Full post here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/09/22/seven-ways-were-empowering-every-person-and-every-organization-to-thrive-in-a-new-world-of-work/

We are experiencing digital transformation at epic speed. COVID-19 has accelerated secular trends in the ways we work and live, jumpstarting durable new habits that will persist well past the pandemic.

Throughout 2020, as we’ve navigated the equivalent of a year of digital transformation every month, it’s IT pros who’ve led the way. When COVID-19 caused a sudden shift to remote work, IT pros brought entire organizations online—sometimes over a single weekend. They trained individuals and teams on essential new tools, quickly deployed custom apps, and vigilantly protected organizations from increasingly complex security threats. Now, as business leaders look to build resilient organizations and find new opportunities for expansion, they’re looking to IT pros for sustainable solutions to support them for the long haul.

We want to help. At Microsoft, it’s our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Today at Microsoft Ignite, we’re announcing scores of new features and capabilities that aim to do just that. But in this age of accelerated transformation, helping our customers achieve more also requires a broader view. So we’ve committed to becoming the world’s best students on the future of work, closely studying our own telemetry, and working closely with customers and researchers across every field, to understand our challenging new reality. This unique vantage point has shaped our understanding of where leaders and organizations need to focus today and in the future, and guided our innovation investments to build tools to support them.

As we kick off Microsoft Ignite 2020, here are seven keys to success for every IT and business leader to empower people for the new world of work—plus innovation in each area to deliver human ingenuity at scale.

1. Reimagine teamwork, culture, and social capital–digitally.

We’re reimagining meetings and workspaces to unlock new forms of collaboration, help people and teams stay connected and engaged, and ensure fluid communication across organizations.

2. Prioritize wellbeing to help people focus and be their best.

As the in-office, nine-to-five workday gives way to fluid work models and flexible hours, we’re spending more time communicating with one another digitally, and often outside of traditional work hours. In Teams, for instance, we’re seeing the number of chats and meetings per person continue to grow, especially after hours.

3. Create a trusted, secure, modern experience for every employee.

As flexible hours and hybrid work models become the norm, providing a secure modern experience for every employee has never been more important. We’re introducing new features and capabilities for IT pros to help empower everyone to work securely from anywhere. We’ve included highlights below, but please check out my colleague Brad Anderson’s Microsoft 365 blog for a deep dive.

4. Unlock the data, knowledge, and expertise of the entire organization.

Powered by the Microsoft Graph, our knowledge experiences allow you to capture and redeploy all the information in your organization to benefit individuals and teams. The first product we will deliver is SharePoint Syntex, which uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge. SharePoint Syntex lets you teach AI to read a document and extract information as you would with no-code AI models.

5. Automate process and workflows to increase discontinuous innovation.

AI and automation streamline workflows and free people up from rote tasks, giving them back time, focus, and energy for the creative and innovative work that only humans can do. Users will soon have even more intuitive and powerful low-code ways to build the solutions they need to run their business processes in Teams. We’re excited to announce the general availability of the embedded Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents studios, powered by “Project Oakdale,” which give Teams users the ability to build, edit, and publish custom apps and chatbots—right in Teams.

6. Include everyone in digital transformation.

New industry solutions, along with experiences designed for Firstline Workers, help organizations enable digital transformation for all their employees. Ensuring that people have access to the right tools to do their jobs is pivotal in every industry, especially industries like government, financial services, and healthcare. It’s now even easier to tailor Teams for industry with templates, get virtual visit reminders and join via mobile, enable collaboration with Lists, and much more.

7. Help people learn, reinvent, and grow with the pace of change.

For individuals, teams, and organizations, success in the new world of work requires learning new digital skills, reinventing roles, and finding new ways to grow every day. We want to help our customers provide every employee with the resources they need to incorporate learning right into the flow of their daily work.

This summer, Microsoft launched an initiative to help 25 million people worldwide acquire the digital skills needed in a COVID-19 economy. In the coming months, we will be announcing new learning experiences in Microsoft 365 and Teams to support this initiative, along with other learning opportunities designed for employees across your organization. Check back here for more news, coming soon.

Today at Ignite, we announced seven keys to success to help leaders navigate a new world of work, along with hundreds of new features and capabilities designed to put those principles into action. As we all face new challenges and changes it’s an honor to help our customers reimagine work for the future—and we look forward to bringing you many more exciting announcements in the weeks and months to come.