Modernizing HR at Microsoft · PDF fileModernizing HR at Microsoft ... Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SAP. ... Microsoft Dynamics Unified Service Desk provides agents with

Business Case Study

IT Insights A service of Microsoft IT Showcase

Modernizing HR at Microsoft

June 2015

To support major strategic and cultural shifts at Microsoft, the HR Reimagined

initiative helped the company deliver a seamless, engaging HR experience for

over 100,000 employees worldwide. Microsoft Azure was an easy choice for

the platform to support this global effort, enabling HR to take advantage of

their existing investments in software for an industry-best solution.

Situation

Microsoft decided to realign its corporate strategy to meet the evolving needs of their customers and

implemented cultural changes that required rethinking HR strategies such as recruiting, retention, training and

development, and performance management. This realignment ensured that the organization maintained a

strong link between corporate strategy and HR strategies. However, the employee experience remained

complicated and disjointed. To be a strategic enabler for the company’s transformation, HR had to be reimagined.

Solution

HR leadership took a progressive approach to achieve the goals of the organization. They focused on strategic

planning, prioritized investments, and modernized the portfolio to fully embrace the social, mobile, analytics, and

cloud philosophy, in alignment with industry trends. Their deliverable was a global shared service and portal for

the company’s worldwide workforce that provided robust employee and manager self-service functionality,

enabled recruiters to share prospects, delivered new approaches to learning and readiness, and made HR data

available through self-service Power BI.

Benefits

Increased productivity and reduced costs

Tied talent strategies to corporate strategies

Made recruiting more of a competitive

advantage

Improved employee satisfaction

Helped employees develop the skills to deliver

on the company’s strategy

Translated workforce data into insights business

leaders can act on

Products and technologies

Microsoft Azure

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Skype for Business

Microsoft SharePoint Online

SAP

www.microsoft.com/ITShowcase

2 | IT Insights: Modernizing HR at Microsoft

Situation

Microsoft HR, like other organizations, strives to build a progressive corporate culture that unlocks

the full potential of its employees and managers to deliver significant business impact. But the

business of HR was disjointed and unwieldy, and it wasn’t offering employees and managers the tools

they needed to completely achieve this goal.

Microsoft implemented significant changes

Microsoft implemented significant changes to better meet their customers’ ever-evolving needs. It

also embarked on a new mobile-first, cloud-first corporate strategy and undertook a far-reaching

corporate reorganization and cultural changes, called One Microsoft, to better align the company with

the new strategy.

To help drive the strategy and cultural changes, Microsoft fundamentally altered its approach to

managing employee performance and development to promote new levels of teamwork and agility.

HR had the lead role in designing and implementing the new approach and a key role in delivering

the new strategy and cultural changes.

The state of Human Resources

While HR strove on a daily basis to help employees deliver their best work, it was often difficult for

employees to find information and use tools for HR matters, such as training, performance reviews,

compensation, and benefits. The tools defined the processes instead of the other way around. This

was largely because HR was a product of the company’s phenomenal, sometimes hectic, growth over

its 40 years in business. Some of the issues affecting HR included:

Different systems and processes in the countries Microsoft operates in affected the company’s

ability to make informed strategic business decisions on a global scale.

Tools had multiplied over the years into a patchwork of disjointed interfaces and functionality,

delivering a less-than-optimal experience that was not cost effective.

Many tools did not work on the corporate network or on mobile devices, not living up to the

company’s mobile-first, cloud-first strategy.

Systems were not easy to customize for different levels of engagement with employees or

prospective employees, to more effectively attract, develop, and retain talent.

Opportunities were lost because there was not a simple way for employees to find and take

training to develop their skills.

To be a strategic asset for the company’s transformation, HR had to undergo an extreme makeover. It

needed to deliver a seamless, engaging service experience to over 100,000 employees and potential

new hires worldwide, delivering greater business impact, and driving HR and business innovation.

Solution

The highest levels of HR leadership created a global HR team to support the company’s

transformation. This team was tasked with creating the vision that would change the HR organization

and service for employees, managers, and prospective employees worldwide. They called this vision

HR Reimagined, which encompasses the following four areas:

Deliver HR Core Services

Attract Talent

Develop Talent

Retain Talent



HR Core Services

One major goal was for the company’s worldwide workforce to use the same HR service and

processes, which would accommodate local requirements. A goal of One Microsoft is to standardize

systems company-wide.

Deliver an HR Service

The key deliverable of HR Core Services was a global shared service, HRweb Reimagined, in the cloud

(currently in beta), an all-encompassing, tightly integrated, HR portal that provides holistic, on-

demand, anywhere convenience. The service had to support all of HR’s global business needs.

(However, the current on-premises HRweb, also links to employee and manager self-service in the

cloud.) Through the HRweb portal, employees can update personal information on their self-service

page (Figure 1). Information updates are done in real-time, directly to SAP. Since these pages are in

the cloud, they are available anytime, anywhere.

Figure 1. My Personal Information page on the HRweb portal

Figure 2 shows a high-level view of implementation of the service, the types of HR processes it is used

for, the people/personas who use it, and the devices they use.

Figure 2. The HR global shared service implementation

To support the worldwide Microsoft workforce, the service has to be accessible from anywhere.

Microsoft Azure operates out of 17 regions around the world, which all have numerous datacenters.



This extensive global infrastructure was an easy choice for the agile and resilient platform of HR’s

global shared service.

The service also has to be highly available. If a web server has a hardware failure, Azure will

automatically replace it. To help manage user access to the service, HR federated user identities to

Azure Active Directory and enabled multi-factor authentication for more secure sign-in.

During peak usage, such as when employee reviews occur, the system has to meet demand. Azure’s

platform as a service (PaaS) components automatically scale up, adjusting the number of servers to

meet the current load.

HR was able to provide compelling mobile solutions on a wide variety of devices, because the Azure

App Service provides full-featured support for cross-platform and native apps for iOS, Android,

Windows, and Mac. Using software as a service (SaaS), HR was able to use existing software by both

Microsoft and third parties, such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SAP. Because

they decreased the number of tools and designed a robust service, HR was able to use SAP as the

sole source of employee HR data. For example, to get address information, the user interface (UI)

communicates with SAP in real-time through Azure.

Employees and managers have real-time access to the appropriate HR data and exceptional tools,

which empower them to perform more HR self-service tasks. HR Core Services provides self-service

functionality through the HR global shared service. HR also provides a full range of ready-to-use tools

and services to create, deploy, and manage reports, through Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services

running on an Azure virtual machine.

Manager self-service with the Team page

With the manager’s self-service Team page on HRweb (shown in Figure 3), managers now have one

place to perform all HR actions for their employees, such as changing an employee’s employment

profile, title, compensation, and even promote them.

With even a few employees, it is easy for a manager to lose track of the HR transactions that are in

progress and the status of each. On their Team page, managers see the status of transactions that are

in progress for each employee and can click a link view the details. The Team page is on HRweb,

which is built on Azure, so it is available anytime, off the corporate network, and on any device.

Reporting is provided and based on SQL Services.

Figure 3. The manager self-service Team page on the HRweb portal

Employee self-service with the My Personal Information page

Before the HR Reimagined initiative, employees could perform a limited set of actions on their

HR-related information and it required multiple tools. Employees can now access and update



personal, employment, and financial information in one place, My Personal Information, their self-

service page on HRweb (Figure 4).

Personal information includes details such as an emergency contact. Employment information

includes employment history and work details. Financial information includes US Payroll, W4, and

direct deposit preferences.

Figure 4. My Personal Information page on the HRweb portal

Answering HR-related employee questions

HR implemented AskHR, based on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, to efficiently manage HR-related

questions and tasks. Employees can access it via the HRweb portal, email, and telephone. Microsoft

digitized and centralized data to enable robust analysis of employee issues and support service

delivery.

Agents are in a central support center. Microsoft Dynamics Unified Service Desk provides agents with

a tool that provides all the necessary data (Figure 5), including an extensive knowledge base that

helps agents find the right information for an employee no matter what country or Microsoft division

they are in.



Figure 5. The AskHR agents’ Microsoft Dynamics Unified Service Desk

Elevated support is provided by telephony, taking advantage of the company’s worldwide

deployment of Skype for Business, and is used for complicated or sensitive issues, Tier 2 support,

increased accuracy in response, and legal requirements.

Enable BI analytics

HR is making HR-related data available to internal customers through self-service Power BI. The data

comes from different cloud-based sources, such as Microsoft Dynamics and SAP, but the customers

can see all of their data on a single live dashboard, because HR used out-of-the-box connectors and

other tools. The data could also come from on-premises sources.

Executives are currently the target audience for analytics. They are using the dashboards HR provides,

as well as creating their own, to visualize data that’s important to them so they can more easily

foresee trends (Figure 6). They explore data further by using the underlying interactive reports,

discovering new insights that they can pin back onto the dashboard to monitor going forward. They

are sharing their dashboards and reports with their teams and across the company. They’re also

interacting with their dashboards and reports on the go, in a touch-optimized experience with the

Power BI app for Windows and iOS apps.

One of the ways they are using self-service Power BI is to predict employee attrition, which helps to

ensure that Microsoft is staffed to meet business needs.

Figure 6. HR Business Insights Power BI-based dashboard

Attract talent

Recruiting

HR changed the way recruiters at Microsoft share prospects across the company. Recruiters used to

have their own lists of prospects. They weren’t easily shared or analyzed, and when recruiters left,

their lists left with them. With the new global shared service, recruiters store their interactions with

prospects in a shared service built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, removing barriers to sharing

prospects, for the benefit of Microsoft.

Microsoft embraced talent analytics to analyze the volumes of data it generates from the company’s

recruiting efforts. HR can adjust how they deploy their recruiters, such as increasing or decreasing



recruiting at a university, shifting resources where the need is greatest, to get higher returns on their

recruiting efforts.

The millennial generation and other prospective Microsoft employees relate differently to technology

and social networks than those of just a few years ago. To attract and retain top people, Microsoft

needed to connect with candidates and employees in richer, more fluid, and interactive ways. It

implemented social recruiting, taking advantage of the tools and resources people use in their

everyday life. HR is leveraging the power of social networks to source and engage candidates.

Recruiters can view a candidate’s LinkedIn profile within CRM instead of using an outdated resume

from company files. They can tag and enter notes about candidates when they interact.

Candidate experience and onboarding

HR transformed the candidate experience. Throughout the interview process, prospective hires are

encouraged to use the Candidate Experience app (Figure 7), built on Azure and accessible through

the devices of their choice. The app is a digital companion for prospects during the interview process

and enables them to experience the company’s mobile-first, cloud-first strategy.

Figure 7. The Candidate Experience app

Through the Candidate Experience app, prospective hires can check in for interviews, view the

interview schedule, learn more about their interviewers (including biographies that are pulled from

LinkedIn), book a shuttle to an interview, get alerts if someone is running late, and get information

about the city they’re interviewing in.

When candidates are hired, to help ease them into their job, HR provides new employees with an

onboarding dashboard on HRweb (Figure 8).



Figure 8. The Onboarding dashboard on the HRweb portal

Through the Onboarding dashboard, new employees can perform tasks, such as create or update

their LinkedIn profile, get to know their teammates, see what recent training their peers have taken,

and view upcoming meetings.

Develop talent

Employee learning and readiness

It’s a challenge to provide employee training for a large multinational company like Microsoft.

Employees were confused about what training was available, what was required, and where to get it.

There were many sources of training, such as Role Guide, a Windows 8 app built on Azure that

provides targeted learning; Infopedia, an employee-sourced site built on SharePoint Online; and

Academy, a site used to host webcasts and then make them available on-demand—and many more.

HR needed to provide a new approach to the learning experience at Microsoft to ensure employees,

managers, and leaders were ready, engaged, and empowered to drive the company’s transformation

and cultural priorities. HR determined they could do this through better integration of formal training,

such as Role Guide, and informal training, such as Infopedia. They standardized Infopedia (Figure 9),

making it the learning portal at Microsoft, targeting learning opportunities based on business

priorities. Infopedia now provides training about Microsoft and its products as well as information

about:

Analysis of the competition

Reviews of different industries and the public sector

Required training and when it’s due

Recommended training

It also provides the ability to build-out a training plan and to develop skills for the current job or the

next. Employees can stay on top of it all with live tile and email notifications.



Figure 9. Infopedia: the learning portal at Microsoft

Conducting employee performance reviews

Performance management was an annual global process at Microsoft. An employee had a mid-year

career discussion and an annual review with their manager. The employee was stack-ranked on a bell

curve with their teammates; the process provided a once-a-year feedback loop. With the new One

Microsoft strategy, HR reimagined the HR experience for over 100,000 employees worldwide,

transforming the process from stack ranking to a holistic model that manages, evaluates, and rewards

employees for business impact.

To support the new performance management approach, HR developed Connect, a tool that enables

employees and managers to have frequent engagements around performance, business impact, and

career development (shown in Figure 10). These engagements occur three or four times a year and

cover what the employee is doing well as well as areas for improvement.

Figure 10. The Connect performance management tool on the HRweb portal

Connect is 100 percent cloud-based, built on Azure, and is accessible anytime, anywhere, and on any

devices. A cloud-based solution was the natural choice, given the dramatic seasonal bursts of activity,

followed by slower periods, taking advantage of Azure’s automatic scalability. HRweb would also

benefit from Azure’s automatic scalability in a scenario such as acquiring a company.



Evaluating employee compensation and promotions

In the past, managers used an off-line, stand-alone tool they downloaded to evaluate an employee

for salary, bonus, reward, and promotion. It wasn’t particularly easy to use and there wasn’t much data

to help them manage their budget. It was difficult for a manager to see how a change for one

employee, such as increasing a bonus, affected their other employees.

HR developed the Manage Rewards tool that helps managers more effectively evaluate employees for

changes in salaries, bonuses, rewards, and promotions, and a new criterion that is critical to the One

Microsoft strategy—employees’ impacts on the business—all while staying within budget.

Manage Rewards is an easy-to-use tool that is available from a manager’s self-service Team page

(Figure 11). It is all on one screen and has simple sliders to help managers evaluate their employees’

impacts on the business, potential changes in compensation, promotions, and real-time data to help

them stay within budget. It’s 100 percent based in the cloud and built on Azure, so it’s accessible

anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Figure 11. The Manage Rewards tool on the HRweb portal

Viewing the total value of employee pay and benefits

Employees often do not realize the total value of their base pay, bonuses, stock, and benefits. To help

them appreciate this value, HR now provides the total rewards portal. It pulls information from many

different sources to display the value of an employees’ compensation and benefits (Figure 12). It

provides historical and current views, as well as future modeling.

Figure 12. The Total Rewards Portal in a personal computer browser and our mobile app



HR outsourced development of this portal to a vendor. Both HR and the vendor’s services are in the

cloud, so integration was much easier. The vendor provides SaaS to the HR service using Azure

authentication; this enabled fast, real-time calculations. If either HR or the vendor had used on-

premises components, it would have been difficult to implement and performance would have

suffered.

Retain talent

Accessing pay and benefits information

HR had multiple tools for benefits and payroll. SAP was at the core, along with HeadTrax, an internal

line of business application that didn’t have real-time data; Global Pay Services; and Paytools, another

internal application—and many more.

While this complexity was largely hidden from employees, it was a difficult situation for HR and

limited the experience they could offer employees and their families. There were multiple databases,

none of which were a single, comprehensive source of HR information. To access benefit and payroll

information, employees had to be on the corporate network, making it difficult for employees and

their family members to access pay and benefit information. HR’s goal was to reduce the number of

tools and provide a better experience for employees and their families (such as a seamless transition

between different sources of information) and to make it more manageable for HR.

Figure 13 shows the My Benefits Dashboard from HRweb. HR partnered with a vendor who integrates

with providers such as health insurers to offer information to employees and their families through

HRweb. SAP is still the core of the system, but now it is the sole source of Microsoft HR information.

The vendor followed HR’s UI standards and it interfaces with SAP in real time through Azure.

Figure 13. My Benefits Dashboard in a personal computer browser and the mobile app

Benefits of HR Reimagined

HR leadership took a progressive approach to modernizing the portfolio, standardizing processes,

and simplifying the user experience. By providing employees and managers access to HR information

through a one-stop-shop portal, HR enabled productivity increases and achieved cost savings

through robust functionality, such as enhanced employee and manager self-service features.



HR core services

Deliver an HR Service

Microsoft HR, managers, and employees worldwide always have access to HR information and

functionality when they need it, because the service is built on Azure’s robust and agile global

infrastructure. Whether it’s accessing payroll information from a work computer in New York or taking

training on a personal phone while riding the bus in Beijing, employees’ time isn’t wasted,

opportunities aren’t lost, and they have a great experience.

There are always sufficient resources for the service to meet demand because of Azure’s automatic

scalability. And the service is fault tolerant. If a server fails, Azure automatically replaces it without

affecting users. The company’s worldwide staff is able to efficiently perform their HR-related tasks and

have a positive experience.

HR is able to effectively manage costs for the service, paying only for the hardware they use, because

Azure features are cost-optimized. HR pays for CPU cores by the minute and storage by the

megabyte. Having on-premises datacenters would require a substantial investment to support peak

worldwide usage, such as when employee reviews occur, and then a significant portion of the

investment would often sit idle. The cost savings were even greater when HR switched from using on-

premises test environments. HR was getting approximately six percent average resource usage for

their on-premises lab hardware. With Azure, HR can deploy test environments for a few months,

weeks, or hours, and again, pay for only what they use.

HR was able to take advantage of existing investments in software by both Microsoft and third

parties, such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SAP. Because they used existing

software, HR was able to also use existing business rules, decreasing the time, complexity, and cost of

development.

HR designed the service to use SAP as the sole source of employee HR data, enabling them to better

support the company’s evolving global business demands through quicker access to relevant data,

analysis, and reporting. And employees, managers, and HR are able to create, deploy, and manage

the reports their teams need, because the service provides robust reporting capabilities. To help

manage user access to the service, HR federated user identities to Azure Active Directory and enabled

multi-factor authentication for more secure sign-in to support user needs, secure user information,

and meet regulatory requirements.

Employees and managers have real-time access to the appropriate HR data along with superior tools

that empower them to perform more HR self-service tasks. They require less IT assistance, which

reduces costs. Because HR was able to cost-effectively build cross-platform apps for multiple

operating systems using Azure’s App Service, employees and their families are able to access the

service from virtually any device using Azure’s Active Directory for authentication to make sure they

are securely connected, meet regulatory requirements, and meet their needs.

Manager’s self-service Team page

The manager’s self-service Team page enables greater manager engagement and accountability with

data at a manager’s fingertips. Managers can perform HR tasks more efficiently without assistance

from IT, which helps manage cost.

Employee self-service with the My Personal Information page

Employees can perform more self-service HR-related tasks on their My Personal Information page,

helping to maintain accurate information. Since updates are done in real-time and link directly to SAP,

they are fast and seamless, provide a terrific employee experience, and the self-service functionality

helps manage HR costs.



Answering HR-related employee questions

The AskHR central support model has led to an increase in the number of cases per staff ratio, helping

to manage costs. Greater efficiencies were also achieved through automated case routing,

assignment, and communications on case creation and case resolution. The knowledge base has

increased agent response accuracy and consistency, leading to an increase in customer satisfaction.

Enable BI analytics

Executives use the insights obtained through self-service Power BI dashboards and reports to make

more informed business decisions on a global scale, helping to drive Microsoft’s business. They share

the dashboards and reports with their teams, which helps establish unified goals.

By using self-service Power BI to predict employee attrition, for example, they are able to proactively

manage headcount, keeping Microsoft staffed for maximum effectiveness. Because they don’t need IT

to create a dashboard or run a report, costs are effectively managed.

Attract talent

Because Microsoft recruiters now share their lists of prospects in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, the

sourcing infrastructure is better able to help them find the best talent for positions. Integrating

LinkedIn with Microsoft Dynamics CRM improves HR’s ability to find and follow talent, creates tighter

connections with candidates and their networks, and enables the company to identify and hire talent

that has the capacity to be truly transformative for the company.

The Candidate Experience app acts as a digital companion for the interview process, making it a

better experience for potential new hires, enabling them to experience the company’s mobile-first,

cloud-first strategy, and providing a competitive advantage for Microsoft in attracting top talent. And

new Microsoft employees have more of an impact on their first day because the onboarding

dashboard provides them with the information they need, all on one page, to help get them up to

speed fast.

Develop talent

By standardizing Infopedia as the learning portal for Microsoft, training opportunities are not lost. The

easy-to-use holistic site allows employees to find and take training and develop their skills, thereby

helping to drive Microsoft’s business.

Connect enables a more effective performance management experience for employees and their

managers, and brings performance management in-line with the One Microsoft strategy. Connect has

outstanding performance and availability, with IT support tickets in this area at an all-time low. And

managers have the tool they need in Manage Rewards to effectively and efficiently evaluate their

employees while staying within budget.

Employees can easily find the total value of their current compensation, as well as historical views and

future modeling, using the Total Rewards Portal. They are often pleasantly surprised by the value of

their total compensation, leading to greater employee satisfaction. Since the vendor provides SaaS to

the HR service using Azure authentication, calculations display quickly and employees experience

seamless, robust functionality.

Retain Talent

By reducing the number of tools, HR made the global shared service easier to manage, thereby

reducing cost. Since HR and the vendor services for payroll and benefits information are both in the

cloud, transactions are amazingly quick. Because Azure provides single sign-on through Azure’s

authentication, employees and their families seamlessly access payroll and benefit information



anywhere, anytime, and on any device, providing a great experience and more satisfied employees

and their families.

Best Practices

Increase productivity with self-service portals.

Use the cloud to keep information safe and deliver service anywhere on any device.

Give employees the skills they need to compete and increase business impact.

Elevate the discoverability and summarize the total value of compensation and benefits to attract

and retain talent.

Tie talent strategies to corporate strategies.

Translate workforce data into insights business leaders can act on.

Resources

Microsoft IT Showcase

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb687780.aspx

Microsoft Azure

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/

Digitizing the Interview Experience

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/microsoft-it/reports-2014/workforce/default.html?page=4

Employee Self-Service at Microsoft with HRweb

https://www.microsoft.com/itshowcase/Article/Content/71

Reimagining Human Resources: Microsoft Enterprise Site

https://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/business-leaders/reimagining-human-resources/default.aspx

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information

Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Order Centre at (800) 933-4750.

Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access

information via the World Wide Web, go to:

www.microsoft.com


© 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Microsoft and Windows are either registered

trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The

names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective

owners. This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES,

EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb687780.aspx

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/

http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/microsoft-it/reports-2014/workforce/default.html?page=4

https://www.microsoft.com/itshowcase/Article/Content/71

https://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/business-leaders/reimagining-human-resources/default.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/

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Modernizing HR at Microsoft · PDF fileModernizing HR at Microsoft ... Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SAP. ... Microsoft Dynamics Unified Service Desk provides agents with