Powering a Richer Workday Experience in Microsoft Teams

It’s been a year since we first introduced Workday for Microsoft Teams, and our quest to make work as frictionless and productive as possible hasn’t let up. Whatever the future brings, enabling collaboration and productivity from anywhere is here to stay.

The past year has taught us all quite a bit, which is why Workday is so intent on meeting people where they are, so they can get work done without endless clicks and switching between applications. 

Context-switching—whether that means taking care of family one minute and then presenting at a big virtual meeting the next, or just having to continually switch between user interfaces—is one of those “small” things that really adds up over the course of a day. In sum, it’s exhausting. What’s more, it eats away at focus and productivity, which ultimately hurts employee engagement (an already scarce commodity for some organizations).

This is why we’re deepening our integration with Microsoft as a further step in our openness and extensibility journey, and why we’re excited to announce an even more immersive and productive experience using the sleek UI componentry of Adaptive Cards in our Workday for Microsoft Teams app.

Bottom line: This will enable a new, better experience where users can access key information, and initiate, act upon, and complete more tasks in Workday from the Teams app. This translates into greater worker productivity and engagement, and most importantly, organizational success.

Always Striving for Better

Enhancing our app with Adaptive Cards gives our developers a more scalable, secure, and low-code way to deliver a rich Workday experience—right inside of Teams. It also allows us to reuse objects like the menus and dashboards in many of the card components we already deliver in the Teams app today—such as Quick Actions for requesting time off, filing expenses, looking up a coworker, giving feedback, or asking Workday Assistant for help.

With this new feature announced at Microsoft Build (and available here) this week, we'll soon be rolling this new experience by default for all Workday customers using Microsoft Teams.  

To state it simply, building our app with the native-feel and services provided through Adaptive Cards allow us to introduce a much richer Workday experience in Teams, with new Workday dashboards specially designed for both people managers and employees.

For workers, we are introducing a new Quick Actions menu with common Workday tasks, such as requesting time off, creating an expense report, or looking up a coworker. Workers’ dashboards will also feature a calendar with approved time off and pay dates. This means getting more done and staying more informed right inside the one tool that many workers are already using all day, every day.

For managers, in addition to the Quick Actions menu, the Adaptive Cards enhanced layout will show an overview of their team and quick access to a team calendar, with important dates such as time off, work anniversaries, and birthdays. This means more informed managers who are always aware of what’s going on with their team, making it easier to go the extra mile with things like birthday or anniversary emails; this is especially important, as some workers are feeling somewhat disconnected after not seeing their coworkers for more than a year due to the pandemic.

We’re excited to be one of the first Microsoft partners to adopt this new capability and deliver these new capabilities for our customers. We believe Adaptive Cards not only creates a better experience for joint Microsoft Teams-Workday users, but will ultimately benefit every developer building for the Microsoft Teams platform.

Ready for the Next Normal

Whatever the next normal looks like, we’re certain that seamless collaboration and natural workspaces (the collaboration tools where people spend most of their time) are going to be key. Part of why we're so excited about building our app using Adaptive Tabs is that it gives our developers another powerful tool to build a better Workday experience for users.

Looking ahead, we see a future—fueled by collaboration— where we can deliver great Workday experiences and content across Microsoft solutions, including other Microsoft 365 apps and the new Microsoft Viva.