There are lots of pros and cons to working remotely. Pro? Don’t have to head into the office every day. Con? Don’t have a great way to communicate or interact with a team on a consistent basis.
There are tons of collaboration tools these days. Being a Microsoft Partner, we use Microsoft Teams and SharePoint within Office 365 to collaborate and keep in touch with each other throughout the day. One of the things we pride ourselves on, though, is providing access to management to all of our employees – regardless of how often we physically interact.
This is why we have an anonymous feedback form. Everyone wants the ability to provide feedback, but not everyone necessarily would like everyone else to know who it came from. For this solution, we’ve used four Microsoft tools: SharePoint, an embedded Microsoft Forms form, Flow, and Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Forms
Microsoft Forms is the underlying technology. We created a simple form with two questions; what’s your feedback and who are you. Sometimes, people want management to know who they are so they can get a response back – we wanted to allow that.
Anonymous feedback form
As you can see in the screenshot, though, it’s not required. Additionally, we turned off the “Record name” feature in the form to make it anonymous.
Microsoft SharePoint
Forms is great, but people can’t remember where everything across the organization is if you don’t store it centrally. To help with this, we created a modern SharePoint page and used the embed web part to embed the form.
Form hosted in SharePoint
Microsoft Teams
Again, since no one wants to periodically check Microsoft Forms to find responses, we’ve also added an integration with Microsoft Teams.
I created a Team that includes the management personnel that should be aware of feedback from other people. After creating this team, I created a Microsoft Flow that posted to the General channel whenever a suggestion was created.
Feedback responses in Microsoft Teams
Is this useful?
Obviously, this type of stuff isn’t earth-shattering. In fact, no one in our company may ever use it. To me, though, it’s a great example of how you can use modern technology to help solve old problems and keep your team connected even when they’re working at other ends of the world.
If you want some additional detail on how this was setup or questions about any of the technologies used, please feel free to email [email protected].