38 COVER STORY Mobile devices for frontline workers and cloud-based solutions such as the Tasks and Shifts apps in Teams are also helping users to carry out operations more efficiently while managing their workloads. Microsoft has also been researching how organisations can use artificial intelligencepowered solutions to overcome some of the common issues that are causing employee productivity, efficiency and morale to decrease. The AI-powered Viva Personal Insights within Microsoft 365, for example, provides users with a personalised and private view of their work habits to help them prioritise tasks and increase productivity. Organisations can also opt for ‘Focus Time’ to be automatically scheduled onto users’ Outlook calendars to fit around their meetings for that day, helping them to better manage their time and reduce stress. Some companies have found that the burnout levels in remote and hybrid workers correlates with a lack a sense of connectivity to their team. Microsoft’s New Future of Work 2022 Report found that 61 per cent of individuals surveyed had reported lower connection to their colleagues as a key barrier to remote work for fear of less social activity with their team members and lower visibility to leadership. However, 76 per cent are interested in using technology to facilitate better connections. Microsoft Viva Engage is just one example of the Microsoft technologies workers could use to facilitate better communication and collaboration between co-workers. Integrated in Teams, Viva Engage allows colleagues to connect through text and video messages, and uses AI to power the ‘Answers in Viva’ functionality, which provides users with pre-existing answers to their questions or connects them with an internal expert. This saves employees the time that it takes to source the answers from other team members and helps them to feel connected to others in their organisation. As colleagues are no longer all working in the same office at the same time, the number of virtual meetings has increased, with a 252 per cent rise in the average Microsoft Teams user’s time spent in meetings since February 2020, according to Microsoft. This has introduced new challenges to everyday work life such as meeting inequity and fatigue. Due to this, it is more important than ever for businesses to invest in platforms such as Teams to help facilitate real-time communication and devices such as headsets and conferenceroom microphones that enable people to host productive meetings. Audio hardware provider Jabra, for example, is focused on combatting the ‘leaf blower’ problem – when a big distraction for one participant in a meeting has a knock-on effect for other team members and makes the meeting unproductive. Its Speak2 range of speakerphones have noise-cancelling microphones and voice-level normalisation technology to avoid meetings being impacted by background noise, increasing participants’ concentration levels. Hybrid work also means that some participants are joining virtual meetings online whilst others are joining from the office, often resulting in the key interactions of the meeting being missed due to outdated technology causing issues such as audio delays or participants being unable see one another. Audio and video solution provider EPOS is helping to alleviate this problem through its EXPAND Vision suite of products. For example, the EXPAND Vision 1M camera uses an 8x digital zoom camera, an integrated electromechanical privacy shutter and intelligent picture framing powered by EPOS AI to adjust the frame of the camera to capture the amount of people sitting in a meeting room. This enables participants to engage with everyone while speaking. “ As leaders look to embrace AI, it becomes more critical than ever to prioritise having a data-driven business, fortified with digital and cloud capabilities” JUDSON ALTHOFF, MICROSOFT
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