, and where people want to work. It helps provide context around the flexible work patterns of colleagues’ calendars, enables AI-assisted space booking, and updates people’s locations to share presence with others, fostering connection and collaboration. Here’s a summary of the key things that Places does for our employees from within Microsoft 365 apps they use every day, like Teams and Outlook:

• Workplace presence. Our employees use it to update their status to show that they’re in the office, working remotely, or at another location, providing transparency and improving communication within teams with 129,000 employees actively using this feature.
• Work plans. Employees use it to share their schedules and, conversely, see who else has shared when they will be in the office, making it easier to plan face-to-face interactions and collaborations.
• Places cards. Employees can see who is coming into the office and adjust their plans accordingly, directly from their Outlook Calendar, enhancing coordination and reducing scheduling conflicts.
• Team guidance. This feature assists managers in setting and communicating office attendance expectations and finding effective work patterns, helping teams balance remote and in-office work.

To find and book the right space for the right work, employees use:

• Places finder. This feature helps users book desks, rooms, or workspaces with additional information like images and floorplans, making it easier to find and reserve the right space for their needs.
• Desk booking. Users can book individual desks for their office days, ensuring that they have a designated workspace when they come into the office.
• Managed booking with Microsoft 365 Copilot. This AI-driven feature manages room or desk bookings, handling changes, updates, and conflicts, streamlining the booking process and reducing administrative overhead.

To manage and understand space utilization, our IT and real estate teams use:

• Auto release. This feature automatically frees up unused rooms and desks for others to reserve, optimizing space usage and reducing wasted resources.
• Space analytics. This functionality provides data on space usage to help track trends and optimize workspace management, enabling organizations to make informed decisions about their office layouts and capacities.

McWreath says there is immense value in our employees being able to see who will be in the office.

“It makes it easier for them to plan in-person meetings and collaborate more effectively,” he says. “Teams can coordinate their schedules and maximize face-to-face interactions, which can be more productive than virtual meetings.”

It’s about empowering our employees to better set up their work plans, whether they’re working in the office, remotely, or a combination of both.

“We value this flexibility at Microsoft, and Places helps us cater to diverse work styles and preferences, promoting inclusivity,” he says.

With features like space booking and seat reservation, Places helps us optimize the use of physical office spaces. Employees can book the rooms and desks that are best suited for their needs, ensuring efficient use of available resources. This is particularly valuable in a hybrid work environment where office attendance can vary.

Places integration with Outlook and Teams is particularly helpful.

“This integration ensures that employees can easily access Places features within the tools they already use every day,” McWreath says. “It also enables them to move smoothly between their digital and physical workspace.”

For example, when employees check in at various office spaces, the system updates their presence and makes this information available to their colleagues. For instance, if an employee checks into a physical office location, their presence is updated in real-time in Teams and Outlook. This information is visible to their team members.

Knowing that the employee is in the office, a coworker can schedule an impromptu face-to-face meeting to discuss ongoing projects, which might be more effective than a virtual meeting. Similarly, another employee, who might be working remotely, can decide to visit the office on the same day to collaborate with them in person, fostering a stronger team connection and improving collaboration.

By suggesting nearby colleagues who are also in the office, Places helps facilitate social interactions.

“This can encourage spontaneous coffee breaks or lunch meetings, helping to build stronger interpersonal relationships and a sense of community within the flexible workplace,” McWreath says. “By using the presence information provided by Places, employees can make more informed decisions about when and where to work, enhancing their connection with colleagues and improving overall team dynamics.”

Partnering with the facilities team as Customer Zero

Microsoft Digital is Customer Zero for Microsoft products. We use them first, test them first, and provide feedback that helps our product groups improve Microsoft products for our customers.

The Places product team has worked closely with Microsoft Global Workplace Services, the company’s facilities team, to continually improve and evolve the employee experience using Places. Global Workplace Services manages and enhances the workplace environment at Microsoft, ensuring that it’s safe, efficient, and conducive to productivity.

“Our collaboration with the Places product team has greatly enhanced the efficiency of space usage in our buildings already,” says Mike Messer, director and technical program lead for Microsoft Global Workplace Services.

Messer’s team is using Places to enable more efficient office space usage.

“Flexible work has changed the way many people come to the office and use space,” Messer says. “Places gives us the capability to understand how our physical spaces are being used and make these spaces more discoverable to employees.”

For example, Places allows Microsoft employees to book rooms that are more targeted to the in-person size of the meeting. This helps Messer’s team ensure that the right facilities are available to the right people at the right time.

Messer sees big opportunities for Places at Global Workplace Services in the future.

“The primary use of Places within Global Workplace Services is currently focused on the employee experience,” Messer says. “There’s also huge potential for us to use the analytics provided by Places to complement our existing reporting with richer insights into the usage data around building usage, from conference rooms to meeting spaces and individual desks.”

Considering compliance, security, and governance as Customer Zero

Our journey as Customer Zero means ensuring that compliance, security, and governance are primary considerations from the beginning of any solution we develop or implement. This initiative involves a comprehensive review and adhering to stringent security and privacy standards, including tenant trust and works council approvals. We’ve worked with our Customer Zero users and internal teams to ensure that Places protects employee information while fostering a secure and compliant flexible work environment.

Tenant trust reviews are an essential part of the company’s process to ensure that first-party apps and features are secure, manageable, and compliant before they are deployed on our corporate tenant.

The primary goal of tenant trust reviews is to conduct an independent assessment of first-party apps and features from the perspective of a data controller. This helps us ensure that the product is internally manageable and doesn’t pose unnecessary risks to the company in any of the countries where Microsoft operates.

All products are evaluated against the Microsoft Tenant Minimum Bar Standards. This includes checking for compliance with security and privacy standards and ensuring that the product is manageable by tenant administrators. The review process involves several steps:

1. The product team shares details about the features and how they work.
2. The tenant trust team evaluates the product’s security, privacy, and manageability.
3. Feedback is provided to the product team for any necessary enhancements.

By putting apps like Places through the tenant trust review process, we can ensure the product is ready for deployment within Microsoft, with all necessary security, privacy, and manageability measures in place.

Places also went through a works council review, a process applied to all solutions and apps deployed at Microsoft. The works council review process ensures that new features aren’t available to employees in specific countries until the works councils in those countries have granted approval.

“Works council reviews are an essential part of ensuring that new IT capabilities, including Places, comply with local regulations and protect employee interests,” Yuan says. “Feedback from works councils has been invaluable for refining Places functionality.”

Works council reviews ensure that new features in apps respect employee privacy and provide adequate control over their data. Collaboration between the product team and works councils led to the implementation of specific settings in Places that allow users to determine the level of information they want to share – ensuring users always maintain full control over how their location information is shared. The Places product team also added admin controls to turn specific features on or off for certain countries, ensuring compliance with local regulations.

What’s next

We will be expanding the scope of how we use Places internally here at Microsoft, adding more early adopter sites globally, focusing on diverse locations and space constraints. As our adoption grows by phases with 20,000 employees in the pilot and 50,000 targeted for early adoption, we expect the insights provided by Places to generate significant benefits for our building usage and occupancy efficiency across Microsoft global office locations.

We’re looking forward to exploring more ways that Places will help our employees modernize the way they connect, make the most of in-office days, and provide an optimized and productive flexible work experience.

“Our journey with Places is just beginning,” D’Hers says. “We’re very pleased that we were able to help develop Places, and we’re eager to continue partnering with the product group to make it better and better.”