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 companys 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 companys 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 companys strategy
Translated workforce data into insights business
leaders can act on

Products and technologies

Microsoft Azure Microsoft SharePoint Online

Microsoft Dynamics CRM SAP

Skype for Business

Business Case Study

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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 wasnt 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 companys 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 companys
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
companys 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 companys 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 companys
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

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HR Core Services
One major goal was for the companys 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 HRs 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.
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This extensive global infrastructure was an easy choice for the agile and resilient platform of HRs
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. Azures
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 managers 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 employees 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

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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.

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Figure 5. The AskHR agents Microsoft Dynamics Unified Service Desk

Elevated support is provided by telephony, taking advantage of the companys 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 thats 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. Theyre 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 werent 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 companys
recruiting efforts. HR can adjust how they deploy their recruiters, such as increasing or decreasing

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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 candidates 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 companys 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 theyre 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).

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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
Its 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-demandand 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 companys 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 its 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.

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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 Azures automatic scalability. HRweb would also
benefit from Azures automatic scalability in a scenario such as acquiring a company.

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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 wasnt particularly easy to use and there wasnt 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 strategyemployees impacts on the businessall while staying within budget.

Manage Rewards is an easy-to-use tool that is available from a managers 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. Its 100 percent based in the cloud and built on Azure, so its 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

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HR outsourced development of this portal to a vendor. Both HR and the vendors 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 didnt have real-time data; Global Pay Services; and Paytools, another
internal applicationand 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. HRs 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 HRs 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.

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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 Azures robust and agile global
infrastructure. Whether its 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 isnt wasted,
opportunities arent lost, and they have a great experience.

There are always sufficient resources for the service to meet demand because of Azures automatic
scalability. And the service is fault tolerant. If a server fails, Azure automatically replaces it without
affecting users. The companys 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 companys 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 Azures App Service, employees and their families are able to access the
service from virtually any device using Azures Active Directory for authentication to make sure they
are securely connected, meet regulatory requirements, and meet their needs.

Managers self-service Team page

The managers self-service Team page enables greater manager engagement and accountability with
data at a managers 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.

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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 Microsofts 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 dont 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 HRs 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 companys 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 Microsofts 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 Azures
authentication, employees and their families seamlessly access payroll and benefit information

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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

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www.microsoft.com

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