How SES is transforming its working culture with Viva Insights

“This project isn't about data for the sake of data. It’s about finding ways to empower our people to take better care of themselves and others.” 

David Giles, Director of Programs for the CEO Office at SES, is discussing employee wellbeing at his company and the initiative that’s helping to enhance it. 

“Looking after our people is our first and foremost priority,” says Giles. “For us, that means creating a frictionless employee experience and delivering systems of work that can promote employee health and wellbeing.”

Over the past year, SES has been working to do just that - investigating ways to decrease the amount of meetings taking place internally while improving their quality. In collaboration with Microsoft and its partner Xylos, it has been exploring the use of data-led insights and workplace analytics to improve work-life balance, drive efficiencies and encourage employee development. 

“We believe that technology can play a key role in shaping the behavior of our employees and helping them to look after themselves,” says Giles. 

“That unlocks a bit of a superpower for us; using Viva Insights, we can help them to improve their work and make better use of their time.”

A ‘meeting company’ changes direction

SES is a global provider of content connectivity solutions. Using satellites in geostationary and medium earth orbits, and an extensive range of ground networks, the company reaches 366 million TV households in the world and over one billion people every year. It also provides connectivity services to some of the underserved and unserved communities in the world.  

With offices located across 34 different countries – spanning across five continents – SES employs more than 2,000 people, who have a key common challenge: the meeting culture. “SES is a meeting company,” says Marc Leblanc, Vice President of Service and Automation Platforms at SES. “Meetings are our bread and butter and the heart of how we operate.”

Over the past few years, Leblanc has been looking into ways to improve the company’s meeting culture with technology, with a particular sense of urgency since the pandemic. He eventually found a partner to his ambitions in David Giles. 

“Since 2020, we’ve been working on plans to simplify our operations and release capacity,” explains Giles.

“As part of it, we’ve been looking for a transformation project that could help us tackle something that was universal and impacted everybody, allowing us to drive meaningful change for everyone at SES. 

“So, when Marc came to me to work on our meeting culture, we realized this was the chance we were looking for.”

Claiming back thousands of hours

When Giles and Leblanc first explored Microsoft Viva Insights, their business case was simple: to cut down 100,000 meeting hours a year. 

“We know that our people on average work over 40 hours a week,” says David Giles. “So, when we started our project, the key goal was simple: to give them back an average of two hours a week, so they could reinvest that time in whatever made most sense for them. 

“And Viva Insights, within the Microsoft Viva Platform, seemed the perfect answer for our needs.” 

Microsoft’s flagship employee platform, Viva Insights is designed to help people focus, learn, and thrive at work through data-driven, privacy-protected insights, and tailored recommendations aimed at improving productivity and wellbeing.

To test out the effectiveness of the solution, SES involved some 900 employees in a trial that looked to gather data on meetings and identify patterns that could be improved. 

Soon enough, it became clear they had made the right choice.  

“The richness of the first Power BI reports we saw was really mind-blowing,” explains Giles. “All of a sudden, the data we were gathering was answering more questions than we thought we had. That was a really exciting moment for us.”

Carried out in 2021, the trial proved crucial in identifying what SES calls ‘bloated’ meetings – namely, meetings that run for too long, involve unnecessary people and stand in the way of efficiency. 

“The categorization of these meetings gave us crucial insights into the business which we were then able to study and analyze,” says David Giles. 

“This allowed us to track key metrics regarding collaboration load, span, wellbeing, and more. And it gave us a sense of what was really happening inside the business.”

Xylos Partner Alliance manager Paul Peersman remembers the excitement of those initial days. “Working for a customer with such a strong, real business objective was a great experience for us,” he says. “It was great to be part of this initiative and help SES to dig deeper in the data.”

From meeting company to meeting-free Wednesdays

With the implementation of Viva Insights, SES is now starting to use data to run new projects, make adjustments to its way of working and carry out further tests. 

“The insights that we capture are starting to form the basis for structural changes to how we're tackling meetings,” says David Giles. “For example, we recently decided to try and accelerate our transformation by trialling a meeting-free Wednesday. 

“With help from Xylos, we were able to create bespoke reports looking at the meeting load across the week and see if the idea would be successful.” 

Indeed, the initiative is already showing positive impacts on people’s wellbeing. “Overwhelmingly, the feedback was positive, and our employees felt more productive,” says Giles. 

“More than 60% told us that their wellbeing has improved. In addition, 70% felt they were more productive, while over 80% believe that it is valuable to block meeting-free time,” adds Leblanc. 

As the solution becomes more and more widely adopted, the duo is now focusing its efforts on educating employees on the benefits of Viva Insights and providing transparency on the handling of their data. “We’ve had extensive conversations with our data protection officer on this topic,” he continues. 

“These gave us good insights and advice on how to explain to our people what our rules of engagement are, who has access to the data, what it is used for and more.” 

Next steps and changing culture

As they look to the future, David Giles and Marc Leblanc are planning to expand their Viva suite initiative to various solutions, such as Viva Learning, Viva Topics, Viva Goals and Viva Engage.  

“The fact that Viva Personal Insights sends us prompts and reminders and all these useful trends and tips really helps our employees to handle their day in a much more organized, efficient and engaging way,” says Leblanc. 

This is a sentiment increasingly shared both company-wide and at a management level. “Using our reports and data, we can really start to empower the senior leadership team with data,” adds Giles. 

“We’re reassuring everyone that Viva Insights is strictly not about performance management. It is about encouraging managers and leaders to reflect on the way they lead and manage, the way that they handle workload and address their employees’ wellbeing.”

Ultimately, they conclude, this is all that SES is trying to achieve. “Our project has never really been around pure cost saving or driving these kinds of efficiencies,” they say. 

“But truly giving individuals the insights to be able to reflect, to be empowered, and improve their work experience by taking more control over their behaviors.”