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July 14, 2022

Grupo Fleury implements Microsoft Teams and standardizes its corporate communications

With more than 90 years of history, Grupo Fleury is one of the most respected medical organizations in Brazil. Its operation consists of approximately 10,000 employees and 3,000 physicians in more than 216 medical units throughout the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, Bahia, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte, Distrito Federal, and Maranhão. 
 

Grupo Fleury undertook a project to bring advanced security and compliance controls to the company’s internal communications with the support of partner companies Microsoft, RedT, and FunctionOne. By deploying Microsoft 365 tools with robust, industry-leading security and compliance capabilities and integrating them with services like ServiceNow Virtual Agent for IT support calls, the company was able to accomplish this.

Grupo Fleury

The need for a unified corporate communication tool

In September 2019, Grupo Fleury started a technology project that would also bring a cultural transformation to the company. “The initiative aimed to ensure that employees could work from home without technical limitations,” says Guilherme Nobre, an IT Governance Analyst at Grupo Fleury. To achieve these goals, the company sought a standardized corporate communication solution to replace the different platforms in use by various teams throughout Grupo Fleury.

The project was supported by the Internal Communication group, which mapped the company’s teams, professionals, and overall workplace to define the stages of the migration. “We’re a very big company, so we split into two teams: one focused on the work environment and the other on people management,” says Carolina Tanaka, Internal HR Consulting Manager at Grupo Fleury. “These teams had a lot of conversations and exchanges to flow.”

To implement this transformation, Grupo Fleury enlisted the support of FunctionOne and Microsoft Partner Network member RedT.

Microsoft Teams deployment

Diogo Otero, Director of Business Development and Partnerships at RedT, explains that Grupo Fleury had Skype for Business for communication, which wasn’t used by the whole company, in addition to various task management platforms that individual teams used on their own. “The initial motivation was to follow the evolution of Skype for Business and promote the expected benefits of Microsoft Teams, especially mobility and remote work,” says Otero.

The project began in late 2019 but accelerated in March 2020 with the onset of COVID-19 and the urgent need for remote work capabilities. The company was already familiar with Microsoft products and found in Teams not only an effective communication platform but also a powerful way to support Grupo Fleury’s transformation goals.

FunctionOne, which focuses on the impact of technology on users, helped promote employee adoption of Teams. “We first conducted an awareness marketing campaign and then followed that up by helping employees get to know the platform and the best ways to use it,” says Flavio Nicoletti, New Technologies Adoption Manager at FunctionOne. The implementation process featured communication materials, training, more than 20 workshops conducted via Teams live events, and the election of champions to support implementation in their teams or areas.

Microsoft 365 integration

Grupo Fleury was able to sustain operations during the initial stages of the pandemic, and in September 2020, the company realized the potential of Teams, creating a permanent remote work policy and launching a project named Interstellar to roll out Microsoft 365. “The project was largely conducted on Teams,” says Nobre.

The Interstellar project eventually ushered in the solution for the entire company, and Grupo Fleury used Teams and Microsoft Planner to support the coordination and management of this process. Nobre cites the interoperability of Microsoft 365 tools as a major asset during the migration. “We created channels for each workgroup to use while working at home, and daily tasks were performed in Teams with the help of Microsoft 365 functionality, such as pulling information from Planner, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations,” he says.

Julia Kertichka da Silva, an Internal HR Consulting Analyst at Grupo Fleury, points out that Teams brings its own day-to-day work features, such as the Teams Phone voice and video calling capabilities that some employees use. “Teams has everything we need daily, including the ability to share documents,” she says. “Our teams are organized without needing to exchange emails, and we have a platform for meetings. With Teams, now we have everything centralized.” Da Silva adds that Microsoft 365 now underpins the organization of the company.

ServiceNow Virtual Agent support

In January 2021, Grupo Fleury implemented ServiceNow Virtual Agent, a platform that uses automated conversations via a chatbot to get users information quickly. According to Ana Claudia Abreu, IT Coordinator at Grupo Fleury, the platform was implemented so that Grupo Fleury employees could open IT support calls directly in ServiceNow, but the company subsequently integrated it with Teams. The response was instantaneous. “We had an average of 7,700 calls registered by the portal, but after the integration, this number jumped to 8,900—a 15 percent increase,” she says.

Bringing ServiceNow experiences right into the flow of work with Teams provides additional benefits. For example, employees now receive notifications within Teams that they have follow-ups to their ServiceNow IT support requests. “When they receive a notification in Teams, they can access the call and get to know the portal,” adds Abreu. She notes that as a long-term result of the Teams and ServiceNow integration, Grupo Fleury support tickets have increased to an average of 10,500, representing 50 percent of registered calls.

Other features and benefits

With Teams in place, Grupo Fleury employees began asking for more features from the platform. The company is implementing Company Communicator, an app that they use to create and send messages to different groups or large numbers of employees over Teams chat.

Grupo Fleury also developed a chatbot that employees can use to activate the company’s security center in case of events such as theft or other suspicious situations in the workplace. The bot triages the interactions, and in critical cases, employees can discreetly start conversations with the security center through Teams.

Some business units are also studying the Teams Walkie Talkie module, which offers communication over mobile devices via a single frequency, to facilitate the work of attendants. And other units and physicians are beginning to use app templates for Teams for policy documents, newsletters, and videos to promote closer communication between teams.

An indispensable tool for robust communication

“We now have a corporate tool that meets the company’s needs,” says Nobre. “With Microsoft Teams, we now have a highly secure environment that promotes governance.” He adds that Grupo Fleury has reached a robust level of internal communication among the company’s employees, but it’s still looking to adopt new products and services that can expand the solution.

Tanaka notes that Teams became indispensable almost from the moment the company adopted it. “When everyone had to work from home suddenly, Teams was essential. And as we’ve learned more about how to use it, no one can imagine themselves without it,” she concludes.

Find out more about Grupo Fleury on Facebook and LinkedIn.

“With Microsoft Teams, we now have a highly secure environment that promotes governance.”

Guilherme Nobre, IT Governance Analyst, Grupo Fleury

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