The Power of Praise: Recognizing Colleague Success

The definition of praise is to express warm approval or admiration. The person on the receiving end of this kind act is often appreciative and happy. For years Human Resource Professionals have been analyzing the impact praise has in the workplace. For examples, check out the Training Journal's article on "The Power of Praise and Recognition" and Gallop's Workplace article, "In Praise of Praising Your Employees". The conclusion seems to be unanimous. Employees who receive praise on an ongoing basis have increased engagement and productivity.

To help get you started spreading this positive feeling around your workplace, PAIT Group's Modern Workplace Consultant, Kat Weixel has recorded an easy to follow tips & tricks video that demonstrates just how easy it is to communicate praise in Yammer and/or Microsoft Teams.

For those of you who appreciate a written how-to that can be used to follow along with the video, I have organized that below.

As in Kat's video, we will start with Yammer.

UPDATE: Praise can also be shared from Microsoft Viva Insights.

5 Fundamentals for Effective Communication

Lately, I have been seeing an increase in what feels like anti-meeting content. While the point may be to highlight other methods of communication rather than scheduling a meeting, we shouldn't dismiss or put a negative connotation on meetings. I feel we need a reminder of communication fundamentals. A "checklist" of sorts we can utilize to ensure we are delivering effective and clear messages. In this process, we can choose the appropriate channel or medium to best communicate with our coworkers and, as a result, hopefully, reduce the feeling of meeting overload.

Functional Flair: adding Pictures to a SharePoint List

The List you need to use this JSON formatting as-is

Why Is Anyone Talking About Yammer When We Have (and Love!) Teams?

Editor's Note: "Yammer" is now known as "Viva Engage"

Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012 and made it available for their Office 365 customers the following year. Early in 2016, Microsoft rolled out Yammer to their Office 365 commercial customers as “on” by default.

At the time, I was an intranet manager at an association and decided to go along with Microsoft’s “on by default” rollout of Yammer. Why stop it? I started with a pilot for a few weeks to test it out, and then I opened things up to all staff. I got lots of folks interested in using it, but many wanted “private” groups for their teams to collaborate and communicate. They also heavily used the “private messaging” option in Yammer. They contributed to the public groups for sure, and enjoyed engaging across the org, but they really were craving some “private” options.

Imagine the confusion, then, when this “Teams” thing was suddenly all the buzz coming from Microsoft just a year later. Group spaces for people to communicate and post files? Check! “Chat” that seemed a lot like “private messaging”? Check! Option to subscribe and get email notifications for missed activity? Check! Plus, the interface was just so appealing, the chat was a much better experience than the “private messaging” in Yammer, and there were so many additional features in Teams.

Why the heck would we still use Yammer now that we have this new shiny Teams toy?

How to Make a Custom Teams App Available to Everyone in Your Org

I usually write about branding stuff like making custom themes and creating site designs, but today I am to switching gears a bit and focusing on Making a Custom Teams App Available for Everyone in your Organization! Using Teams’ App Policies, it’s easy to give all your users access to a standard set of apps, without them having to add those apps to their Teams installation manually.

Cascading Drop-downs in PowerApps

I probably don’t have to tell you this, but just in case, PowerApps are versatile no code or low code solutions you can create to simplify processes for your end users. One of the most common PowerApps is a personalized form for data entry or selection. PowerApps has a lot of built in controls that are a breeze to just click and add, but if you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty you can really tailor your app and make it easy for users to put in data with integrity. One of my favorite ways to do this is with a cascading drop-down, or basically two drop-downs that have related fields. Whatever you select in drop-down 1 impacts the choices available in drop-down 2. For example, if you’re building an order form, you might have a drop-down for category, then a second drop-down for product. Let’s look at how you might put that together.

Pait Group Blog