Dell Technologies boosts culture and eNPS scores by using Microsoft 365 to modernize work for its global employees

Dell Technologies has built its business with a purpose: create technologies that drive human progress. To do that effectively, Dell’s 150,000 employees need to collaborate and innovate across a diverse and fast-paced business. Srikanth Ramaswamy, Global Lead for Modern Content and Collaboration Services, Dell Digital Team Member Experience at Dell Technologies, works to enable consistent and effective collaboration throughout the workforce. In practice, that means choosing technology that can handle the high-stakes reality of communications at Dell. “It all starts with team activation,” says Ramaswamy. “We look for best-in-class productivity tools that help us provide a modernized experience for Dell employees while maintaining a high level of security.” 

That search led Dell Technologies to embrace Microsoft 365 as its solution to support the company’s vision for modern employee experiences. Today, Dell uses Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Viva, and Yammer to foster collaboration, and ultimately, support employees. “We’re driving Microsoft 365 as a foundational suite of tools for enacting our vision for a modern, seamless employee experience,” says Ramaswamy.

Creating a more streamlined digital workplace with Teams and SharePoint

Michael Gray, Presales Programs and Strategy at Dell Technologies, describes Microsoft 365 and Teams as key elements of Dell’s strategy for modernizing work. “A lot of us have changed the way we work,” Gray says. “We’re using Teams to collaborate with greater efficiency. My colleagues and I feel we’re much more productive and have a better quality of life now.” The ability to simultaneously collaborate on documents, chat with colleagues, and effortlessly meet is very different from the conference call–laden and email-intensive processes Gray experienced in the days before Teams. “It was a very liberating experience when we rolled out Teams,” he says. “Today, we use Microsoft 365 and Teams to bridge gaps.” 

Gray recalls how the support organization at Dell previously used email to flag and resolve issues, a process that now happens in Teams. The change has dramatically reduced how long it takes for issues to get resolved. “We can now have a Teams chat with everyone who’s involved in an escalated support issue and resolve it in a few hours instead of a few days,” he says. 

Dell also turned to Microsoft 365 to help the company minimize the number of tools its employees use to accomplish their tasks, moving toward a single pane of glass solution—something Ramaswamy cites as a pillar of Dell’s vision for collaboration and employee engagement. He states, “Today, we‘ve eliminated multiple applications from our environment and standardized on SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.” The company consolidated like this in direct response to employee surveys, where feedback indicated a desire for a more standardized set of tools to reduce sprawl. “We moved from 30 or so tools to 6 or 7 over the last two years,” Ramaswamy continues. “Consolidating and focusing on Microsoft 365 started to increase our employee satisfaction Net Promoter Score. In the span of six quarters, we improved our score by more than 60 percent.”

Building culture across a diverse workplace

SharePoint in Microsoft 365 provides the basis for Dell’s intranet—yet another facet of the company’s vision for an enhanced employee experience. “In the past, most of our culture-building initiatives happened via our intranet,” says Hunter McConnell, former Internal Communications and Intranet Strategy and Operations Lead at Dell Technologies. He saw the move from an application-based intranet to SharePoint as an opportunity to boost those initiatives even further. “Moving to SharePoint for our intranet means we can provide better access to knowledge and tools because SharePoint is part of a unified set of tools rather than one of the siloed tools we used to build culture in the past.” Today, employees can access Dell’s intranet directly from Teams, with Microsoft Viva Connections as the front-end portal that helps keep culture front and center. They don’t need to leave the flow of work to find relevant, timely content and tools.

McConnell describes how crucial collaboration and communication tools are to Dell’s culture. “We have a highly entrepreneurial and innovative culture,” he says, “and tools affect culture.” With that in mind, McConnell and his colleagues rolled out Yammer. They provided employees with this enterprise social network partly in response to the realities of hybrid work, which is increasingly the norm at Dell. “Promoting culture can be really difficult when lots of employees work remotely,” says McConnell. With Yammer, Dell employees gained a dedicated platform to explore communities of interest, ask questions of their colleagues, and engage with company leadership. “Our vision is to use Yammer to provide that key social component and cultivate open, ongoing discussions that encourage people to learn and grow together,” he continues. “For example, it’s a great place to connect with leaders.” 

To foster those connections, Dell launched a leader-connect series on Yammer. “We’re also promoting Yammer as the central place for storing questions and answers,” says McConnell. “Anyone in the company can check Yammer to determine if someone has already asked a question, and if not, ask it there and get it answered quickly.” In this way, Yammer acts as a knowledge management solution in addition to an employee engagement platform.

Dell also uses Yammer to epitomize the “learning in the flow of work” strategy the organization has embraced. “When a creator or a community owner starts a conversation in Yammer, employees can engage with that content no matter where they’re working—in Teams through Viva Engage, a mobile version of the app, or SharePoint,” says McConnell. “We all have the shared benefits of Yammer, even when accessing it differently.”

Microsoft Viva Insights is Dell’s latest product adoption for building culture and engagement. Personal insights from this and other modules in the Viva suite can help Dell team members who opt in improve productivity and promote a better work-life balance. “I’ve definitely felt the personal impact of Viva Insights,” says Gray. “I have a better understanding of how I’m using my time, and I use the focus time feature to block out uninterrupted time on my calendar. Using Viva Insights helps me be a lot more relaxed at the end of my day.” 

Reducing costs and supporting self-service innovation

In line with Dell’s innovative culture, the company is launching Microsoft Power Platform to tens of thousands of global employee citizen developers. “Dell is full of intrapreneurs who will take our existing technologies and tools to the next level using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI,” says McConnell. “There’s so much incredible value in Microsoft Power Platform—we’re really excited about tying those capabilities in to everything we’re already doing with the Microsoft 365 platform.” 

Ramaswamy and his colleagues in the Modern Content and Collaboration Services team consider Power Apps an appealing alternative to the costly and often time-consuming process of specialized, in-house app creation. “IT used to develop the apps,” he says. “We would design, build, and test apps before handing them back to the business.” This method created bottlenecks and occasionally exposed gaps between what users envisioned and what was built. “Custom app development will remain big at Dell, but including citizen development is hugely beneficial,” says Ramaswamy, who describes a new process where employees have free rein to create apps but then engage the help of IT when it comes time to launch. “A marriage of the two processes will give us the best user experience and reduce total cost of ownership for new apps.” McConnell agrees, “People view Microsoft Power Platform as a huge opportunity area versus going out and having that buy discussion.” 

Tech-savvy Dell team members were the first to embrace Microsoft Power Platform, but the tools have quickly spread to include more user groups—even those without specialized knowledge. “Teams is a great starting point for the Microsoft Power Platform components,” says Ramaswamy. “Dell employees have already created thousands of Power Apps applications and automated flows with Power Automate. We’re using Microsoft Power Platform to rethink what we can enable the business to accomplish on a self-serve basis.” 

With its vision for a streamlined employee experience, Dell worked to ensure that security didn’t suffer in the process. “Dell’s culture focuses on the user experience in conjunction with security,” says Ramaswamy. “We’re banking heavily on Microsoft 365 to achieve that.” To manage user identities and simplify the sign-in process, Dell uses Azure Active Directory to create a single sign-on experience for employees. “Our widespread use of Microsoft 365 is bringing us closer to our vision of a seamless experience,” says Ramaswamy. 

Promoting more flexibility and a seamless experience

Even before COVID-19, Dell embraced a more flexible hybrid work environment for team members around the globe. Today, the company’s vision continues to evolve. “Our future state is driving that continuity of information and a seamless experience for our team members to make their days easier,” says McConnell. “People should be able to work without having tools act as a bottleneck to their success.” 

That strategy, where tools fade into the background and productivity flourishes, is part of Dell’s effort to provide a better work-life balance for existing employees and attract new talent. “Our grand vision is for a unified employee experience,” McConnell concludes. “Culture is how we retain great talent, and we’re using Microsoft 365 tools to ensure that employees have a modern work experience.”