A1: Creating a digital space for collaboration

“At the beginning, when we talked about running a virtual festival without any support from a specialist agency, some people said we were crazy.”

Rainer Salcher, Head of Organizational Development for the CTO area at A1, is talking about the decision to go at it alone in organizing the company’s first entirely virtual New Work Festival. No agency, no technology partner – just an in-house team and the existing technology at the company’s disposal.

It was an idea that captured the imagination of Executive Assistant to the CHRO, Gwendolin Eberhart. “The concept of a virtual festival focussed on co-operation and co-creation really interested me,” she says. “It seemed to challenge the conventional wisdom: that the most effective collaboration required everyone to be in the same room.” 

Still, there was no shortage of questions about how to most effectively manage such an ambitious project themselves. How could they make registration as simple and user-friendly as possible? How could they best manage attendee numbers? How to ensure the privacy of participants? And importantly, how could they effectively communicate the value of the event?

“Previously, we would have invested a large budget in an agency to build a platform with all the bells and whistles, and to manage all those challenges,” says Salcher. “But then we realized we already had all the resources we needed to make a successful virtual event.”

Those tools included a whole suite of M365 solutions – from Outlook, Forms and Teams to SharePoint and Power Automate.

“I really wanted to push M365 and the usage of Micrsoft Teams and SharePoint,” Eberhart explains. “They can really enhance collaboration. They provide a digital space where people and organizations can create something together.”

Driving adoption through workshops

Headquartered in Vienna and listed on the city’s stock exchange, A1 Telekom Austria Group is a leading provider of digital services and communications solutions, serving around 25 million customers in seven countries across Central and Eastern Europe. 

The company’s 18,000 employees use its state-of-the-art broadband infrastructure to make digital business and lifestyle possible, connecting people and companies everywhere, anytime. A1 is a highly successful operation, achieving revenues of 4.55 billion Euros by year-end 2020. 

But in 2019, a review of the company’s internal collaboration systems showed them to be lagging behind the modern standard. “There were some share boxes,” recalls Eberhart. “But the primary sharing tools were Skype and email.”

There had been a small-scale trial of Microsoft Teams, but Eberhart saw the value of extending it company-wide – an idea that quickly gathered pace as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded. 

With increased urgency, A1’s Technical Co-ordinator, Jürgen Wimmer, set to work driving adoption in the Microsoft ecosystem across A1’s workforce. “Teams is very intuitive to use,” Wimmer says. “So we found the best way of driving adoption was simply showing people how much better it was than what we had been using.” 

Over the course of 2020, Wimmer and his colleagues ran 300 training workshops for Teams, before moving onto more advanced training in Power Automate and PowerApps.

“I was really surprised by the adoption rates,” says Eberhart. “Everyone switched to Microsoft Teams almost immediately.”

It was then that Eberhart realized A1 could do more with the technology they now had. 

“Microsoft 365 is an amazing environment,” she says. “So at the end of 2020, when we thought about how we could run the New Work festival, it was clear for us: we had to use Microsoft 365.” 

Planning process as learning process

Initially, the plan was to run the festival as a hybrid event, with sessions and workshops held on-site and keynotes held virtually via Teams, but subsequent lockdowns forced the festival to a fully virtual format.

“It was all a massive learning curve for us,” says Eberhart. “A1 had never done a fully virtual, internally managed event before, so we didn’t really know what it would look like.” 

Faced with a raft of logistical and technical issues, Wimmer sought solutions within the Microsoft environment. 

“By law, we are not allowed to record meetings with staff. So for keynotes and more content-focused sessions we used Microsoft Teams Live Events, so if someone couldn’t attend they could watch it back later. Then for sessions that required greater collaboration, we ran them as Teams meetings.”

Using the Microsoft 365 platform as the foundation for the festival, the team were able to offer participants a seamlessly integrated experience. 

“Attendees could register for sessions using Microsoft Forms, then it would automatically be pulled into Outlook,” Salcher recalls. “Then when it was time for the session, they could join the event from their calendar with one click. It worked really well.”

More attendees, greater accessibility

A total of 1,500 employees attended 61 events over nine days – all brought to life in a virtual event space. “We had keynotes from internal and external speakers,” says Eberhart, “as well as training sessions and workshops on the topic of co-creation and working together.

“Based on the numbers alone, the event was a huge success,” says Eberhart. “We never usually see attendance like that for any kind of event.”

There were several unforeseen benefits of choosing a virtual event over other formats. “A great advantage was that our colleagues from regional areas were able to join the festival,” Eberhart explains. “In-person events are often centered on our headquarters in Vienna, so an employee in Carinthia or Tyrol won’t come across the country for an hour long event.”

By embracing remote working, more employees were able to participate in the event – and in more inclusive and meaningful ways. 

“Everyone from the call centre to the marketing department could play an active role in discussions.”

Uniting the organization with a common goal

The festival was such a resounding success, within six months A1 was already gearing up for its second virtual event, focused on the theme of leadership. “It wasn’t really planned,” admits Eberhart, “but after the success of the New Work Festival, the virtual event was something we wanted to do again.”

They approached it as an opportunity to improve on what had come before, starting with a refined registration process. “For the first festival, we used Forms and Power Automate to manage registrations,” explains Wimmer. “It worked well enough, but it turned out to be really time-consuming because we had to make a form for each event. We had 61 forms in total.”

Wimmer streamlined the process. “We learned from the experience of the first festival and made a dynamic registration form in Power Apps instead, so we had one app for every event of the leadership festival.”

Going forward, the team at A1 want to explore the virtual format in different ways. “Something we’d like to focus on next is creating a hybrid event,” says Eberhart. “The sense we get is that a mix of in-person and virtual is what really works best.”

And she believes every company can benefit from the type of cross-functional exchange that holding events virtually really encourages. 

“When an organization is dislocated, whether it’s working from different regions or working from home, it’s really important to make sure everyone is still exchanging thoughts and working together towards common goals, whatever their role, wherever they are,” says Eberhart.

“Collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams really make that possible.”

Learn more about A1’s New Work Festival by visiting the company’s blog here.