Faced with the rise of teleworking and the seizure of power by virtual meetingsAs part of the "Work@Work" initiative, technology players are organising themselves to improve employee productivity and maintain a link, even a virtual one, between employees. Visit 4 February the launch of Microsoft Viva. This new tool integrates with Microsoft 365 and Teams - Microsoft's video-conferencing tool - and is designed to embody the "Microsoft way of working". the first platform dedicated to the employee experience ". Satya NadellaMicrosoft's CEO, explains: ".We took part in the world's largest remote working experienceand it has had a considerable impact...
Faced with the rise of teleworking and the seizure of power by virtual meetingsAs part of the "Work@Work" initiative, technology players are organising themselves to improve employee productivity and maintain a link, even a virtual one, between employees. Visit 4 February the launch of Microsoft Viva. This new tool integrates with Microsoft 365 and Teams - Microsoft's video-conferencing tool - and is designed to embody the "Microsoft way of working". the first platform dedicated to the employee experience ". Satya NadellaMicrosoft's CEO, explains: ".We took part in the world's largest remote working experienceand it has had a considerable impact on the working experience of employees. Every organisation now needs to offer its employees a unified experiencefrom welcoming newcomers to the collaboration between the teams, including training and skills development. Viva brings together on the same platform, directly integrated with TeamsAll the tools you need to help your employees succeed, from their very first day in the organisation".
The new range of tools includes four strategic areas - employee commitment, well-beingThere are also a number of modules designed for teams and managers alike. These include the Viva Insight is particularly ambitious. Integrated into Teams from the outset, it is designed to respond to the issues raised by thethe sometimes brutal advent of teleworkingby focusing on the employee well-being and the company reorganisation. It's a huge undertaking, at a time when the boundary between home and office has never seemed so abstract, and when companies are having to deal with an unprecedented situation in terms of human resources management...". Even before COVID-19 changed our lives, a new generation of digital tools was opening up new possibilities for tomorrow's work. What we didn't expect was that this future would arrive almost overnight last March, as millions of businesses around the world responded to the pandemic by switching to remote and hybrid working. "says Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft 365. Viva Insight aims to provide teleworkers with advice on how to better organisation of their working hours - and breaks -It will also help them to set aside time for training or to strengthen relationships with their colleagues. From a managerial point of view, based on anonymous data collected from users, Viva Insight will also offer a series of recommendations for finding the right balance between efficiency and well-being. In addition, the tool goes further by helping companies to rethink their offices in order to adapting to hybrid workingNot all employees have left the premises.
" Promoting a new corporate culture "This is the ambition of the new tool launched by Microsoft, which has also focused on team cohesion and information sharing. Two modules are designed to meet these challenges. The first, called Viva Connectionsis built on Microsoft 365 with a custom interfaceThis will be followed by an integration into Teams in March. mobile application. It must improve team engagement by offering them a single point of entry for interacting with colleagues and accessing company resources, particularly in terms of internal communications. A major imperative at a time when 60% of employees feel less connected to their colleagues since adopting teleworkingaccording to the study Work Trend Index from Microsoft. The other module, Viva Topicsalso focuses on shared resources within the company, but from a more operational point of view. Based on theartificial intelligenceTopics organises the organisation's content around headings and thematic files. These can automatically appear at the moment of publication. ad hoc during an exchange on one of the Microsoft tools (Office 365, Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Teams).
And finally.., Viva Learning is dedicated to professional trainingBy centralising all information relating to skills development, and integrating content from LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn and partners such as Skillsoft, Coursera, Pluralsight and edX. But other modules are already on Microsoft's roadmapaccording to Jared Spataro...
A new asset for Google Meet
Microsoft is not the only digital heavyweight to rethink its approach to the new working environment for employees and new remote communication habits. A few days ago, Google Meet and Otter.ai unveiled a new partnership. L'English transcription tool now integrates with the American giant's video-conferencing solution. In practical terms, all users have to do is download the dedicated Chrome extension and sign in, as Otter.ai requires users to create a user account, the free version of which is sufficient for a limited volume of use. Once the recording is launched, the exchanges held during the online meeting are then automatically converted from spoken to written form, with a fairly impressive success rate. In other words, once the meeting is over, its full transcription is completed almost instantly.
The practical features that have made the tool so successful have been integrated, including the ability to distinguish between different callers, synchronise between devices and share transcripts within a workgroup. For the time being, this integration between Google Meet and Otter.ai is being offered to users free of charge. But things could well change, if other partnerships entered into by the transcription tool are anything to go by. Google Meet is not the first to acquire the services of Otter.ai, whose artificial intelligence is already available via Zoom, the rising star of 'videoconferencing' in 2020, but also with a more institutional player such as Cisco Webex. It also remains to be seen when Otter.ai will tackle the French-speaking market more directly. For the time being, the artificial intelligence is good enough to recognise and adapt to the foreign accent of an Indian, Chinese, Russian or Italian speaker, but we don't know what the tool's roadmap is for opening up to other languages. For the time being, machine translation tools remain immune to this potential competition.
