SLB energizes collaboration across its global business with Teams and Teams Phone

When asked to describe the corporate culture at SLB, Sebastien Lehnherr, Chief Information Officer, doesn’t miss a beat. “Extremely, extremely innovative and collaborative,” he says. It’s no wonder the technology company prides itself on collaboration—the business has spent the last 90 years providing services to the energy industry, a truly global enterprise. “We operate in more than 120 countries around the world,” says Lehnherr. “Throughout our history, we have focused on growing our domain knowledge and driving innovation in the energy sector across all regions of the world.”

While a global outlook might be an advantage when it comes to culture, it can pose a challenge when it comes to communicating with teams and colleagues spread around the globe. “We are always looking for novel and leading solutions for collaboration and communication,” says Lehnherr. When SLB employees need to be in contact with customers or geographically dispersed teams need to attend meetings and workshops or work together on solution building and engineering, they use Microsoft Teams and Teams Phone. The recent addition of Teams Phone, which employees use to place and receive voice calls right from Teams, represents the latest step in SLB’s collaboration journey. “Since we were already using Microsoft technology—particularly the Microsoft 365 suite of applications—the evolution to Teams Phone as our calling solution was very natural and seamless,” says Lehnherr.

“Since we were already using Microsoft technology—particularly the Microsoft 365 suite of applications—the evolution to Teams Phone as our calling solution was very natural and seamless.”

Sebastien Lehnherr, Chief Information Officer, SLB

Extremes of user experience find common ground with Teams

Brett Walton, Global Infrastructure Services Manager at SLB, and Neil Cloutter, Modern Communications Platform Manager, were part of the team behind the evolution of Teams Phone at SLB. “SLB employees work in some very challenging environments, including remote areas of the world where it’s not easy to establish communication,” says Walton. “We have used Teams and now Teams Phone to help us keep our employees well connected, wherever they are.”

In the days before Teams Phone, SLB employees in some field locations faced challenges sending and receiving documentation and often had to place expensive PSTN (public switched telephone network) phone calls from cell phones to connect with customers. “Today, sending files can be done very simply via Teams, and remote employees use the Teams mobile app to make PSTN calls to customers, saving telephone charges,” says Walton.

“We have used Teams and now Teams Phone to help us keep our employees well connected, wherever they are.”

Brett Walton, Global Infrastructure Services Manager, SLB

SLB employees around the world work in vastly different environments, from corporate offices in Houston, Paris, and London to operating locations in the Gulf of Mexico. Ensuring that this diverse and highly mobile workforce has a consistent collaboration experience was a top priority for SLB’s Modern Communications Team. “We support every extreme of user experience you can imagine,” says Walton. “For our very mobile employees, Teams creates a consistency of experience.” Cloutter agrees. “We really do have that single pane of glass now with Teams for collaboration, chat, voice, video, and PSTN connectivity,” he says. “There is no confusion about switching between applications for different functions.” And, in the early days of COVID-19, Teams Phone helped support business continuity. “We used Teams Phone to collaborate with colleagues and customers,” says Walton. “When many employees moved home to start working remotely, Teams and Teams Phone helped facilitate continuity in a critical period.”

Engineering a smooth transition to Teams Phone

To achieve the consistency they envisioned, Walton and Cloutter devised a Teams Phone implementation worthy of a company of engineers. “We spent half a year preparing so that we could get Teams calling up and running as quickly as possible,” says Walton. “When our Teams Phone licenses arrived, we immediately began migrating 10,000 people every weekend.”

Walton and Cloutter took a unique approach to the weekly migrations. Instead of migrating departments or geographies, their method involved identifying collaborative groups and moving those users simultaneously. “We wanted people who worked together all day, every day, to move at the same time, regardless of their location,” says Walton. Walton and Cloutter also used Microsoft Power BI data visualization software to track the progress of the migration. “We used the Power BI report as our looking glass into who had migrated successfully and who had not,” says Cloutter. “It was fundamental to the success of the deployment.”

The transition was remarkably smooth, undoubtedly aided by SLB employees’ familiarity with Teams. “We had already moved employees from Skype to Teams, and the move to Teams Phone was a natural transition,” says Walton.

“When our Teams Phone licenses arrived, we immediately began migrating 10,000 people every weekend.”

Brett Walton, Global Infrastructure Services Manager, SLB

Reducing costs, carbon footprint and supporting a more connected organization with Teams

Following SLB’s Teams Phone deployment, Lehnherr recalls the goals of the implementation. “We had a need for an immersive user experience along with improved mobility, and Teams has delivered,” says Lehnherr. For a company like SLB with a large global footprint, agility is key. SLB employees can now use Teams to connect from their mobile device if the more traditional desktop client is not an available option, giving them more flexibility to work and connect to anyone, from anywhere.

The result? “Undoubtedly, we are saving time, while giving more flexibility to our employees,” Lehnherr says. “Giving our workforce this freedom to connect with Teams and Teams Phone, along with rich content-sharing and collaborative capabilities, is part of the employee experience we want our people to have every day,” he continues.

Like at many companies, SLB employees had to travel the world for workshops and meetings. By using Teams instead, many of the meetings that would have called for travel can now be accomplished digitally, and with significant cost savings. “We’ve reduced our travel costs and contributed to a reduction in our carbon footprint,” says Lehnherr. SLB employees have even begun to use Teams Rooms and wearable tablets to perform traditionally in-person processes like customer witnessing. “It’s been incredible to bring that fluidity to something that would have involved putting people on planes not long ago,” says Walton.

With Teams, SLB creates a more connected organization. Lehnherr describes a recent global webcast held in Teams that promoted the contribution of women at SLB. “We had four of our top women executives delivering that message using Teams live events, from their respective homes around the world,” says Lehnherr. “The ability to deliver these types of events using Teams makes them more interactive,” he says. In the past, similar events lacked the chat capability that Teams provides, making it harder for audience members to interact with speakers and ask questions. And, the fact that speakers can present from their home environment, rather than a studio set up, makes the experience more engaging and informal.

After the success of Teams and Teams Phone for collaboration at SLB, Lehnherr looks forward to expanding the benefits of Teams as an employee engagement portal through the use of Microsoft Viva. “We are at a shift in the energy industry, both in terms of technologies and how we work. Being able to facilitate our employees’ ability to develop better technologies, perform better for our customers, and continue to drive innovation, we are excited to explore the potential of Viva to help employees plug into what is happening in their world,” he says.