IKEA empowers and engages its frontline coworkers with Microsoft Teams to support more great days of serving customers

IKEA is well known for its yellow and blue logo, ready-for-assembly furniture, and delicious Swedish meatballs. It has a passion for making everyday life better for people around the world and takes a lead in pushing for corporate responsibility around issues such as climate change and equality. As part of this effort, the company focuses on developing sustainable business practices through material selection, product design, and efficient operations, with many design and process improvements coming from store staff. 

“We are not a top-down company. We encourage people to initiate change in the company,” explains Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka Group, which includes IKEA Retail, Ingka Centres, and Ingka Investments. “We strive to tap into our organizational intelligence and unleash the potential of our people to achieve our goals and values. We can’t bring all of our 166,000 coworkers together physically, but digital transformation has created new opportunities for us to bring people together and enable them to collaborate.”

Seeing an opportunity to unleash collaboration

With a widely distributed workforce spread across 30 markets, IKEA had taken a traditional approach to IT with on-premises solutions that coworkers could only access on corporate desktops or laptops. In stores, managers had to rely on paper-based processes to deliver information to store coworkers or handle processes like shift changes. “We saw the opportunity to connect people and help them take part in the ongoing improvements in our company by sharing their knowledge, but it was simply not possible in our previous environment,” says Brodin.

Transforming with the cloud

IKEA turned to Microsoft for a cloud-based solution that would help the company bring communication and collaboration to new levels and avoid the need for costly hardware and software upgrades. It chose to deploy Microsoft 365 because it delivered the capabilities IKEA wanted on a highly secure platform that didn’t require extensive IT management and upgrades. And because Microsoft 365 offers a complete, intelligent solution for frontline coworkers, IKEA gave store coworkers access to the same capabilities that its staff at central headquarters enjoys. In addition, IKEA coworkers have the option to use Microsoft 365 mobile apps on their personal devices.

The security capabilities built into Microsoft 365 helped IKEA fully embrace a modern way of working. With a focus on improving communications and collaboration, IKEA made deploying Microsoft Teams to everyone in the organization a top priority. Within five months, all IKEA coworkers had access to Teams, and there were 75,000 active users. Following the rapid rollout, the company began focusing on driving to full adoption and decommissioning its on-premises Skype for Business servers, which corporate coworkers had previously used for chat and meetings.

Making scheduling easy

Restaurant workers at IKEA Kungens Kurva, the largest IKEA store in the world, took the lead as early adopters of Teams. Before adopting Teams, Nadja Soto Huurre coordinated schedules for the restaurant’s 150 coworkers using a paper-based process. “My job is to ensure my coworkers can have a great day serving customers instead of worrying about their schedules, but it was difficult before,” she says. Coworkers had to fill out forms to request shift changes and call or text when they were sick, and they had to use different forms and different programs depending on what they wanted to change.

Showing the initiative IKEA encourages, Huurre began investigating the Shifts app in Teams soon after she received access to see if she could streamline the scheduling process. Shifts offered the perfect solution, and after a two-week trial her team adopted it permanently. “Everybody has the Teams app on their phones, so now, no matter where they are, they can use Shifts to make schedule requests, whether they’re changing shifts, taking open shifts, or requesting time off. And if they need to chat with me or coordinate with each other, they can use Teams chat,” explains Huurre. “Using Shifts, it feels like we are in the future.”

Fabian Haeberlein, Deputy Marketing Manager at Huurre’s store, appreciated the benefits immediately. “Using Teams makes our life in the store easier and helps us meet our sustainability goals because we don’t need to use as much paper,” he explains. “We’ve calculated that in this store, we could save SEK364,000 [USD37,700] by replacing our current scheduling process with Shifts. And you can imagine how much we could save as a company if we used Shifts at IKEA stores all over the world.”

Removing layers of communication

Store coworkers have seen immediate benefits through mobile access to coworkers with the Teams app. Haeberlein explains, “Before, I had to be in the same room to communicate with my coworkers. Using Teams chat is much easier, and it’s the way that our younger coworkers expect to communicate, so it makes working here more appealing for them.”

Instead of relying on bulletin boards, store coworkers can now access corporate communications posted by store managers at any time on their personal devices. And when store managers share corporate plans in their Teams chat, they expect coworkers to respond with feedback so they can work together to create a better workplace. 

Reducing travel with online meetings

Moving to digital communications in Teams has not only helped IKEA reduce the paper it uses, it helps reduce the need for travel—and the company’s carbon footprint. With more virtual meetings, IKEA wastes less time travelling between locations, and coworkers find the use of video calls has made everyday communications more personal. 

To facilitate these virtual meetings, IKEA has invested in Microsoft Teams Rooms for many of its corporate locations. It developed a standard room design with a consistent look and feel across all locations to create a sense of one extended room for meeting attendees. 

In the transition to Microsoft 365, IKEA has adopted a new way of working. “Thanks to Microsoft Teams, we’ve adopted new working styles, which have reduced travel and supported people to achieve a better work-life balance,” says Brodin.

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