Zoe 365

Microsoft Viva Turns 2!

Zoe 365 — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 20:15:43 +0000

On the 4th of February 2021, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, announced Microsoft Viva, calling it the first employee experience platform, designed to bring tools for employee engagement, learning, wellbeing and knowledge discovery directly into the flow of people’s work. During 2020, the whole world participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment that we’ve ever seen, and this had a dramatic impact on how we all experienced the world of work. Gone were the days of spending most of our work-week in a physical office, of being able to build serendipitous connections by the watercooler. No longer were new starters automatically guaranteed to be in the office on their first day, shaking hands and getting a building tour, being introduced to key people from across the organisation. At this point, the physical employee experience was no longer the most important – the digital employee experience became the de facto employee experience, as it was the one constant that all employees had. Moving to remote – and then hybrid – work required organisations to rethink everything about their employee experience. The values, vision, mission, ethos and very culture of an organisation suddenly had to be present in the digital experience as well as in how people physically interacted with each other, and for many organisations, this was a whole new frontier that they hadn’t really got to grips with yet. And to be honest – still haven’t in many cases! In this article, I’m going to take a look back at Viva over the last two years, as well as sharing with you how Viva has benefited me during this time. I’ll then talk about Teams as the experience platform, before looking at the opportunities we have before us if bring HR and IT closer together. Microsoft Viva over the Last Two Years Microsoft Viva as it was first announced looks very different to what we have today. Initially, there were four modules announced. Using Microsoft Teams as the scaffold, Viva’s early aims were to unify the employee experience across four key areas — Engagement, Wellbeing, Learning and Knowledge — in an integrated experience that empowers people to be their best. Connections provides a personalized gateway to your digital workplace where employees can access internal communications and company resources like policies and benefits and participate in communities like employee resource groups, all from a single customizable app in Microsoft Teams. Insights gives individuals, managers and leaders personalized and actionable insights that help everyone in an organization thrive. Learning makes training and professional development opportunities more discoverable and accessible in the flow of work. Topics delivers a knowledge discovery experience that helps people connect to information and experts across the company. The initial four Viva modules, Feb 21 Over the course of it’s first year, the primary focus was on releasing the initial modules, and starting to see the use-cases and scenarios in which organisations were proving value. Microsoft gradually started adding new modules such as Viva Engage, Viva Goals and Viva Sales into the mix, and quite quickly, it felt like things were getting quite confusing and messy. It became challenging at points for those of us working in the Microsoft consulting space to keep up, so even more difficult for HR and business teams within end-user organisations. In September 2022, Microsoft attempted to address this confusion (while also announcing new releases!) by reframing the Viva modules into experience areas, grouped by Connection, Insight, Purpose and Growth. They also announced two new products, Viva Amplify and Viva Pulse, neither of which have become generally available yet. This really simplified the messaging and made it easier to understand the purpose of each Viva module, and where they all fit together, as shown in the image below. Additionally, the new modules starts to make a more compelling case for investing in the Viva Suite licenses. Microsoft Viva Unified Framework, Sep 22 One of the greath strengths of Microsoft Viva is that it is built on top of Microsoft 365, benefitting from the privacy and security features of the M365 platform. It is also designed to be accessed and consumed from directly within the Teams app, which is where people are spending most of their working time. This is an important step in integrating fragmented workplace tools, and delivering a much improved experience to employees. How Viva has Helped Me I’ve talked in an earlier blog about being part of the Viva Explorers and what this means to me. When Viva was announced 2 years ago, I was already well underway with my community journey, and just a few months away from being awarded MVP for the first time. However, at that point, I still hadn’t felt like I’d really found my tribe. I’d made loads of friends within the community, but most of them from the Power Platform / business applications space, and while I’d met some great people within the M365 space, I didn’t know them well. For me, one of the most rewarding things about Viva has been the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had along the way. I’ve found a group of fantastic friends, who work with the same technologies that I do.While we all have different experiences and perspectives, we’ve converged on Viva as an area of interest. Not only am I able to learn from and improve my own thinking about Viva, but I’ve had so much fun with this group of people, and definitely feel like I’ve found my tribe. How else? Last year, I changed roles. I moved from an organisation where we had a small number of Viva Suite licenses, with some components deployed and others being tested.I deployed Viva Connections for example in the first week that it was available, and had great feedback from employees across the organisation. I moved to Avanade, who also have the Viva Suite licenses – however, at Avanade we’re using Viva more extensively. When I joined, I onboarded remotely. We have a comprehensive first week for new starters with structured onboarding that is a mix of meetings with our onboarding cohort, and self-paced learning. Outside of that, I used tools like Viva Connections and Viva Topic to really accelerate my onboarding experience. When I talk about the impact that Viva can have on the employee experience, I’ve felt this first-hand. Having my intranet in Teams with Viva Connections made it so easy for me to find my way around the digital organisation. The topic pages in Viva Topics helped me get up to speed on key things within Avanade, as well as find all of the assets / collateral, and identify who the key people were for me to talk to about each thing. I joined communities of interest in Viva Engage (Yammer by any other name…) allowing me to widen my internal network outside of just those people I met through onboarding or my daily work. And then Viva Insights helps me to stay on top of my focus time and manage the impact that I have on my colleagues in how I work and collaborate. The different components of Viva made a big difference to me in my early days at Avanade, and continue to play an important role in how I manage my time, and find content / people / information that I need. Thinking about employee experience though, the key thing that all of the Viva components have in common is how I access them – and that is through Microsoft Teams. Teams as the Experience Platform Microsoft Viva is described as an employee experience platform, however I firmly believe that Microsoft Teams is actually the platform through which we all experience work. Teams is the hub for teamwork, the single pane of glass view into where work gets done. Viva is an important part of the Teams experience platform, however thinking about your digital employee experience in the context of Teams as a platform allows you to consider a much broader set of opportunities. We should be thinking about how we can bring more into the front-end system that people use – Teams – and eliminate the need for context-switching and jumping between applications. Teams apps, bots, the collab toolkit and Power Platform all deliver significant capabilities that can be used to achieve these, alongside Microsoft Viva. The future of work is about ecosystems, and about simplifying the complex for the people who work inside our organisations. To quote Kevin McDonnell, it’s about making it easy to do the right thing, and I firmly believe that Teams as the experience platform is the way to achieve this, with Viva playing a key role. The Opportunities for HR & IT I was researching HR technology trends last week, and in this article I read the following paragraph that set me thinking: It’s worth bearing in mind that, for today’s growing number of remote workers, the entire employee experience is delivered over digital platforms. HR tech is the employee experience for many employees. Now, the wider article does talk about the difference between “employee experience” and “digital employee experience”, with the latter expanding to incorporate the wider tools and technologies that are used within an organisation. However to me, this shows that we still need to bring HR and IT closer together. IT need to understand more about priorities and focus within the realm of HR, and HR need to understand what the art of the possible is when incorporating HR tech into workplace tech. Within organisations, HR typically have their own vision, and their own strategy for driving improvements in employee experience. They’ve also typically invested in enterprise platforms such as Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Cornerstone and so on. They have made big investments both financially but also in terms of the time and effort spent designing, implementing and managing these platforms. The IT department typically don’t understand enough about how these platforms are used and consumed, what features and functionality they have. Likewise, for HR colleagues, they are learning about the potential that Viva has, and struggling to figure out where it fits into their employee tech landscape. For me, it isn’t that either of these groups are wrong in what they are doing. It is that we haven’t yet found the middle ground in all cases. It isn’t either HR tech OR Viva. For me, this is an equation with an AND. Viva – and Teams as the experience platform – acts as the middleware, the tool that can drive an improved employee experience across the board. The Viva partner ecosystem is already large, as you can see in the image below – and continues to grow, with the integrations continuing to mature and develop. There is a huge opportunity to significantly improve the employee experience if we can bring HR and IT closer together, get them talking to each other and understanding more about what they each bring to the table in terms of platforms and capability. The Next Two Years Looking at how Viva itself has grown and developed since it was first launched back in February 2021, I’m really excited to see how this will continue to mature over the next two years. Last year, we saw the first role-based experience with Viva Sales, and we’re expecting more to follow. We’ve also got the launch of both Viva Pulse and Viva Amplify to look forward to, as well as some of the features like Answers and Leadership Corner. Will glint be rebranded as a Viva product? Who knows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens at some point. Alongside this though, with the rapid development of generative AI – and the commitment made by Microsoft to integrate GPT and OpenAI into all of their products – I can see really exciting times ahead. Last week, Microsoft already announced that GPT will be available within Viva Sales to automatically generate seller emails based on certain scenarios, and we can see AI capability landing in Teams Premium as...

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Writing a Great Session Abstract

Zoe 365 — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 19:00:52 +0000

In previous posts, I’ve talked about getting started with community speaking and how to set up your sessionize profile – today, we’re going to look at how you write a great session abstract. First of all though, it’s helpful to understand why a good session abstract is important. A good session abstract should help you stand out as a speaker when responding to calls for content – it is your opportunity to effectively communicate the unique value and relevance of your proposed session to the conference organizers. A strong abstract can effectively communicate the unique perspectives, insights, and solutions that you will share during the session. It should clearly articulate the key takeaways and outcomes that attendees can expect from your session, demonstrating your ability to deliver a high-quality, engaging, and informative presentation. Writing a compelling session abstract can increase the chances of your session being selected for the conference and position you as a thought leader and professional in your field. Writing your Session Abstract I want to take a moment to give a huge shout-out to a long-time MVP and community stalwart, Tracy van der Schyff. Back in 2019, Tracy shared the image below that she created on Twitter and I stumbled across it. Ever since then, this has been the format that I’ve followed when writing session abstracts. Additionally, I’ve shared this far and wide. I’ve shared it with colleagues who were taking their first baby steps into community speaking, I’ve shared it with fellow community members, and I’ve shared it with people who I’ve been mentoring / sponsoring through the MVP process. This guide breaks down really clearly how to structure your session abstract so that it is clear and easy to understand. It tells the reviewer what you’re going to talk about, it tells attendees what they will take away from your session and it includes the topics / technology areas that you will be covering in your session. For accessibility reasons, I’m going to include some of the key messages from Tracy’s image here, as the text is too long to add in alt text. Please note all of the below is Tracy’s work and I am SO thankful that she shared this back in 2019, as nearly every session I’ve submitted has followed this format. What to do: Pick a worth / relevant topic Write a session abstract Check spelling and grammar Check product names Get someone to review it and provide feedback Submit the session When writing your abstract, the format should look something like this: Title Problem statement / context Bullets of what will be covered What can the audience expect to leave with? Products Example (remove the words in < > when submitting your own): <Title> The significance of Digital Literacy in the Office 365 Digital Workplace <Problem Statement> Just in the last couple of years, technology has evolved so fast that most people are struggling to keep up. Training users on new technology is not delivering the desired outcome, which directly affects your user adoption. This is due to factors that we are not considering. In this session, Tracy will share concepts as well as solutions to this challenge. <Bullets of what will be covered> Literacy statistics and ROI on training Psychology behind learning new skills How Office 365 supports and grows digital literacy skills Where and how to keep up to date with new features and releases <What can the audience expect to leave with?> Investing in your users and helping them realise the value that Office 365 brings you will not only enable your users, but also help with changing company cultures to flourishing, creative and collaborative places to work. <Products> Office 365, Office ProPlus etc Being a Good Speaker Tracy has also provided guidance on how to be a GOOD speaker. Taking care of the speaker admin is important – uploading slides in the way that the conference organisers have requested, or otherwise making them available to attendees. This format has worked incredibly well for me. I’ve reviewed hundreds of sessions submitted to events where I’ve been part of the organising team or volunteering, and have seen some sessions which were submitted with either one line of text, or the other extreme, where the speaker has provided a wall of text and it isn’t actually clear what they are talking about. One thing I’ve found that works well for me is to start the “what can the audience expect to leave with” section with the phrase “by joining this session, attendees will…” – it helps you get the value proposition of your session really clear in your head, and that of the reviewer. Think about what people will learn or expect to take away from your session. Use this format and follow the “what to do” instructions, and your session abstracts will stand out from the crowd. Adding to the awesomeness that Tracy produced and kindly sent out into the world, I wanted to add some additional tips of my own. Some events arrange for sessions to be reviewed blind, where the name and all identifying characteristics are hidden from the people scoring the sessions. This removes any unconscious bias that relates to gender, ethnicity, place of origin or anything else that reviewer may know about the person. It also reduces the risk of favouritism as well! So PLEASE don’t refer to yourself by name in your session abstract, and ideally don’t use any gender-identifying language / pronouns, or include other identifying categoristics. This can make the process unfair when sessions are being blind reviewed, and to be honest, I’ve actually scored sessions less where speakers do this. This is not good speaker behaviour – use your profile and speaker bio to talk about yourself, your achievements and experience etc. The session abstract should be all about what you’re delivering to the audience. Additionally, if you follow the session abstract format above, you don’t need to submit the content with the headings in place – these are just to help you to structure the content. And lastly, don’t make the abstract too long! For bigger events, organisers have hundreds and hundreds of submissions to read, so keep it clear, keep it concise, and make sure the value and benefits are clear. Finding the Perfect Session Title The title of your conference session is SUPER important when responding to calls for content because it is the first impression that attendees and organizers will have of your proposed session. A strong, clear, and concise title can help grab their attention, generate interest, and effectively communicate the key theme and focus of your session. A good title can also help your session stand out among a large number of submissions, making it easier for conference organisers to identify and shortlist the most relevant and valuable sessions for their event. A well-crafted title can also increase the visibility and discoverability of your session, making it easier for attendees to find and sign up for the sessions that align with their interests and goals. For some of my sessions, I’ve spent longer on writing the title than I have on writing the entire session abstract. However, here’s a cheat. Start with your session abstract, and then go to ChatGPT and ask it to provide you with a catchy title! Run the query a few times, and use the best out of the bunch! Mark Rackley recommended this to me, and I’ve actually tested it with many of my old sessions, and found that the results in most cases were better than my own titles. Bringing it all Together Hopefully this guidance makes it easier for you to structure a session abstract. One of the most important steps (especially when starting out) is getting feedback from someone else. Does it read well? Is it clear what the value is? And does it sound like a session they want to join? It’s worth noting that this isn’t the only way to write session abstracts, however this has worked for me as it provides a clear structure that I can follow. It also makes it really easy for reviewers / organisers and attendees alike to know what they will get out of my session. Good luck, and watch out for the next in this new speaker series, where I’ll be sharing tips from community leaders about what they look for when reviewing sessions, as well as tips and tricks that they have for new speakers.

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How to Create Your Sessionize Profile

Zoe 365 — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 19:37:26 +0000

Last week, I wrote about how to get started with community speaking, and today, we’re going to build on that, with a guide to setting up your Sessionize profile for new speakers. This is quite a long article, so use the following buttons if you want to navigate quickly to a different part of this page: Set up your profile Add your first session Examples of Profiles What is Sessionize? Sessionize is a platform that is used by event organisers around the world to run and manage calls for speakers / content. For organisers, it provide a comprehensive set of tools that make it easy to review content, to pull together event schedules, to contact speakers and generally manage the vast majority of the admin related to sourcing content for an event. Now, that’s not to say that it is used by all events – many events do use their own processes or platforms, and there are other systems out there that can be used to manage calls for content. However, in my experience, Sessionize is the most common platform that is used, and it is a great way to get started with building out your online presence as a speaker. For speakers, it allows you to create your own public profile that includes your biography, a photograph, your location, details of your areas of expertise and speaking topics, and any relevant industry awards. Additionally, you can create sessions which can then be re-used REALLY EASILY when you submit to new events! For speakers who submit to a lot of events, this can save a crazy amount of time, and makes it much easier for us to submit to an event. Creating your Account To create a new Sessionize profile, first of all head over to the Sessionize website, and hit the “try for free” button. It is really easy to set up your account using an existing authentication type such as Facebook, your Microsoft account, Twitter and so on. I would STRONGLY recommend that you set this up using your personal account details or email address, rather than using a work identity. Once you start speaking at events, hopefully this is something that you will continue to do even after changing your employer and moving to another company. If you set this up to use your work email address, it can be a real pain to have to switch it at a later date. I know people that have lost access to their early speaking history by moving jobs, so definitely set this up using your personal identity. Depending on which authentication provider you select, Sessionize will attempt to pull in some of your information to start populating your profile. However, for the purposes of this demo, I’m going to set up a new profile using classic login (ie email) so that I can create a dummy account that isn’t connected to any of my existing stuff. For my own Sessionize account, I use my Microsoft account, which works really well. If you select Microsoft Account, it will prompt you to log in, and then create new Sessionize profile. Once you hit “create new classic account” it will prompt you to enter your email address, name and choose a password. I’d generally recommend using a Microsoft account though if you have one. If you choose classic method, then once you’ve filled out all the info in the form shown, complete the captcha and hit the create button. You’ll be sent a confirmation link, and once you hit that, you’re in! Setting up Your Profile When you activate your account and login for the first time, you will see the options on the screen below, asking if you want to get started as an organiser or as a speaker. Hit the “start as speaker” button.This will take you to an overview of your speaker area within the Sessionize platform. The screenshot below shows you a number of menu options on the left, which we’ll start to go through today, and provides a summary on your dashboard. Currently, as a new speaker, this will be blank. However, once you start adding sessions and speaking at events, this will start to show you a useful summary of upcoming sessions, as well as a snapshot of your public profile. One last thing to note – currently, your speaker profile is not public. Once you have finished editing your profile and getting yourself set up, I’d recommend switching your profile to public. This makes it easier for people to find you, and look at your experience, the things you talk about and so on. On the left-hand menu, click on “Edit Profile”. This will take you to a new screen, where you can start to populate your personal information. Along the top, you can see a number of different tabs where you can edit the following different items: Basic: Name, upload a photograph and set a nickname. Tagline & Bio: Write a tagline for your profile, and upload your professional biography. You can also add another langauge on this screen too. Public Profile: this is where you can turn on your public profile, and create a custom profile URL. Additionally, you can add topics, your area of expertise, your location and any additional notes. You can also add a cover photo / header image to your public profile under this section. Awards: Here you can add things like Microsoft MVP award – it will only let you add awards to your profile once you’ve made it public though, and awards will have to be verified to make sure they are legitimate. Links: Add links here to your social media profiles – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Insta etc. You can add a link to your own blog if you have one, or a YouTube channel and so on. Update all of the relevant information on these tabs, and save the changes. Once you’ve populated everything, make sure you set your profile to public. Pro Tip – Don’t forget to add a cover image to your public profile! This can really make your profile stand out from the crowd. A key benefit of creating a public profile – apart from the fact that it makes you visible – is that it also allows you to use a fantastic feature within Sessionize, and that is another one of the options on the left-hand menu, “Discover events”. This will use the things that you’ve set in your public profile – such as location, topics and areas of expertise – and then show you calls for speakers for events that would be a good match, which are currently open and requesting content. If I look at the Discover Events page within my main Sessionize account, I can see the following list of open events (plus a whole load more that I have to scroll down to see): This can make it really easy to find events that are a good fit, which are currently looking for speakers! I’ve discovered loads of new events this way that might not have been on my radar otherwise. Take a look over here at the demo Sessionize profile I set up for this article. Add Your First Session You don’t need to add sessions before you start submitting, as you can write it in the form when you submit for your first event. However, if you really want to prepare in advance for that first open call for content, then you can create a session without needing to submit it to a specific event. To do this, click on “My Sessions” on the left-hand menu, and then click the Add Session button shown in the screenshot below. When you click “add session” it shows you a very simple form, where you can populate the session title, the description and any small print. The small print could include additional information that you may want an organiser to know about your session, such as technical requirements for an in-person presentation. I’m not going to go into detail on how to write your first session, as I’ll cover that in my next blog posts for new speakers. In the next article, I’ll be giving you the tips and tricks that I use to write my conference sessions, as well as tips and guidance from event organisers and community leaders about what they look for in session abstracts. At the top of the form to add a new session, you can see a check-box to show in your public speaker profile. If you check this box, then the session will appear on your public profile. My public profile shows many of the sessions that I’ve submitted via Sessionize, as well as events that I’ve spoken at previously, or which are upcoming in my speaking calendar. Examples of Existing Profiles I’ve shared above the steps you need to follow from a practical perspective to get your Sessionize profile set up. However, sometimes it really helps to see examples of how other people use it, to get some inspiration and start to see what works for other people who have been doing this for a while. Several of my tech community friends, MVPs and public speakers, have kindly agreed for me to share their public profiles with you. Take a look at some of the accounts linked below, so that you can start to see how other people are filling in their profile information. And a HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has allowed me to publish their public Sessionize profiles here – you’re all legends! All of the speakers shown below are experienced, speaking at many different events – both virtual and in-person. Many of them are Microsoft Most Valued Professionals and / or Microsoft Certified Trainers. They cover a wide range of topics, of technologies and different areas of expertise. Sara Fennah, MVP & MCT Read Sara’s profile here. Chime Okure, MVP & MCT Read Chime’s profile here. Jon Jarvis, MCT Read Jon’s profile here. Yannick Reekmans, MVP Read Yannick’s profile here. Ana Ines Urrutia, MVP Read Ana’s profile here. Kaila Bloomfield, MVP Read Kaila’s profile here. Chris Huntingford, MVP Read Chris’s profile here. Vivian Voss, MVP Read Vivian’s profile here. Sarah Lean, ex-MVP & Microsoft Read Sarah’s profile here. Andrew Bibby, MVP & MCT Read Andrew’s profile here. Kevin McDonnell, MVP Read Kevin’s profile here. Check back soon for the next in this new speaker series, where we’ll start to look at tips for how to write a session abstract.

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Getting Started with Community Speaking

Zoe 365 — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:08:39 +0000

Within the Microsoft tech community, we have some fantastic speakers, but I’m really keen to support new speakers who are just getting started with community speaking. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been to so many events where I’ve seen lots of the same people time and time again. On the one hand, this is fantastic as I’ve made so many good friends, and every event feels like a reunion – an opportunity to reconnect, to strengthen relationships with the people I’ve already met. However, it is important that experienced speakers are able to support the development and progression of new talent – and ideally from a diverse background! I talked in this previous article about diversity in community, and it is important that we’re able to hear and learn from people who have different stories to share, different perspectives, who have had different experiences, as this helps make all of us better, more well-rounded people. Who can be a Community Speaker? The simple answer is that anyone can be a community speaker, and start presenting at tech community events. Everyone has a story to share, that someone else will learn and benefit from! Whether you’re sharing a “how-to” technical session, a demonstration, how to solve a specific problem, a customer scenario / case-study, art of the possible, strategy, roadmap, career journey, special interest group, imposter syndrome, career story – it doesn’t matter! There is space within the technical community for all of these and more, and you will bring your own unique perspectives and learnings, which is something that no-one else will have. Find your passion – and find your tribe! Think about the types of things you might talk about. Is this related to what you do for your job? Are you in a technical role, or do you work with a specific type of technology? What are you really passionate about? What stories do you have to tell? Are you early in career and want to share how you got started with your technical career path? Are you highly experienced, and want to deliver a deeply technical session, or share your strategic / leadership perspective? Do you care really strongly about things like adoption and change management, diversity and inclusion, accessibility? Have you had a really interesting and unusual career journey, or have overcome challenges within your career journey that other people could learn from? Do you have stories to share from the perspective of women in tech, neurodiversity, or changing your career later in life, and how this has impacted or benefited your overall career progression? What lessons have you learnt along the way, and what if anything would you do differently? When getting started with community speaking / contributions, it helps to narrow it down to the types of tech / community that you want to get involved in, as this will help you narrow down the search for the right place to get started. This may be a local or online user-group or a small conference that you’re aware of – but identifying what you’re passionate about will help you find your tribe. How do I get started with Community Speaking? Once you’ve narrowed down the types of things you might want to talk about at community events, you can then start to search for events that would be a good match for that type of session. I generally recommend that new starters get started with user-groups, as they are typically smaller, local, focused on a specific technology or area, and feel like a lower-pressure way to dip your toe in the water. User-groups are often held for a couple of hours on an evening, and will typically include 2 or 3 sessions, and for the in-person ones, there is usually a social element as well, which is a great way to start to connect with people with similar interests. Once you’ve found a user-group or small event that fits your goals, research how they manage the calls for speakers. Some do this using Sessionize, some just use a simple form or you can reach out directly to the organisers and ask how to get involved. Create a profile on Sessionize Sessionize is the most common platform used by event organisers, as it provides really comprehensive tools for requesting, reviewing and managing sessions from speakers. You can sign up for a free account as a speaker at https://sessionize.com/. Once you have an account, populate your personal details, including your bio, photograph, location, area of expertise and the topics that you want to talk about. Getting this ready now will mean that it is really easy for you to start responding to calls for speakers when you see them. In a future post, I’ll go into setting up your Sessionize profile in more detail, but for now, you can view my public profile here to see how I use it. Find a co-presenter Many established speakers within the tech community are keen to support new speakers who are getting started, and are open to co-presenting. So one way to make it really easy for yourselves is to identify your favourite speakers within the community, and reach out to them asking if they’d be willing to co-present. I actually prefer sessions with two or more presenters, both as an audience member and as a presenter – I find them to be higher energy, with more back and forth between the presenters, and as a speaker, it can be much easier to share the load with your co-presenters. If you’re going to do this, I’d recommend being clear on what you want to talk about, and it should really be aligned with what your target co-presenter likes to speak about. What next? Once you’ve identified where you want to start presenting, found a co-presenter and created a profile on Sessionize, the next step is to write a session abstract and start submitting! Over the past few years, I’ve reviewed countless sessions for events where I’ve been involved as a track lead or organiser, and have spoken with many other community leaders about what they’re looking for from a session abstract. Check back for the next in this series, where I’ll share with you the tips and tricks that have worked for me when it comes to writing a good session abstract.

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What is Employee Experience?

Zoe 365 — Mon, 09 Jan 2023 20:27:55 +0000

The world of work has been an incredibly stressful one for the last three years, with a huge amount of stress, pressure and flux affecting the way that we all work on a day-to-day basis, and impacting our employee experience. First, we all had to shift to working from home – for many of us, this happened almost overnight. Not all organisations were ready to make the change, and the first half of 2020 saw many companies speed up projects to deploy tools like Microsoft Teams, to enable people to be able to work from home. Teams usage absolutely sky-rocketed, and I’m sure many of you remember the struggles with the quality of calls or issues with bandwidth usage in their area. Then, things opened up again, and some companies started to try returning to work. Then we saw another lockdown, and another – before finally in 2021, things started opening up again, and moving to a semblance of normality. The focus on Employee Experience Some forward thinking companies were already starting to focus on employee experience (EX) prior to the pandemic – however, certain worrying trends emerged in the first half of 2020 which started to shine a light on the importance of thinking through what the employee experience should actually look like. Microsoft released the first Work Trend Index report and launched the Worklab site, where that and future research is published on a regular basis. In the first report, they shared the staggering increase that we all saw in Teams meetings – which makes sense, when you consider that this was the main way we were speaking with our co-workers. Further reports published during 2020 highlighted the impact of increased collaboration, highlighting the mental fatigue from being in constant Teams meetings, as well as the increased burn-out that many of us experienced due to increased workweek span, increase in meetings and increase in notifications. Microsoft responded to this challenge by announcing Microsoft Viva in 2021, which they describe as an employee experience platform. Statistics from the September 2020 Work Trend Index What do we mean by Employee Experience? Many organisations are discarding the outdated and traditional term of Human Resources, and move to a more employee / people-centric terminology, with a focus on employee experience. It is a response to the fact that people are demanding and expecting more from their employer and the work that they do. The pandemic saw many of us changing our priorities – we’ve had a taste of increased flexibility, and work on our terms, and we like it. I saw a statistic on LinkedIn last week that said the number of job postings being advertised as remote had dropped to 1 in 8, but those remote jobs received approx 50% of the applications, which is just staggering. So, we’re expecting more from our employee experience. And that EX covers all of the interactions that we have with an employer from the moment that we connect with them, right the way through to the point at which we leave employment. It is how employees think about your business, and it will impact how we as employees show up and interact with organisations. It is felt in how organisations treat us, in the culture, transparency, in the systems and processes that we have to use and follow. It is the tools, the apps, the way that we work, the ease with which we can be most effective, and deliver business value. Employers are recognising that they need to reimagine all aspects of their work – from recruitment, learning and development, benefits, how and when people work, the tools that they use, the levels of automation and innovation, the devices, the spaces and the places. The global war for talent will be won or lost by companies based on the employee experience that they offer. McKinsey defines EX as “companies and people working together to create personalised, authentic experiences that ignite passion and tap into purpose to strengthen individual, team, and company performance”. I like this definition, as it makes it feel more like a partnership between employers and employees, rather than something that just happens to us. It is also important that we’re able to quantitatively measure the employee experience – this could be through things that are measured systematically, such as device / app performance, or collaboration / productivity metrics. It also includes the need to measure sentiment, through a combination of pulse surveys and more formal engagement surveys. Improving Company Performance It’s also important to recognise that there are wider benefits to improving the employee experience. Companies that get this right can expect to see higher retention rates, better engagement of key employees, and improved profitability. The latest Work Trend Index pulse report published in September last year talks about how employee experience impacts business success, and their research found that only 15% of employees are engaged at work. They also found that highly engaged employees as 12x less likely to leave their company than those who are not engaged. Additionally, organisations with highly engaged employees have 23% greater profitability. This demonstrates that there is a huge amount of white space and potential improvement that can be achieved by turning the 85% of employees who are not highly engaged, into highly engaged individuals. Microsoft Viva This is where Microsoft Viva can help. Viva is a suite of tools that bring together everything that employees need to be successful in this new world of work, integrated with the productivity and collaboration tools that we’re typically all using every day. The products within Viva support different stages of the employee experience, across the four key pillars of Connection, Insight, Purpose and Growth. Additionally, last year we saw the first role-based Viva product with the launch of Viva Sales, which is targeted at making a sellers role easier and more efficient / productive. Microsoft Viva I will talk in more detail about the different components of Microsoft Viva in future blog posts, and you can follow the Viva Explorers to find out more about how to deploy Viva from a technical perspective. However for now, I wanted to share some of the key advantages that I think Microsoft Viva has compared to some of the more traditional HR focused products. Firstly, Microsoft Viva is part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, benefiting from the deep integrated experience with Microsoft Teams, the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem, third-party apps and integrates with the rest of the Microsoft Cloud. Microsoft Viva taps into the power of the Microsoft Graph, to help turn workplace data and insights into actions, and connecting Microsoft 365 signals for smarter work. Because it is built on the Microsoft Cloud, Viva benefits from the security and trust of the Microsoft tech stack – it is secure, with privacy at the forefront, and integrated with the wider security and compliance capabilities. Lastly, it is extensible, integrates with a wide ecosystem of employee-centric platforms, and can be used as a platform for custom solutions for organisations. Teams as the Experience Platform Microsoft Viva has incredible capabilities to deliver an improved employee experience – making it easier for people to connect, to find, to do, to protect their time and manage their work-life balance. However, when considering what an employee experience looks like for your organisation, it is vital that you remember one really important fact. The way that we all work today relies on Microsoft Team. It is the hub for teamwork, the place where work gets done – it is where we chat and collaborate, where we meet, where we learn, share, read and contribute. For many of us, Teams is the most used app on a daily basis, and should be absolutely front and centre of your employee experience strategy. The way that we access Microsoft Viva is via Microsoft Teams, and we can use Teams to integrate with and extend many of our other systems, making it the true front-door to the employee experience. While Microsoft Viva may be categorised as an employee experience platform, I’d argue that Teams is the gateway to the employee experience within an organisation. Ensuring that you have an effective deployment of Teams can be the most powerful enabler for EX ahead of deploying tools like Viva, and integrating with back-end HR systems.

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Zoe 365 Reflections on 2022

Zoe 365 — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 14:35:24 +0000

2022 saw big career changes The start of the new year is a good time to reflect and look back on 2022, including all the wonderful moments, the highs, the lows and everything in between. It feels like sharing my reflections on Zoe 365 is a good place to start the new calendar year. 2022 was a strange year for me, as it saw me change roles for the first time in 5 years – which wasn’t on my radar at the start of the year. I spent 5 years working for Agilisys, and during my time there I worked in multiple roles, with a huge group of absolutely fantastic people. I learnt so much during my time there and feel I really blossomed as a professional. They supported me through my MVP journey and I was given a huge amount of autonomy during my time there, which allowed me to really make an impact – internally, with clients and within the tech community. Saying goodbye to friends I’d worked with so long was difficult, but at the midway point of the year, I started my new challenge. At the start of July, I started in a new role at Avanade – where I’m also surrounded by an awesome bunch of people. Avanade is a Microsoft-focused tech firm full of passionate and innovative technologists – it’s a much bigger organisation than my last one, operating on a global scale. This means that I’m surrounded by lots of people who are smarter, more knowledgeable and more experienced than I am, which is really fantastic – it allows me to grow and stretch as a professional, and I’ve already learnt so much in the six months that I’ve been here. In my new role, I’m the Europe Workplace Value Realisation Offering Lead, and my focus is helping drive value out of investments in workplace technology. This role is great for me, as it allows me to focus on things like employee experience and the future of work, which are topics I’m passionate about (and speak about at community events). However, it has also given me the opportunity to learn more about topics like collab apps / collab controls, frontline worker enablement and the connected workplace. The Microsoft technology space is incredibly exciting at the moment, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can achieve in 2023. Awarded MVP for the 2nd year running Iwas awarded MVP for the first time in August 2021 – and to be honest, felt like a bit of an imposter for most of the following year! Although my roles tend to focus on the art of the possible for technology, I’ve been in leadership positions for the last 6-7 years which means I’m not delivering hands-on technical solutions. I do however tinker and test a lot of the new stuff that Microsoft release, as I think it’s super important that I actually understand how it all works! In July 2022, I was delighted to be awarded MVP for the second year running – this went some way to convincing me that the first year wasn’t a complete fluke! In the last 12 months, I’ve nominated three community members for the MVP award and am actively supporting others who have either been nominated already, or who I feel are on the right trajectory for MVP. I’m always happy to talk to people who are active in the community and want to know more about what it means to be an MVP – if this is you, please feel free to contact me. My second MVP award, being inspected by one of my cats, Mishka The Viva Explorers In 2022, a group of MVPs formed the Viva Explorers, which is a community of like-minded Viva evangelists who aim to share knowledge, present and product content together, and generally drive education of what Microsoft Viva is. I’ve already written about the Viva Explorers, so you can find more information on this page. Community Rocks! 2022 was the year where we really saw more in-person events taking place, and it was just SO fantastic to connect with so many of my community friends in real life. In the UK, two key highlights were the Scottish Summit in Glasgow, which took place in June, and the South Coast Summit in Southampton, held in October. I was part of the organising team for Scottish Summit, which was a great experience – I’ll write more about this experience in a separate article in coming weeks, as there are some fantastic lessons to share from being part of the team. I was also a track lead and volunteer at South Coast Summit for the second year running, and again this was another great event. Microsoft Ignite clashed with this event, so we started proceedings early with an Ignite watch day on the Thursday, followed by pre-conference workshops on the Friday. Myself, Chirag Patel and Kevin McDonnell delivered our Viva and Syntex workshop again, which was a lot of fun. The social activity at South Coast was great, with an Oktoberfest event on the Friday, and the charity pub quiz on the Saturday. Talking of the pub quiz, my team won both the Scottish Summit and the South Coast Summit pub quiz events, which is definitely up there as a highlight of 2022! In 2023, we’ll be aiming to retain our crown for sure. 👑 Me with some of the Bratwurst and Chill quiz members after our victory Tricia, Laurie and myself dressed up for the Oktoberfest party at South Coast Summit Me and Sara Fennah in full Scottish Summit merch Presenting on Viva and Dynamics HR at Scottish Summit Me and Chris in our captain costumes at the South Coast quiz Winning team Bratwurst and Chill collecting their trophy Me and Ana at the Scottish Summit quiz Attendees of the Viva and Syntex Workshop at South Coast Summit The South Coast Summit quiz team hosts and captains Bratwurst and Chill, complete with me dressed as a Bratwurst The winning quiz team Bratwurst and Chill, at South Coast Summit South Coast Summit Previous Next Another massive highlight for me was getting to speak in-person at the European SharePoint Conference for the first time. It was also my first time to Copenhagen, which is a beautiful city. In 2020, I was selected to speak at ESPC which was meant to be held in Amsterdam – however, the pandemic forced this event to go virtual, so 2022 was my first time attending the event in-person. It was an amazing experience, I loved everything about it. And it felt like a great way to finish the years events. The image below shows most of the speakers at the event – there were some great Microsoft presenters, as well as some of my community heroes who I’ve looked up to for years. ESPC was great for me on many levels. We delivered a workshop on Viva and Syntex to a much bigger audience which was a lot of fun, and the Viva Explorers delivered a panel session as well. I got to network and interact with some incredible people from Microsoft and the global tech community. I learnt a huge amount, and was able to have a lot of fun during the week in Copenhagen. I’m hoping I will be lucky enough to be selected again for this coming years event! Previous Next Looking Ahead to 2023 I don’t generally make New Years Resolutions, as I find it sets me up for failure. Instead, as I look ahead to 2023, I’ve set goals for the year ahead. Focus on being healthy – this looks like eating better, drinking less and exercising more. Be more consistent about creating online content – hence, starting this blog, Zoe 365! I will aim to post something at least weekly throughout the year. Be happy! Make an impact in my new role in 2023. Actively mentor / sponsor new female talent into public speaking and community activities.

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Learn About The Viva Explorers

Zoe 365 — Thu, 05 Jan 2023 09:04:38 +0000

Who are the Viva Explorers? 2022 was the year that the Viva Explorers were officially founded, although the story starts slightly before that. In December 2021, Lesley Crook – the founding Viva Explorer – was encouraged to set up a new blog by her boss at Cloudway, Stale Hansen, to start blogging. She called her blog the Viva Visionary, and published 12 Viva related articles throughout the month of December. She was joined now long afterwards by Sara Fennah, and then myself and a group of other early Viva evangelists and MVPs, and the Viva Explorers officially became a thing. All of the Viva Explorers are Microsoft MVPs or Regional Directors, and this was quite a deliberate decision. Microsoft Viva is such a new product that is changing at pace, with many new modules, features and capabilities being announced in 2022. At this point, in January 2023, we’re still under the two-year mark since Viva was even announced publicly, so it is a very new emerging product, and arguably the first full employee experience platform. We decided early on to keep the explorers to only MVPs and RDs as this would allow us to fully discuss and digest any NDA- information in order to ensure that we understand what is coming from a Viva perspective before it gets announced publicly. We do work closely with a lot of Viva enthusiasts though, who might not be MVPs yet (or even targeting it) but who are out there sharing content and speaking about Microsoft Viva. One of the other things that we’ve started to do – which I absolutely love – is to tag-team, and deliver joint sessions with new co-presenters, that we might not have presented with before. In my view, sessions with more than one presenter can be more engaging – as well as easier on the presenters – and allows multiple perspectives and views to be shared in the session. It also makes us better, as it gives us another mechanism by which we can learn from one another. What the Viva Explorers means to me Technology as a whole is evolving at an exponential rate, and this makes it more challenging to keep up to date. I need to make sure my knowledge is current so that when I talk to customers and colleagues – or when I present at events – and across the entire Microsoft 365 stack and the wider related tech ecosystem, there is just too much for any one person to manage. One of the clear benefits that I get from being a part of the Viva Explorers is the network of peers, and how we work together to help each other stay up to date and understand what changes mean is incredibly valuable. I also love the fact that I feel part of something – part of a community who are all working hard on top of our day jobs to educate people around the importance of employee experience, and how Microsoft Viva can be used as the technology platform that enables an improved and equitable employee experience. Within the Viva Explorers, I’m surrounded by so many fantastic people from around the world who all have different backgrounds, different roles, different areas of focus and expertise, and working with them as part of this community helps me to become a better and more well-rounded leader, as I am able to benefit from their different learnings, perspectives, and viewpoints. I definitely feel like I’ve found my tribe Artwork by Merethe Stave, showing the personas for the early Viva Explorers The Viva Dreamer All of the Viva Explorers have a persona, and mine is the Viva Dreamer. As a senior leader working for Avanade, a global systems integrator, my role requires me to understand the art of the possible with Microsoft Viva and the wider Microsoft 365 stack. I help clients “dream big” and map out their medium to longer-term roadmap for employee experience, collaboration and productivity, and then walk them back through the steps that they need to take to help them get there. It is important to remember that improving employee experience is a journey, and one that will constantly evolve, but being able to dream big, to map out your vision and strategy for employee experience is vital in making sure that the steps you take along the way will support your longer term goals. Zoe Wilson, the Viva Dreamer Viva Explorers Highlights in 2022 Last year was a busy year for the Viva Explorers. We delivered Viva sessions at many events – both virtual and in-person – as well as organising our own events for the first time. In November 2022, we ran the first Viva Explorers Community Day in Manchester, UK, and had almost 50 people join us for a full day of Viva sessions covering the overarching view of employee experience, all the individual modules / pillars within Viva, new products and roadmap announcements, as well as a guest session from Al Eardley sharing the UK Microsoft view. The following week in early December, a similar event took place in Toronto, Canada, with a whole host of speakers and attendees joining a wide range of Viva sessions. When I first started speaking at events about Microsoft Viva some 18 months or more ago, audience numbers were quite low – it was a new product, people didn’t really understand much about it or the benefits of it, and so interest at that time was low. It’s been really heartening for me to see increased attendee numbers throughout 2022, and to see so many people giving up their weekends to travel to events that are solely dedicated to Microsoft Viva. Viva Explorers Community Day, Manchester 2022 The biggest highlight of the year for me though was the European SharePoint Conference in Copenhagen at the end of November. This is such a big conference with attendees and speakers from around the world, and it was the first place where we were able to get such a big contingent of our global Viva Explorers present in the same place. Myself, Kevin McDonnell and Chirag Patel delivered a full-day pre-conference tutorial at the start of the week, looking at all things Microsoft Viva and Microsoft Syntex – we had almost 80 people attend which was fantastic. Every time we’ve delivered this workshop previously, attendees have been capped at ~10 people due to room size, so it was fantastic to have a much bigger audience. The rest of the Viva Explorers delivered a number of great sessions throughout the main conference, and many of us spent time manning the Microsoft Viva “ask the experts” stand, answering questions throughout the week from attendees. On one of the conference days, we arranged a Viva Explorers meet-up for a group photo in the event app, and were delighted to be joined by none other than Jeff Teper and Adam Harmetz, who wanted to understand more about who the Viva Explorers were and what we’re all about! Viva Explorers with Jeff Teper & Adam Harmetz Plans for 2023 2023 will be a busy year for the Viva Explorers. As a group, we will be presenting at many virtual and in-person conferences globally, sharing our views, perspectives and tips for Microsoft Viva. Alongside that, we’ll also be running more of the Viva Explorers Community Days around the world as well, following the great success of the first two that took place last year, in Manchester and Toronto. However, one of the activities that I’m most excited about for the Viva Explorers is the opportunity to run a conference within a conference, as we will be hosting the Viva track for Commsverse, which is currently the only dedicated Microsoft Teams conference in the UK and Europe. Call for speakers is due to open next week, on the 9th of January, and will include a dedicated track for all things Microsoft Viva. Watch this space for more information about what we have planned throughout the event! If you run a conference or event and would like support with your Viva track, please reach out to one of the Explorers and we’d be happy to work with you! Want to know more? Check out the Viva Explorers website to find out more about who the rest of the Viva Explorers are, as well as access our latest content and activities. If you’d like to know more or get involved, please get in touch.

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Improving Diversity Within Our Community

Zoe 365 — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 20:33:11 +0000

How do we drive more diversity within our tech community? This is a subject near and dear to my heart. Being a woman working in the tech industry, I’ve come up against my fair share of challenges throughout the years, and even now, there are many situations where I’m the only woman in a room or a meeting. Over the last 6 or 7 years, I’ve interviewed over 150 candidates for technical roles, and I can count the number of women that I interviewed during this time on both hands. So from a gender perspective, there is the issue of not having enough women who are staying the distance to become the experienced technical hires, which is then compounded within the tech community by a lower proportion of women typically putting themselves forward for things like public speaking. Then, we can start to look at this from another diversity lens – and while I might have had challenges as a woman working in tech, those challenges are significantly greater for Asian, Black and ethnically diverse women, who typically have to work harder, to higher demands and for less pay than either white women or men. We have a real diversity problem in tech – we need to attract more diverse candidates into technology careers, either when they leave education or by targeting those returning to work / switching careers, and to do this, we need to ensure that we’re presenting the right image of what a career in tech could look like. We also then need to make sure that once we get people into tech careers or into the tech community, that they feel included, that they feel a sense of belonging – we need our world to be one that is inclusive to everyone. Now, in this post I’m not going to get into how we increase diversity and inclusion in the tech industry as a whole, as that’s a much bigger conversation. However I did want to take some time to look at some positive actionable step that we within the tech community can take, that can make positive changes. One way that we can get more women (or those who are Asian, Black, ethnically diverse / LGTBQ+ / religious diversity / disabled) into tech is by ensuring that we have more visible role models – there is a famous saying from a 2011 Sundance documentary (Miss Representation), where the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund said “you can’t be what you can’t see”, and what this means is that without other women to look up to, many young women are self-selecting out of a technical career path before they even really give it a chance. “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Marian Wright Edelman I will start this section by saying first of all that I see loads of great examples of events where the organisers are doing great things, where they have diverse speakers, where the audience is diverse, and for all of you who are doing the right thing – please keep up the good work! However, there is still more to do, and what I want to share here are some practical things that you can do as event organisers and community members to increase diversity within your own events. I attended my first SharePoint Saturday in London in 2017 or 2018, and saw some great speakers – some of whom had travelled from around the world to share their experiences and perspectives with us. I remember watching and learning from these speakers and being inspired to start submitting my own speaking sessions, with my first session being accepted for SharePoint Saturday in London in 2019. Since then, I’ve spoken at tonnes of events – some virtual, some in-person, some in the UK and some abroad. I’ve been part of the organising team for the fantastic Scottish Summit in Glasgow, been a volunteer and track lead for South Coast Summit and volunteered as an online moderator for many other events. In this time I’ve crossed paths with many event organisers and with many speakers, and I’ve watched and observed what good practices look like when it comes to improving diversity. I’ve also seen many bad examples as well – not so much with events that I’ve been involved in or spoken at, but I have seen a TON of events recently that feature an all-white all-male speaker roster. It is LITERALLY the first thing I notice when I’m looking at a speaker line-up. If all of your speakers are men, I probably won’t even look at who the speakers are or what the session abstracts are about, as you’ve instantly just turned me off your event. If I feel like this as a seasoned speaker, how do you ever think your event is going to pull in a diverse audience if all your speakers look the same? Speakers at the European SharePoint Conference 2022 So, we recognise that tech in general has a diversity problem. We also understand that to solve this, we need to have more visible diverse role models. One way that we can do this is through the tech community that we know and love, and if you organise events or run a user group, there are some practical things that you can do to help. I must give credit to Mark Christie who published some of these on twitter earlier today, via the Scottish Summit account, as well as a variety of our community members who commented and replied with great suggestions. The Scottish Summit team in particular are a shining example of how to address the challenge of diversity, inclusion and accessibility head-on, and I’ll share more about my experience of working with them in future posts. Take a look at your organising committee Does everyone on your organising committee look like you? Are you all from similar backgrounds? Similar ages? Same types of roles, experiences, accents? If your organising committee are all the same type of people, then the speakers you attract will likely be the same type of people, and this will translate into the audience that you attract to your event. Taking a positive step to invite diversity into your organising committee will help you start to attract more diverse speakers, and that will help you attract a more diverse range of attendees. I watched Scott Hanselman talk about sponsorship, mentorship and how we get more young people into tech careers at ESPC last year, and one of the things that he shared which struck me was that inclusion isn’t being asked to dance – it is being a member of the party-planning committee.The best way to include everyone is to start right from the beginning, with the people who are putting on the event. Blind session scoring One way to remove any bias from reviewing speaker submissions from your event is to use blind session scoring, where the reviewers judge the content based solely on the title and abstract. We would recommend that you could also go a step further and have someone else go through the submissions prior to review, to make sure the speaker hasn’t referred to themselves by name in the session abstract – I’ve seen this used before as a way to get around blind session scoring. Additionally, you can also get them to remove any pronouns, job titles or community awards – basically anything that would allow the reviewers to identify them and thus lead to bias in the scoring process. Proactively reach out to new groups If your call for speakers has been open for a while, you’ve had loads of sessions submitted, but the diversity is lacking, then you need to try a different tactic to increase the diversity at your event. What does this look like? Well, it looks like reaching out to new groups, to new communities that exist within our own communities. There are tonnes of sub-communities within the Microsoft tech community that cover a huge and diverse range – find the people who lead these communities and reach out, ask them to get involved. Make them feel welcome and wanted, create a space for them and support them through the process Support for new speakers Having processes and support systems in place that can make it easier for people to get started with public speaking can make a huge difference. Not everyone has experience of presenting – and even if they’ve had to present something for work or school / university, they may not be a confident speaker. Creating a new speakers track, with support and mentoring for people who want to get involved, can be a really powerful way of encouraging the next generation of community speakers to get started. I’ve seen this take different shapes at different events, with everything from a public commitment to reserve a certain number of slots for new speakers right the way through to a structured mentoring program for new speakers, with helpful planning and preparation calls covering everything from writing a session abstract through to technical storytelling skills. There is no one size fits all, but definitely think about how you can support your new speakers. Organisers & speaker at the Viva Explorers event Manchester Nov 22 Additionally, there are further practical things that we can do within the tech community, such as mentoring / sponsorship, offering to be a co-speaker for a new speaker – however I’ll dive into these in more detail in future blog posts, as this is already far longer than I intended it to be! Diversity and inclusion means something different to all of us, depending on our background – I come at this from the perspective of gender, because that’s personal to me and something that I’ve been able to identify as the cause of many challenges throughout my career. Other people will have their own thing, and the best way that way that we can be inclusive – and create an inclusive community – is by being open to hearing and recognising the perspectives and challenges that other people share, and by creating space at the table for people from diverse backgrounds to get involved, and to tell us what works for them. I’d love to hear from you – please share comments and feedback, or feel free to reach out to me directly.

The post Improving Diversity Within Our Community first appeared on Zoe 365.

Welcome to Zoe 365!

Zoe 365 — Wed, 04 Jan 2023 10:29:25 +0000

Hey everyone! This is the first official post of my new blog, Zoe 365, and I just wanted to say a HUGE thank you for coming over here, I’m delighted to welcome you all here, and hope you find something useful! I figured I’ll start off by sharing a little bit about me first of all. I’m an IT professional, who has spent the lasts 16+ years of my life working with various forms of SharePoint initially, and then in more recent years, broadening out to the wider Microsoft 365 stack, with a particular focus on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Viva. I’ve always been super interested in that intersection between people and technology, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of helping people solve problems, particularly using tech to make their life easier. I’m a Microsoft MVP for M365 Apps and Services, which has been a fantastic experience for me over the last 18 months – I love the opportunities I get to share and give back to the Microsoft tech community that has been so welcoming to me. I’m big on diversity and inclusion, and get particularly passionate (read: shouty) about accessibility, and about women in tech. I think it is really important to be as inclusive as we can, and one of the things I love about the Microsoft 365 platform is the sheer range of accessibility features available at every level, from operating system, through the various products, browsers, mobile apps etc. It is so easy for us all to be more inclusive, but most people don’t even realise this stuff even exists! Fun with community friends in European SharePoint Conference 2022, with a trip to Tivoli Gardens for the Christmas Market From a women in tech perspective, well, I am a woman who has worked in tech for nearly 20 years now, and even after all these years it is SUPER common for me to be the only female in the room. When I was younger, I did have a few difficult experiences, where I wasn’t taken seriously, was ignored and passed over for promotion due to being fresh-faced and female. While I don’t have these problems now, we’re still lacking from having a diverse group at decision making level within the IT industry, and I want to help fix that. I actively mentor both within and outside of my organisation, I’m a member of the Women in Teams community and I am trying to be as vocal and visible as possible, to show young girls just how great it can be to work in tech. Outside of work, I love music, I am an avid reader, particularly science-fiction and fantasy, I love cooking (in particular on the bbq) – and eating! – and I love people. Spending time with friends and family, and making new friends – this is one of the things I love about the MS tech community. Anyway, that’s enough about me for now. Over the coming weeks and months, you’ll learn more about me as I share my thoughts on Microsoft 365 related tech updates, but also some of my random thoughts and reflections on life in general. I’ll be taking a look back at some of the great stuff that happened in 2022, including events and the Viva Explorers, as well as sharing existing and new content. Watch this space!

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