Kohler Co. embraces culture of agility and productivity with Microsoft 365, builds core strengths to provide gracious living for customers

Enabling cultural values with digital tools: A key success factor for Microsoft 365 

With 36,000 associates working in more than 50 plants and sales offices on six continents, Kohler Co.  recognizes that a strong company culture is a powerful glue to connect associates and drive cohesive support for key business strategies. 

“The way we look at success with our technology deployments is ‘Are we able to embody the cultural values that we are trying to bring to life?’” says Paul Ryan, Chief Information Officer at Kohler Co. “Breaking down the silos in our organization, creating agile, self-organizing teams, and driving decision-making using accurate data—we’ve seen amazing results with Microsoft 365.” 

According to Michelle Manthey, Staff Project Leader – Digital Enablement, Power Systems at Kohler Co, “We have key cultural beliefs—Delight Customers, Inspire People, Boldly Innovate, Own It, and Prioritize—that drive how we work. We began this cultural evolution two years ago, building on our core competencies that go back to our mission of providing a higher level of gracious living for those touched by our products and services. Today, our associates are connecting better with Microsoft 365 and Teams to share in the mission.” 

Kohler had just begun implementing Microsoft 365 when the COVID-19 health crisis struck. Back in January and February 2020, rapid adoption of the tools enabled a nimble pivot to remote work dictated by the sudden onset of work-from-home rules. By this time, approximately 70 percent of associates used Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive. Today, that figure is 90 percent. “We focused on delivering specific training in a short amount of time for those associates who might not have used Microsoft 365 apps at scale and at a level they needed to know,” says Ryan. “We used tips and tricks, micro learning videos, curated podcasts, and live Q&A sessions with internal and external experts—all to make people feel comfortable with the new tools.” 

“Microsoft 365 had already begun to prove itself in reducing the challenges of time zones, cultures, and languages in our global operations,” adds Brad Short, Vice President-IT Operations and Infrastructure at Kohler. “It brought us together as if we were a single location. Using Microsoft 365 to collaborate on critical business needs was a key driver for us as we coped with COVID-19.” 

This was evident during the first few weeks of the health crisis when Kohler used Microsoft 365 to ensure associates everywhere felt supported in new and difficult circumstances. “Collaborating in real time on our response to the health crisis was key,” says Ryan. “Thanks to Microsoft 365, we quickly implemented an incident management team to address the challenge with global and local leaders working together. Using Teams to mobilize expertise helped us understand what was happening in every market.” Kohler also used SharePoint Online as a communication and information repository for global associates to access information about the company’s response to the COVID-19 crisis and safety guidelines for associates and customers. 

Recently, the company has begun to deploy Microsoft Power Apps, part of Microsoft Power Platform, inside Teams. Employees use a COVID-19 app to manage the inflow of data related to colleagues impacted by the virus. “With our high adoption rate of Teams, taking advantage of Power Apps and other third-party applications brought within the platform is critical to the evolution of Teams at Kohler,” says Short.

Supporting future success with long-term culture change

The rapid adoption of the new tools during the COVID-19 crisis has long-term implications for Kohler’s culture—and long-term benefits. Moving to the cloud drives agility and speed, and it supports a new emphasis on mobility so associates can work productively anywhere. In conjunction with the widespread Teams usage, Kohler is moving 400 terabytes of shared directories to SharePoint, and associates are migrating an equivalent size of personal files to OneDrive. “The data that’s being moved to the cloud includes information used by associates to support and in some cases share with customers,” says Ryan. “By using Microsoft 365, we are able to expedite that support and communication with customers.” 

According to Ryan, most of Kohler’s administrative associates who had worked primarily in offices quickly adopted a new set of skills as they moved to work from home across the globe. “Administrative associates embraced Teams, replacing in-person conversations with chat and Teams meetings,” says Ryan. “These interactions grew from approximately 200,000 a month to several million. Associates are jumping on Teams meetings with the right colleagues to make decisions in real time, versus how we did it previously, via email and phone calls.” 

Following a recent survey, 60 percent of associates in North America now say they want to continue to work remotely. “For Kohler, this is an amazing shift. We were very office-bound, worldwide,” says Gerard Gallenberger, Vice President, IT, Core Capabilities at Kohler Co. “Teams has been the game-changer. Our workplace is different now, and a lot of that has to do with how well we use Microsoft 365 to enrich our culture.” 

Even top executives are talking about revising the company’s approach to physical offices. “We are revising the idea of building a new office on the Kohler campus,” says Gallenberger. “We’ve learned that with Teams, productivity has not been impacted by remote work. In fact, the remote work environment gives Kohler advantages—such as flexibility and costs savings—that our leadership is fully supporting.” 

At the very least, Kohler is re-evaluating how and when people will need to be in an office, an example of how far the company’s culture has changed in the last six months. “Thinking about the long term and how we work when and if associates return to the office, we need to evaluate the reasons why and how often we bring associates together,” says Ryan. “Maybe it's around more collaboration or building more community. It's really about how can we most effectively drive our strategy and our culture—and yes, there will likely be some productivity benefits to this over time.” 

Ensuring business continuity with Microsoft 365 security solutions

For Kohler, the evolution of its customer-focused, close-knit culture in a virtual context is only one proof point of the value of a cloud-based workplace. Back in January and February 2020, the rapid adoption of the security and privacy tools in Microsoft 365 enabled a nimble pivot to remote work dictated by the COVID-19 crisis. “Teams is an essential hub that enables business interactions with our distribution network and external uses,” says Short. “We simply could not achieve the same level of business operations with an on-premises solution.” 

The first area hit hard by the virus, China, was the test ground for Kohler’s ability to deliver a reliable, highly secure remote work environment. Here, Kohler facilities shut down quickly, and the company had to work fast to ensure that associates could access the systems and data they needed from their homes. While most information workers relied on Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint for cloud-based file storage, the company turned to Windows Virtual Desktop so that other associates could remotely access on-premises engineering systems. 

“China was just the start,” says Short. “We rolled up our sleeves, resuming operations first in the APAC region, then over to India. In March, we rolled out Windows Virtual Desktop in the Americas and EMEA regions.”

Ryan elaborates on the magnitude of the virus against the backdrop of a complex global company: “We have large operations in places like China and Italy where the pandemic hit early. As the pandemic spread across the globe, we needed to tailor our response in each country. However, our primary focus is the health and well-being of our associates and our families, along with our customers that we serve every day. That led us to either partially or fully closing plants, offices, hotels; reducing and in some cases eliminating travel; and significantly disrupting our traditional ways of working.” 

“When the lockdown happened in China, many associates didn’t have their company-owned equipment with them, so they turned to any devices they could find,” says Ryan. “We used Windows Virtual Desktop and enabled associates to maintain connectivity and productivity during COVID-19 that would have been impossible otherwise. Unlike our previous virtual desktop solution, Windows Virtual Desktop is reliable and scalable enough to accommodate the demands of remote work using both corporate and personal devices.” 

“As we sent associates home to work remotely, we didn’t have enough company-owned equipment to give them, and Windows Virtual Desktop provided a quick alternative to allow them to achieve more secure access to the applications they needed to do their jobs—using their own devices,” adds Short. “We are still largely remote, so I don't foresee this changing moving forward in both the near term and longer term. Now that we know how to do it, and the capability that it can provide, I see it fitting into our future.” 

To protect and manage personal devices that are now being used in the remote workplace, Kohler turned to Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Microsoft Intune to enroll 600 devices a week over an eight-week period during March and April 2020. “The transition to Intune went pretty smoothly,” says Short. “I think my service desk was taking about 10 percent of the transitions, and the issues were straightforward to solve.” 

Today, the entire estate of 6,965 devices is managed by Intune. “We had always wanted to take advantage of a BYOD approach, and Intune opened up the opportunity for us,” says Ryan. “COVID-19 has driven a change in how we work, so the ability to deliver capabilities and content to mobile devices is even more important. Intune changed the way we think about enabling associates’ mobility for the future.” 

Today, IT also takes advantage of multifactor authentication to boost the security of data on associates’ devices. “We like that Azure Multi-Factor Authentication works with Intune, because it removes the single point of failure that we had with our previous device management platform,” says Short. “The flexibility around conditional access policies is certainly a huge and appealing item for Kohler.” 

Kohler is also launching Microsoft Information Protection to bring an improved set of security controls to company data shared internally and externally in emails and documents. Microsoft Information Protection uses Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for authentication, for both internal users and users from other organizations. “We have a data privacy program for associates and partners, and Microsoft Information Protection is a great step forward to help us understand our data and how to protect it,” says Ryan. Using Azure AD, Kohler expanded its single sign-on enabled applications to ensure more secure and seamless access for more than 100 apps and services. IT also deployed a global conditional access solution to improve application security. “Implementing Azure AD resulted in a central identity repository for each of our employees, contractors, and guests that is available globally,” says Ryan. 

Data privacy is important for customer relationships as well, especially direct-to-consumer relationships. For example, Kohler’s set of Smart Home Products—KOHLER Konnect—are connected products located in the bathrooms, kitchens, and living rooms of its customers. “It’s paramount that when customers see a KOHLER-connected product, they see a seal of confidence that they know their personal information will be protected,” says Ryan. “So, we’re using Microsoft security products to help drive that aspect of our brand as leading in privacy.” 

Ryan defines the success of the modern workplace at Kohler by how well associates use the tools to break down barriers and silos and create self-organizing teams that drive collective decision-making. “From an IT standpoint, to measure success we have to ask, ‘Are we providing the right capabilities when, where, and how our associates need them? Are we enabling flexibility for our workforce? Are we furthering our strategic and cultural goals? We’re hearing from associates around the world how they are being more efficient and productive by fully taking advantage of their new workplace tools. Ultimately, these are the stories that represent our success with Microsoft 365.” 

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