Enabling Hybrid Work Scenarios with Collaborative Apps

An American retail and outdoor recreation services company saw an opportunity to rethink their approach to office space when the COVID pandemic hit. After cancelling plans for a new, centralized corporate campus, leaders looked to modern work technology to ensure the employee experience and close collaboration that drove their unique culture persisted in a hybrid world. Turning to their familiar enterprise collaboration and communication platform, Teams, this innovative retailer worked with Valorem Reply to build and manage a custom app that would help geographically disperse staff gather in-person during hybrid work and make the most use of meetings and workspaces when in the office. The resulting Teams application utilizes Microsoft Graph, Bing Maps, and Yelp Fusion to enable employees to:

Check who will be in the office on a given date.
Check the availability of and book workspaces and meeting rooms.
Check the audio/visual capabilities, seating capacity, and location of meeting rooms.
Quickly arrange meetings with colleagues during times they are available.
Locate colleagues close to them.
Find local venues and public spaces conveniently located for meeting colleagues outside of office buildings.

In a hybrid work world, the digital employee experience is the employee experience.

– Jared Spataro, Corp VP Modern Work, Microsoft

In the new world of hybrid work, we talk to clients every day that are struggling to balance and maximize the value of face-to-face interactions as their employees come back to the office. The employee experience is taking a hit when team members are not in the office at the same time to connect in person. Converge is a great tool to address this issue.

- Marcus Ruyle, Director Digital Workplace, Valorem Reply

CHALLENGE

Employee experience at risk without pre-pandemic level of connection and collaboration
De-centralized office spaces throughout metro area
New employees unfamiliar with workspace availability
No insight into hybrid schedules of colleagues
Frustrating first come, first serve workspace making in-office utilization inefficient

SOLUTION

A JavaScript app for Microsoft Teams that utilizes Microsoft Graph, Bing Maps and Yelp Fusion to find workspaces, meeting rooms, and local venues that are convenient for colleagues.