Improving company communication for remote working: a use case

With the advent of COVID19 and lockdown, issues about home working and smart working became a main topic. Many companies found themselves in the need of some support solution for the employees, that can give them not only instruments for communication, but a central hub that may be a common interface between departments, trying to ease daily work life. This thesis has the goal of proposing a solution to improve the interaction of employees with an external news feed, making it simpler and more comfortable to use in a smart working condition. Basing on a real use case, we started the existing solution based on an intranet “legacy” and we studied a solution easier to use also in a multi-device fruition from home, with many fresh functionalities. To make these, we considered the cloud platforms adopted by the company and so already available and familiar to the employees. In this context we studied which one could satisfy the requests in the better way, both in terms of technology, security and user experience. After analyzing the situation, the state of the art and the possible solutions, we opted for Microsoft Teams, platform largely used for company 1:1 communication, but also capable to provide also the requested functionalities. In this way we created a direct channel, immediate and familiar, for company-employee communication. From a practical point of view we can obtain this result with an app that can embed the news flow and many related functionalities. In the months of lockdown, Microsoft Teams platform has been at the forefront in providing support to companies that suddenly had to front the remote working. Also, in the specific use case Teams was already largely used as a communication instrument. However, in the present context it became much more important, becoming the central hub for everyday work life. For these reasons, in this thesis we’re going to explore the potentials of the platform, and to analyze the benefit that it’s adoption can bring in a business context. During the development of the thesis, the candidate will take care of the following activities: Analysis of the business need in the specific use case and the possible solutions to the problems, based on the current state of the art Analysis of Teams environment, its base functionalities, its integration with Microsoft 365 and its user experience Analysis and description of the possibilities of integration with the business environment Implementation of an app proof of concept that allow to interact through Microsoft Teams with a flow of business news Analysis of the impact and improvements that this new interface could have on everyday work life The goal of the thesis is to analyze the real problem and propose a solution. In particular the proof of concept that will be realized using Microsoft Teams will be applied to an intranet company context, allowing to change the way human resources department communicates with the rest of the employees. With our solution we want to substitute the traditional email and flat fruition of content through a web interface, with a new and fresh solution, realized through the integration in Teams. We’re going to analyze the real context of business communication, focusing on the “company news” concept, at the beginning based on a “legacy” technology. We’ll define the technologic perimeter that will be adopted to implement this news flow on Microsoft Teams, and how this can enrich and innovate the experience