Change is hard 😓
We need consistent reinforcement of the behaviours we want to change 💪
Check out some quick and simple ways to do this, even while working remotely in this video 📺
Want to find a nice, quick way to reward employees doing something good when they're working remotely?
By the end of this video, you'll know how to use the Praise app in Teams to increase adoption.
But watch all the way to the end to make it more personal, engaging, and adding a little bit of competition and gamification into it as well.
I've got new videos on Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 coming out every Tuesday, so make sure you hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified when they come out.
I'm Gavin Jones, a former Transformation Manager for a Fortune 500 Company, and now help organizations of any size with modern workplace transformations.
If you're interested in working together, then stick around until the end, to find out more.
Praise Basics
Okay, so we'll quickly go through Praise basics, Praise in replies to keep things in context, we'll have a look at Praise in the new Insights app, then we'll go on to look at how to create a bit of competition in your organization to help adoption and also lastly, we'll look at a way you can scale yourself to be more personalized and really engage your employees. So stick around at the end for a nice little tip to help you.
But for now, let's just jump into Praise, it's pretty quick. This one, pretty quick and easy. So if you start a new conversation, you should have a Praise little icon at the bottom which looks like a little badge. If you haven't, it'll be in the three dots. And Praise will be there until you use it once, and then it will probably appear somewhere down here.
So if we click on Praise, we get a nice little box. if you never used this before. You could pick a little badge to give to someone, a bit like SAP SuccessFactors. We can send people badges and you can do this in Teams. And it's the Teams one, nothing to do with SAP, but you might've used SAP SuccessFactors before in your organization, if you're a larger organization.
So say we wanna say someone's awesome, we click on the awesome badge. It's got a nice rainbow unicorn. We can type a note to say why they are really good, and why we are giving them a badge. And then we can type a name of someone to give it to.
So I can't give one to myself, we're in the YouTube testing teams, [Indistinct], but then if you click preview, we'd get a preview. It just shows you what the badges are gonna look like. And then you hit send, it at mentions the people there, and it goes into the team.
So if we just jump into our modern workplace accelerator team which is where we host all of our clients that are involved in that program. If you want to find out more than stick around until the end of the video, where we help people with modern workplace transformations. Here, I sent a badge to Anthony and Ramneak 'cause they got through phase one of the training and gave me some feedback. So I gave them an achiever batch. It posts it to the team and then at mentions them for you which you can see down here. So they're going to get pinged about it.
All that was done when I clicked send praise. So that's a nice little way to get some engagement going in your company.
To keep things in context, so say that I really want to reward someone for doing something and that in the moment when they were just doing it in Teams and rewarding for being in Teams, you can send praise in replies. So you want to keep everything in context, as much as you can when you're using Teams it helps everybody get back to what was being talked about.
If you hit reply, you get the same options and you can click the praise button there. And then the praise card would go as a reply in line with that conversation. So you can keep everything together. Still the people that get at mentioned whoever you put it to but it helps just to keep everything in context together if you do praise in replies.
Praise In Viva Insights
The last place you can do praise from is now the new insights tab in Teams.
If you haven't got it, it'll be in these three dots and insights will appear there. It's just appearing right on the side for me because I've pinned it there. If you don't see it in the three dots you might have to search for it in the app store in Teams and then just add it into your client. But once you've got it it appears as a tab at the side and there's loads of stuff you can do in Viva Insights and there's going to be more coming as well.
If you want to know more about Viva Insights and the insights tab then let me know in the comments below and I might do another video on Viva Insights for you.
But for right now, Viva Insights also suggests some activities for you. One of them is send praise to your colleagues because we don't praise our colleagues enough. And there you can click send praise.
It's going to be very, very similar. We can say someone's a problem solver, click who to send it to, and then you get the options either do it in a one to one chat so you can send praise in one-to-one.
But I think the best thing about giving praise is that it's open. It's helping people work out in the open and also rewarding them. If just you and them know about it it's not going to be as good. And then if you click team, it's just very similar, you have to get so that the team and the channel that you want it to go into.
Then time to personalize the note, and then preview and shows you what the card is going to look like and then hit send. And it's going to go into the team and channel for you or the one-to-one chat if that's what you selected. So comment below and let me know if you use praise in your organization or if you've got any other tips about how to make people feel more welcome when they're working remotely.
Create Competition With Public Teams Data
So what I like to do though to help with adoption is create a bit of competition. And there's a really easy way to get some stats from teams that you can then use to give people scores. And it's really good for use for the senior manager team where if they're not already engaged and they just don't know what to do you can just give them some really simple things like you just need to post a lot of stuff in the team. You need to do perfect posts or app mentions and replying in thread, you know, all the basics done and give them points for that.
And here's an example of one that we just did for fun in our pilot of our modern workplace accelerator course which is now out of pilot and is accepting new clients. If you want to know more about that then stick around until the end about how to get in contact. But it's just nice little thing. No one wants to be at the bottom of a leaderboard, especially people in sales, and especially people in senior management. So it's a great little tip and to get the scores for there. So this was day since last posts, number of posts, perfect posts, perfect post percentage, whether people have filled in the feedback form.
So if you follow our recommendations and launch a feedback form, when you want to get people into a more modern way of working and launching a whole new rebrand of your culture using technology that you already got, you will want to get some feedback. You then just got that little formula to derive a score from that. And no one then wants to have the lowest score. So it really drives their behaviors as you want to see. And to create that spreadsheet, to get the data, all you need to do is search for somebody in your organization. So I'm going to search for Paul. Paul will pop-up, he's a guest 'cause he's one of our clients. But if it's internal, it'll just be the same, just not say guests.
And then you click on the activity tab and then you can see everything that they've posted in a team that you have both got permissions for. So you can't see things that they've posted in a team that you don't have permissions for. But assuming that you follow our recommendations, have a few larger teams, then you should be seeing them post in the team that you want them to post into. And therefore you can then go through and see how many times they've replied, how many times they've started new posts, and put all that into your little dashboard.
It only takes 20 to 30 minutes just to do that by hand, especially if you've just got a handful of senior managers that you're running that competition for, and then just go and publish that spreadsheet into the team so that it's visible and everyone can see it and just creates a nice bit of competition and a bit of friendly banter between the parties that don't want to be last and even give it a bit of praise to them, to the person that's at the top using the praise app.
Use Stream For Personalised Video Messages
So then the last best little tip I think for creating a culture of engagement and welcoming and wellbeing is to not only use the praise app also to give some quick personalized messages from your senior leaders down to employees that are adopting the behavior that you want them to do to change the culture because it's all about habits, it's all about reinforcement.
So if we just dive into, I've got the iPad actually but you can use it on your phone, the stream app, and we're going to record a nice little personalized video message. I like to do this on LinkedIn to some of my people that follow me on LinkedIn. So if you're interested in following on LinkedIn, say hi on social, the links in the description below, and you might get a recorded message from me to say hi.
For the people that like it's really really much more engaging than sending a text, or if you want it hit every medium. So people that like texts, we've got the praise badge, also, if they want to watch a video, we've got a prerecorded video as well. Just hit the plus, record new video. And we can just do a video, something like this. Hi, just want to say thanks for doing great work this week. I've sent you a badge, a hope that you really appreciate it. Looking forward to seeing what else you can do next week and keep up the good work.
So you just record that video on stream. We'll hit next. So you could jazz it up with other things, we're going to leave it as this, we'll hit done, and then we can either upload now or upload later. We'll call it something more meaningful.
So, praise message test and we'll click upload. Now we can put some description of the video or use hashtags to collate it all together. If you're using stream, more like that. It's going to process it in the background. We'll hit next again, and then visible to everybody is going to make it so it's visible to everybody in the entire organization. So for ease, you can put that on or you can go into stream afterwards and just make it available to the people that are in that team. If we click on video options, we can have auto-generate captions, which is great for accessibility, and then we're going to hit publish.
So our video videos published, to change the settings on the video then tap edit video. We've made it visible to everyone. You can just go and post that in the team straight away. Assuming you didn't want to make that visible to everybody, we can just jump into the stream app on the web from your waffle menu, and then click on my content videos. You can see the one you just did. And then if you go in to update the video details then we can change the permission. So, sharing it with my groups.
They were going to search for testing team for YouTube. It's not a great search. So you need to have the first, a bit of it. If you search for YouTube, see, it would not find that. Group can't be found. And the groups in Teams, I think Microsoft is changing Stream around, but for right now groups are SharePoint sites or teams and channels aren't channels in teams, they're channels in streams, they can set up different collections of videos, which is also called channels which Microsoft use the same name for different things across different apps, which is quite confusing.
But for groups, that's what we need to put it into a team. And if we open up that permission then we can display the video just to any member of that team and not the entire organization which is something you might want to do.
We'll hit apply. And then we go back into Teams, assuming that I got some praise for this message and there's some praise there, or create some new praise. You can then reply and use the stream button there. If you didn't have that, again, it's going to be a three dots for the first time you use it, then jumps down the bottom, and then you can paste a link from Microsoft Stream to there.
So if we jump into Stream and hit share, we'll copy that link from Stream, paste it into here and send. And then we've got a nice embedded video into Teams and people can go watch that back. The other option is just to record it from your phone as a file, and then just save the file into Teams and go and paste the file into the post bit of Teams so that people can see it. And the person who's message it was for can get back and then see that video message.
It'd be better Microsoft had embedded video in Teams, especially because, you know, makes it a nice little card when you do a video from YouTube, but for Stream, it just says view this video on Stream and you can't see it there. Same with a video file. Again, you can't play it back directly in the chat but it would be nice if Microsoft made that. If you think that too, then let me know in the comments below as well.
But I hope you see that benefit of recording a personalized video. It really helps with engagement, especially if from a senior person to someone more junior, as well as using the praise app to create a bit of engagement and excitement and use that competition to drive people to do the behaviors that you want them to do consistently because it's consistency that is key.
I've just shown you a nice little way you can create a culture of inclusion in your organization using a very simple app and not taking much time.
If you want to find out how to change the culture or organization to make your employees lives easier and more engaging with more wellbeing, then book a free strategy call with me. I'd love to have a chat and see if I can help you out at all.
So check out these videos next, remember to give the video a like, subscribe and if you really like the video, consider supporting the channel by buying me a beer. It really does help support the channel. But thanks for watching so far and we'll see you in the next video.