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As The Way We Work Changes, So Must The Tools We Use To Create And Collaborate

Microsoft 365

By Don Steinberg

Marketers who want to establish meaningful connections across continents must first develop a genuine understanding of the people they want to reach.

After all, what engages customers in one region may not work at all in another. Media-consumption habits change as borders are crossed. And navigating local norms and cultural sensitivities can trip up marketers — even those with the best intentions.

That’s why it’s essential for marketing teams to embody the diversity of the customers they want to engage, said Lori Wright, general manager of Microsoft Teams and Skype, and a frequent commentator on collaboration in business. Truly effective marketing staffs, she said, reflect not only diversity in race and gender but also different languages, time zones, work styles and skill sets.

A campaign to deliver a better customer experience may unite marketers with salespeople, product engineers and finance people.

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“It’s important to seek out the most diverse thinking and use it to build a campaign that resonates across an audience representative of the world,” Wright said. “Working in silos, or in an echo chamber where like-minded people reverberate back ideas, is an easy trap to fall into within the marketing discipline.”

At the same time, there’s also more work being done in teams that tap specialists from multiple departments within the company. A campaign to deliver a better customer experience may unite marketers with salespeople, product engineers and finance people. Technology can help, enabling dispersed teams to combine their expertise and collaborate across corporate and international boundaries.

“Today, teams span the traditional org chart. Hierarchy is starting to matter less and less,” Wright said. “It’s about the collective power of the group. With new generations entering the workforce and technology creating more open work environments, people can quickly identify experts and find information tucked away in various parts of an organization, outside of their immediate team.”

Teams In Action

AvePoint, a company that helps customers manage and migrate their data to the cloud, has 15,000 clients around the world and a staff dispersed across continents.

“Our marketing people need to interface with our sales organization and our technical organization,” said Dux Raymond Sy, chief marketing officer at AvePoint. “We do social media, trade shows, webinars, product marketing, PR. There are different subgroups — digital marketing, content communications, field marketing. All of these work side by side, so getting everyone on the same page quickly is critical.”

AvePoint uses Microsoft Teams, the hub for teamwork in Office 365, for capturing group discussions in threaded, searchable conversations. Keeping up with the status of multinational projects is an immediate benefit, Sy said. The CMO wakes up daily at 4:30 a.m. to communicate with co-workers in Europe and Asia, often from the Teams app on his phone.

“Prior to Teams, I had to keep pinging people: ‘Hey Julie, what’s going on with this initiative in France?’ Or ‘Ann Marie, what’s going on in the U.K.?’” he said. “Now I can scroll through what people are working on.”

Collaborative work is done out in the open so Sy can get status updates, retrieve documents and catch up on conversations without having to connect in real time. Sy adds that the Teams interface is intuitive for users, incorporating some familiar elements of social media. It employs at-mentions to alert individuals named in shared messages, and humanizes correspondence with the option to use GIFs, stickers and emojis.

Team members can also communicate using voice and video, mediums that have become increasingly important as more people work remotely.

According to the 2017 Gallup report “State of the American Workplace,” 43 percent of employees spent at least some time working remotely during the prior year, a 4 percent rise over 2012. Those employees also are working more hours off-site.

“While remote and freelance work is rising, our recently published research has shown that people still crave the human connection of an in-person meeting. It’s why we made the decision to bring video conferencing into Teams, and why we are continuing to evolve the product to make video calls a great experience for remote colleagues. For example, soon you’ll have the option to blur your background, so you don’t have to worry about distractions behind you,” Wright said.

Microsoft

Working Together, Smarter

Plans to incorporate artificial intelligence to enhance search functionality in Teams will make discovering information more intuitive. Using elements of the Bing search engine and the Azure cloud service, search in Teams will allow users to quickly find every document they have ever exchanged about a given topic or find an expert on a particular subject based on who has commented most about it.

“Time is our most precious resource. These types of contextually aware abilities can make a big difference in helping people get more out of their day,” Wright said.

Microsoft is investing in AI to also automate many of the routine tasks associated with meetings. Speaking to upcoming features, Wright shared how artificial intelligence in Teams will soon make workdays more efficient.

Before the meeting, “I could get information about who I’m meeting with and all the documents I need,” she said. “During the meeting itself, it’s going to get transcribed and translated. Then afterward, anything that you and I agreed to do would be captured — even assigned out as action items.”

Integrating communication, information sharing, storage and scheduling in one platform — rather than a hodgepodge of separate applications — is important for dispersed marketing teams, Wright said.

“If you have your employees needing to think every time, ‘Where is the latest messaging document?’ it can be a huge drain on productivity,” she said.

Consolidation reduces “context switching,” the need to move back and forth among applications that may have different controls or file-management structures.

What it’s really about, according to Wright, is “giving people the tools they need to do their best work, so they can focus on creating content and making meaningful contributions.”

Download the e-book to learn how teamwork helps marketers excel at 3 everyday projects.

Don Steinberg has covered business and culture for several national business publications including Inc., Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.