Hybrid Workforces Are Here to Stay… Are You Ready?

“Employees today are not the same people who went home to work in 2020. Flexibility and well-being are non-negotiable. Hybrid work is now just work.”  

Colette Stallbaumer, General Manager, Microsoft 365 and Future of Work, Microsoft 

 

So began the Microsoft Inspire conference this past July on the urgent need to meet the needs of today’s hybrid digital workforce. Today, it’s a seller’s market for expert tech workers looking to land full-time employment with hybrid work modality. For employers, this means offering accessible and engaging work platforms that can also be robustly secured across multiple, disparate worker locations to mitigate risk. Luckily, Microsoft is ready to deliver. 

Just as great health benefits, work-life balance enhancements, education supplements, and retirement savings options once defined top job prerequisites, today’s job seekers have upped the ante with demands for jobs that offer engagement, relevance, and collaboration options right from the comfort of their home office. And just in time, Microsoft Gold Partner, Cloudforce, is pleased to highlight a few of the latest introductions and developments in this incredible new arsenal of secure, digital remote work goodies: 

GO TEAMS: As baseball legend Babe Ruth once said, “The way a team plays as a whole determines its success.” And today, nothing compares to the power, flexibility, and innovative deliverables of Microsoft Teams for ensuring business success. With 270 million monthly active users, Teams is considered the epicenter of today’s digital workforce, combining meetings, calls, chat, collaboration, and business process automation. Since last year, Microsoft has introduced over 450 new Teams features to securely bring workers, data, and business processes together. If you have yet to embrace the competitive edge Teams can offer, now is the time! Without a doubt, the trusted experts at Cloudforce can get you just where you need to be. 

WELCOME TO YOUR FRONT ROW VIEW: For all of us Teams meeting participants previously accustomed to receiving important viewpoints and input via a small “tiled speaker” or a distant, wide-angle room view, Front Row now gives you an up-front virtual “seat at the table” with isolated, close-up views of meeting participants for a more personal delivery. With Front Row, intelligent cameras recognize everyone in the room and intelligent speaker devices recognize everyone who is talking, enabling off-site participants to feel more face-to-face, experience a speaker’s message and every nuance more clearly, and enjoy more enhanced meeting participation.  

GET READY FOR YOUR CAMEO: Imagine never losing eye contact with your meeting attendees as you present with PowerPoint. That’s the power of the PowerPoint Cameo feature, that keeps you front and center through every PowerPoint, enabling you to deliver richer presentation experiences. Notch it up a bit further with PowerPoint Live, an interactive tool that enables you to highlight key information in real time and allow participants to engage in their native language. 

IT’S EXCEL LIVE!: Now your team can not only collaborate online with Excel documents, but also manipulate them individually to instantly test out new scenarios or data sets, then seamlessly return to the presenter’s view — all in real time.  

ELEVATE COLLABORATION EVEN HIGHER WITH LIVE SHARE: This innovation allows workers anywhere, anytime, to share code and collaborate on anything instantly regardless of what app they are building, what their programming language is, or what Operating System (OS) they are running. With Live Share, hybrid workers can co-edit, co-debug, chat with peers, share terminals and servers, look at comments and so much more — all without leaving one’s current workflow, and all from the comfort of their own tools. 

VIVA MS VIVA!: Introduced in 2021, the intuitive AI-based Viva innovation combines workers’ communications, schedules, contacts, knowledge, learning, and goals and insights right into the flow of work to enable informed and inspired work outcomes. This year, Microsoft presents Viva Engage, which builds on the strengths of Yammer to help hybrid and on-site workers build communications, spark engagement in personally meaningful subjects, and grow personal networks. Upside to hybrid workers: a vehicle to feel heard and included, and to share common passions. 

Every day, Microsoft and its partners remain laser-focused on delivering apps that empower the seamless real-time connection of people, information, and processes across today’s hybrid workforce. Best of all, all these innovations are yours for the taking on virtually any device, through Microsoft 365 powered by Windows 11, the premier OS for hybrid work. Windows 11 simply offers the best productivity and optimal industry standard security, all with unmatched ease and simplicity of management.  

To help you advance in your recruiting and business success efforts, Microsoft Gold Partner Cloudforce stands ready to help bring these powerful, essential advantages to your current IT configuration and successfully engage and retain top talent. Cloudforce cloud architects and systems engineers are here to answer any questions you may have about your current or potential Windows 11 OS needs, and to also ensure that your current Windows 365 capabilities are optimized for accommodating the pressing demands of today’s hybrid workforce and deliver properly configured solutions. Reach out to us via the links below and let’s connect soon! 

Leslie Bucher
Author

Before joining Cloudforce as Content Specialist, Leslie worked in corporate and ad agency settings, and as owner of her own freelance writer/producer business. Throughout her career, she’s written spots and informercials for the likes of Isaac Hayes, Larry King, Brian McKnight, and Tom Bodett, to name a few. Her passion for inspiring, informing and entertaining also led to several fundraising and awareness video efforts for the Northern Virginia Urban League and Northern Virginia Family Services. As a proud Syracuse University graduate, she also served as Alumni President for the Washington metropolitan area, where she helped establish a scholarship program for area students attending S.U.

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