Why you need to go to modernity—and beyond

While we may have slipped easily into remote working, many of us needed to embrace new tech to better replicate the office experience. We still craved face-to-face meetings and water cooler serendipity. And business continuity meant maintaining open, direct dialogue between our teams and our clients was essential. With an ever-changing landscape and, more recently, a pandemic, we are reminded that our priority is to collaborate as fast and safely as possible.

Here at Accenture, we aim to use technology to create the best employee experiences. We want to bring the right tools to where our people work, not the other way around. Which is why we chose Microsoft Teams as a solution to improving collaboration and productivity company-wide. As part of our journey to an elastic, digital workplace, we are using Teams’ versatility to make our business more agile. It’s an approach that has required us to encourage our people embrace modernity and go beyond “business as usual” ways of working.

Get things done

Microsoft Teams is a chat-centered collaboration platform that brings together collections of people, content and tools to get things done. Our updated case study shares how we’ve deployed Teams in stages to transition from organic growth to large-scale access and adoption. And the process was made easier given that Teams is woven into the Microsoft Office 365 fabric—a familiar platform for Accenture people.

Today, all of our more than 500,000 people have transitioned to Teams and Accenture is Microsoft’s largest enterprise user. What does that look like? Well, our monthly stats include 107M minutes of video conferences, 1.1B minutes of audio, 582M chat messages and 70M mobile minutes. We have seen a massive increase in overall Teams usage—257% increase for audio and 642% for video usage in the past year.

We’ve worked together with Microsoft to create a Teams Resource Center to share leading practices. And we’ve seen how Teams has brought its magic to a broader context—transforming and enhancing the relationships with our clients and between our own people, partners and vendors.

Here’s just some of the benefits you can realize from embracing Teams:

• You can be more inclusive: Facilitating deep connections and engaging partnerships demands a collaboration tool that’s woven into the productivity fabric. Unlike the social dynamics of face-to-face meetings, online meetings are a level playing field in terms of people weighing in on a big idea and can bring better solutions to your customers.
• You can collaborate more easily: Teams enables our clients to join meetings, chat, share and co-author files, dissolving the barriers between them and Accenture teams to enjoy the “holy grail” of collaboration. Video means people can be themselves, humanizing conversations and introducing expertise from anywhere in the world at the click of a button.
• You’ll enjoy consistent meeting experiences: The Teams Rooms functionality gives offices video conferencing and collaboration devices in meeting spaces with a familiar Teams user experience. Accenture implemented a solution to use Teams to schedule all video device meetings, no matter the device type. More than 700 Microsoft Surface Hubs are being used as a favorite device for brainstorming in our company’s innovation hubs. A proximity join feature that enables people to start a meeting without having to touch any Teams devices in the room can also help the transition back to the office and further enable the digital worker with a greater sense of safety.

By modernizing our way of working using Teams, we’re bringing the data, insights and services to where our people work, and putting the tools in their hands to live a truly cloud native life. Read the full Teams story for more.