I work in the business of dealing with customer questions on Microsoft 365 all the time (disclosure), either directly or indirectly. This is part of a series of posts where I share them if they can be of help to others. Where I can of course and naturally, not just the questions but the answers too. All questions and answers strive to respect both sides sensitivities (parts will have been redacted and/or anonymised) and the main topic is covered in each post title.
Question:
We need to work on a Future of Work (FoW) Vision and Strategy, can you share a good framework for arriving at one and managing its implementation as well as Microsoft’s own Vision and Strategy for FoW?
Answer:
Now I cannot share what was provided for the second part of the question, but I can for the first. For the second part though, you can get a very good view from all of the public material on the subject:
- Driving your business forward in a hybrid working world – lots of research-based articles from work together with Boston Consulting Group and KRC Research
- Work Trend Index: Microsoft’s latest research on the ways we work.
- What Is an Employee Experience Platform? – related to Microsoft Viva but naturally, given the topic it covers (Employee Experience), also lots of FoW related research and material
- WorkLab: Vital facts about the future of work – good set of posts covering many topics in the subject
- The New Future of Work – Microsoft Research – the home for all Microsoft research on the subject
As for the first part of the question, here are two slides then a bit of elaboration.
This doesn’t need to much explanation although there is a fair bit of it accompanying the Vision and Strategy Framework which I can’t share.
Also, the Vision and Strategy Framework goes beyond just FoW considerations (the point bottom left of the slide) but it will do just fine to help formulate the thinking in this regard. This framework is actually used for digital transformation which anyway is central to FoW.
But it’s the Readiness Dashboard that really covers the specific aspects of a FoW Vision and Strategy. Now I’m not suggesting the elements covered are complete and fully comprehensive. FoW covers a huge area of work. These will probably do to get you started but the point is you can add to them, change them, remove them, etc. The point is to make them relevant to your organisation.
The point is these are both simple, iterative and accountable ways to arrive at a high level vision and strategy and a way to track progress as a you execute.
Obviously there is a lot of detail missing from this but hopefully this helps.