The Potential Of The Cloud with Wes Hackett, CTO & Co-founder of Addin365

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Wes, CTO and co-founder of Addin365, and we discuss how the cloud has unlocked huge potential for their company, impacts that the new Viva suite has had in unsung industries, and the importance of sourcing talent from diverse areas. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) This is the Modern CTO podcast. When you started the business, how long ago did you start it? Like, when did you found it?

(Wes at 00:00:44) So we started in August 2015. Starting out in 365 was a really fun time because I'd been working in a consultancy that had been dabbling in Office 365, and as an MVP, a Microsoft MVP in Office 365, I knew the direction of travel Microsoft were trying to take things, and I knew the opportunities that the cloud would bring. But obviously, as a commercial business, the place I was working hadn't fully recognized that. And I was finding myself doing some cloud projects, some on-premises projects, and I just wanted to be solely cloud. So I got the opportunity to start Addin365 with my business partner.

(Wes at 00:01:26) And yeah, we just had a great idea, and it was pre-Teams. And we had this idea of productivity being the most important thing and what we could do there, create some products, took a chance. You know, anyone that started a business will understand the financial and hours that go into kicking something off. And we've just grown it from there, and we've had a really successful run. We've had, you know, doubling turnover, doubling growth, doubling clients, doubling product every year since we started. And, you know, we've continued that trend of investing in the latest technologies and using Azure and Office 365 capabilities to their maximum in terms of business value to the customers. And, you know, Addin365 has continued to grow. I mean, I've got an engineering team now of about nine people, if you include the designer, consulting team of similar size. So, you know, there's nearly 20 people in that team.

(Wes at 00:02:22) And we're servicing some of the world's largest companies. So we've got, you know, WPP Group is the world's largest media agency. We have our products in as a global agreement with them, and it gives us huge sense of pride, actually, to know that our product is used by nearly 250,000 people on the average day. So yeah, it's been a really amazing journey. But I think, you know, to be blunt, the cloud was the thing that unlocked that potential because without it, we wouldn't have had, I think, the financial backing to be able to stand up because in on-premises days, you would need to spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on servers just for environments to run things. Whereas with the cloud, it was like we've got some ideas, we've got some code, we can host it in Azure, sell it to customers for a SaaS model, and away we went and we've grown the business from that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:19) So what problem does it solve?

(Wes at 00:03:21) So we've got two product lines, sort of fundamental product lines. We've got one which is intranet, which is all about communications and solving published content needs. So if you think, you know, the word intranet is synonymous with an internal website that provides department content and, you know, potentially is a massive document store. Well, we've got a set of content enhancements that take an Office 365 environment like SharePoint Online, make it prettier, so meeting the brand needs. We've got some feature capabilities that Microsoft just don't deliver. So we've got a whole Google Maps stack, for example, that obviously they're wedded to Bing and customers don't necessarily align to that. And then on the productivity side, we've got Workhub, which is all about unlocking your effectiveness as getting your day-to-day jobs done. So we've got some AI-driven conversation experiences in Teams. We've got some tab surfaces in Teams, a collection of analytics that back both of those products to give the customer insight on the usage. But the, you know, the core premise is a better-together story. So just like Microsoft Teams is touted as that single pane of glass, we're adding to that single pane of glass, understanding who you are, the content you're using, and the way that you're trying to do a task and do a task set. And that kind of triangle gives you, you know, some very strong enhancements to a Microsoft Teams environment or a SharePoint Online website-style capability.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) So are you like a plug-in in the Microsoft Teams?

(Wes at 00:04:57) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we very much named the company in a very literal fashion. You know, we add in capabilities to that 365 environment. We're apps that you can put into the experience that enhance it. So we play nice with everything Microsoft do, which is not always the case in our market space. A lot of vendors are kind of more of a takeover-and-control kind of approach where they have their own platform that kind of removes the UI layer or moves the capability or duplicates it. We're looking at the kind of gaps to join things up. So we might have an experience which provisions a team, sets a team up, takes the content from the internet experience that somebody—so, for example, in a financial services organization that's trying to do some kind of process review, it might take the original process. It might bring that content together. It might shape how you're supposed to review it with a regulator, pull that process automation in place. And we do all that inside Teams. So the conversations there, the file management's there, the capabilities Microsoft have given you that are really strong are then aligned to the way that you're actually trying to work. And we, you know, we've done some work with quite a lot of the major pharmaceutical organizations that were involved in COVID vaccine and changing the way that they were able to enhance supplier innovation or do marketing in a more structured fashion in a repeatable approach using those using those tools that they've had into the environment. So it's a very comprehensive toolset that sits inside the Office 365 environment, letting you use everything Microsoft gave you, but simplifying it to the point where you don't really need to train a lot of your employees on, like, what does that term Microsoft gave you mean? It's like, I want to do X for the business. Let's run this thing to give me the outcome I'm looking for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:53) And then I want to talk about, like, the very first problem you solved and how you knew that that was the problem that you would solve that would get you money.

(Wes at 00:07:01) Well, back in, I mean, back in 2015, this is before Teams existed, we looked at a marketplace that was very fixated on intranet in a box. Lots of vendors, I mean, even to the point where there's a firm that creates a report called Intranet in a Box Vendors. And basically, everybody was coming out of a services, you know, blank-sheet-of-paper kind of projects process where they were delivering intranets. And we didn't really want to sort of step into that sort of embryonic but moving to the mature sort of market. And we looked at it, and we saw that while intranets were evolving, productivity wasn't. There was some capabilities in Office 365 that gave you better file storage and better conversations, but it didn't join it up. It was a ship-your-org-chart-style services that Microsoft were giving you in Office 365. So we created this Workhub product. That was our launch product. And it was pre-Teams. And today, it would be the same concept of Teams. It was one place to come to see all your projects, all your documentation, all your processes so you could see your process while you were trying to execute a project alongside it. And then when Teams came along, we retired a lot of the visual capabilities that Workhub had been using. And we moved it into that conversational AI and we were solving the same problem, but now in a different sort of home. We were, "Okay, Wes, what do you want to do for this marketing campaign? You want to create a TV advert? So what are the processes that we go through to create a TV advert and how are we advising people to behave while we do that?" Okay. So Workhub evolved from this SharePoint-centric experience to this conversational experience in Teams. And that's kind of that was our launch product for the business. And today, we've moved into what Microsoft are calling the Viva suite. So Microsoft, about twelve months ago, launched a whole new product experience called Viva. And in some parts, it's a rebrand of existing experiences, sort of reimagined as they start to join up business services. But the whole point of that Viva experience is it's an employee engagement platform. So they're calling it EXP. It's an employee experience. And they were recognizing finally that somebody doesn't think of their day-to-day work as in a bunch of software. They don't think of SharePoint and then OneDrive and then Teams and Stream and all these things. They think of, I want to engage in a community, and I want to go and talk to people of, you know, similar experiences as me and exchange ideas, or they want to execute a project in Teams. So Microsoft released Viva, and it has kind of multiple pillars. So Viva Connections has got kind of intranet in Teams. It's got a dashboard experience. You got Viva Engage, which they recently announced, which is kind of an evolution of Yammer, so social fabric. Viva Goals is OKRs and managing your progress and targets. You've got Viva Insights, which is the evolution of MyAnalytics, which is giving you insights on your behavior and those around you. If organizations were lucky enough to be able to afford Workplace Analytics, it's now given the kind of combined, well, this is what I do in a day and this is my free space to this is my team and this is what they need and this is the visibility. So this whole experience engine that Microsoft has now created, we were very fortunate at Addin365. We were in the preview programs for a number of those slices. And we've launched a collection of dashboard experiences. So in the Viva Connections area, there's the intranet in Teams, which means that your kind of intranet experience is there, but then they've got this concept of a dashboard. And, really, the value to any business of that dashboard was it's a set of apps that now make actionable things possible within the Office 365 environment. So you kind of you think about it like your iPhone home screen. You've got a bunch of apps. You do things on those apps. You might have, you know, request a holiday, see the upcoming shift patterns that you're working on. You, you know, have a whole collection of capabilities that are kind of out of the box: tasks, news, those things that are available. We've looked at delivering extra stuff into that dashboard experience. And 2022 has been about supporting Microsoft's vision for employee experience as a vendor that supplies products into that environment. The Viva dashboard has been a big investment for us. We've delivered nearly 50 little tiles of capability that are location-aware and they understand who you are and where you might be stood with your device can deliver very tailored information and experiences to you. And, you know, things like the frontline worker experience that can unlock, right, really complicated scenarios that Office 365 traditionally wouldn't have been able to do. So working with, there's a gas supply organization in the UK called Wales and West Utilities. And if you imagine, you know, gas engineers are dealing with a safety-critical item. And they drive vehicles, and those vehicles need checks. And the checks might differ by type of vehicle, and it might differ at time of day, it might differ at weather conditions. So this Viva Connections dashboard tile experience we've got in our product suite allows us to understand that, you know, Wes is in Swansea. It's raining. It's 9 p.m. in the night, and it's potentially dark. And it can promote the safe working practices for vehicle inspection before I pull away. So, you know, make sure I've got my high vis, make sure that I've checked the lights are working, make sure I've got, you know, full tank of fuel because it's the evening, and we don't expect petrol to be readily available. But all those kind of pieces of advice are now on this dashboard experience, and it's kind of understanding where I am, what time of day, who I am, what role I'm in. And it's hyper-contextualized. And Viva experience is all about that. And those dashboard tiles that our company is delivering into it is taking that hyper-personalization and giving organizations, like, a leg up in terms of getting going with some of those scenarios because the core Microsoft offering is very generic. We've really tailored it now across a bunch of customers to a set of products that allow us to kind of plug some of those scenario-centric kind of gaps in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:52) And then do these companies, are they just, like, buying your stuff out of the app store on an as-needed basis? Are they doing contracts with you and you make custom plug-ins? Like, how do you do the business side of things?

(Wes at 00:14:03) So from a commercial point of view, the engagement with most customers is direct, so not through sort of a store acquisition process because customers still tend to go out to market for enterprise-level stuff directly. The kind of app model that you have on your phone is more consumer-to-consumer service, and I haven't yet seen a massive uptick in customers buying in that way. We do have store presence, but we don't see a huge commercial inflow through that channel because it tends to still need IT to deploy something or approve something or have certain services enabled for a collection of their employees to get the value out of it. People are still coming to us direct to purchase those products. Our entire suite is very modular. In early 2020, during the early days of the pandemic, we switched our product offering to be in a very modular system. Just like a common construction idea of you buy little bricks and you put them together to build something that's what you're looking to build, our entire product suite is a sort of model in that vein, which is you buy the two particular modules that you need and you can bolt later ones on and come back to it. So the Viva dashboard tiles, you know, these 50-ish number of tiles, you can buy one, you could buy all 50. And depending on the scenarios you're going through, each tile satisfies a certain type of scenario, and it's suited for a certain type of employee group. And depending on what's your objectives and your priorities as a business, you may take one, you may take five, you may take 15. It really depends on what you're trying to achieve across that experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:51) Have you ever heard of, it's called Dynamic Communities. It's a like a conference that they have every year in Orlando. It's all about, like, Microsoft 365 partners, I think.

(Wes at 00:16:01) No. I've been to, I've personally attended the Inspire conference, both virtually and in person. In fact, I've been very fortunate to present at a number of the Inspire in persons over the years, but I've not heard of that particular one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) Yeah. I went to it. So I went to this, there's a company called Dynamic Communities, and they have all these communities, organizations, like forums and stuff for all the different Microsoft products, and they're, like, really close with Microsoft. And then they put on a conference every year, and people go there. And it was really big. And I went there, and it was my first experience being sort of, like, in a Microsoft environment. And there was a lot of vendors. Like, as you're describing what you do, there's a lot of vendors like you that build specialized things that are completely dependent and sit on top of the Microsoft ecosystem. They have, like, a really, really strong culture with their partners, I guess, is what you would call them.

(Wes at 00:16:54) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:54) So I thought that was pretty interesting. I was like,

(Wes at 00:16:56) Yeah. It's Addin365. For a Microsoft partner ourselves, I mean, we hold—there's loads of different badges and statuses and accreditations they give you. Addin365 are a charter partner in business applications and content services, which for a layman is we can provide applications that provide capability, which is the business applications piece, and we are experts in content management. So we can do information architecture, content security, content manipulation through AI, syntax, all these kind of capabilities, but it's about the content itself.

(Wes at 00:17:36) So with those two sort of specialisms, you've got a very strong productivity offering because you have the applications that help you build the content, you have the content management that helps you strengthen the value of the business application. So it's kind of a virtuous partnership. So that's kind of the business holding those accreditations. And then we're very fortunate that we have three full-time Microsoft valued professionals, MVP status employees. So myself, I hold Office apps and services MVP status.

(Wes at 00:18:10) So that's SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams. Our CEO, Susie Dean, she also holds that accreditation. And then our technical lead, Paul Schaefflein, he's an Office development MVP. So he has a specialism in actually coding solutions and products in the Office 365 space. Paul actually co-hosts the official Microsoft 365 developer podcast.

(Wes at 00:18:35) So he himself and a gentleman called Jeremy Thake on Microsoft side do a monthly podcast for developers, very technical audience. They interview some real sort of deep dive subjects on that space. So the three of us holding MVP status gives us insights into a lot of the pre-release programs and the kind of direction of travel for the Microsoft Cloud in that M365 space. So it is a kind of dual benefit the business enjoys because we get our insights and direction of travel insight by being charter partners, but we also on an individual level, three of us are very tightly connected with the Redmond teams in terms of delivery of those solutions. And the Viva Connections experience is a great example.

(Wes at 00:19:25) So we were one of the very few global organizations that were part of the preview program, and we helped to develop some of those Viva capabilities alongside the product group in early phases. So when it was publicly announced last year, there's a collection of interviews I've done with Adam Harmetz, who's the product owner. And Adam and I and team worked together on those capabilities from—we were their customer effectively delivering it. So that, you know, that's a great set of videos that were an insight into kind of the launch point. And in the last couple of weeks, Adam and I have got back together twelve months on, and we've gone through our learned experience together of, you know, what the Microsoft team have seen, what we've seen with companies like Wincanton, Saint James's Place, Wales and West Utilities, Agri, customers that we're delivering Viva Connections experiences for and, you know, for and with.

(Wes at 00:20:22) And that, you know, that set of videos again is that kind of twelve month, you know, let's catch up and let's see. So it is a really exciting space to work within, and there is a great deal of, you know, emotional excitement that the whole ecosystem around 365 shares and, you know, that community aspect of being an MVP is part of that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:45) And then I saw those videos. They were on your website. What's your website so people can check those out if they're interested?

(Wes at 00:20:51) Yeah. So the website is www.addin365.com. And if you dive on to the top navigation, there's a section called Viva Connections. And that's our home for all of our Viva Connections special sort of content. That's where you can find the interviews and conversation with Adam.

(Wes at 00:21:09) You can also see demonstrations of our Viva Connections products. And we're actually one of the headline sponsors of this year's European SharePoint conference opening over in Copenhagen. And for us there, we've got a couple of customer case studies we're going to be sharing on stage where they've deployed Viva Connections. They've used these dashboard capabilities. Agri is one of those customers.

(Wes at 00:21:32) And they're a really, really exciting organization because they're part of the food manufacturing, the food growing capabilities here in the UK and some parts of Europe. And it's one of those sort of hidden industries that you or I might not encounter. There's a scientific sort of specialism called agronomy. And it's all about the growing of crops and, you know, how do you get the best out of a field and the crop type you're growing. And they've got hundreds of these agronomist specialists, and there's a collection of them that might specialize in growing potatoes and some that grow salad and some that grow wheat and barley and oats.

(Wes at 00:22:16) And we've been working with them for the last six to nine months around delivering an agronomist-specific Viva dashboard. So they get told things like the potato season is changing, and you need to consider how you're feeding and watering, and you need to consider the fertilizer products that need to come to market for the farms that you're dealing with and all those kind of very moment-specific, excuse me, moment-specific times in the year where your skills need to be deployed. And that Viva dashboard is unlocking those scenarios for those agronomist scientists so that when they're in the field, in a literal sense, with iPads, with Surface Pros, they have the wealth of the knowledge from their intranet and their knowledge management system delivered to them in context. So, you know, I'm on ABC Farm, which specializes in potato crop growing. I know it's August.

(Wes at 00:23:18) And in August, for potatoes, these are the things we need to consider. And they can have a really in-depth conversation with the farmer or the farm specialisms at that particular location to get the information they need into the customer's hands, which then drives product sale for fertilizer, seed specialist support in that growing season. So we're going to be showcasing that as a customer story in the Copenhagen sessions. And I'm really looking forward to it because it's one of those kind of Cadbury's or Hershey's factories moments where you kind of know the product. You've eaten potatoes, you've eaten corn, you've eaten salad.

(Wes at 00:24:00) You probably didn't know the effort that goes into creating those supply chain moments. So, you know, we're going to show how some of that stuff has been achieved with Addin365 capabilities, which I'm really looking forward to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:15) I saw a post online the other day, and it was about some shortage of fertilizer because of the things happening in Ukraine and all of that. And the most popular comment on it, it was like a picture of a farm. Right? And then you've got a tractor on it. And they're saying, you know, farmers' crop yields low because of the shortage of fertilizer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:36) And the most popular comment was from this girl who had said something along the lines of, I don't know why these people are wasting their time growing their own food when they can just go to the grocery store. And I was like—and it was hilarious. I hope it was a joke. Yeah. But I read her whole, like, thing, and it didn't seem like a joke.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:57) It wasn't just like a quippy little thing. She was really going off on them for doing this, and I just was—I felt a lot of pain. And, you know, that's what happens in society. We get these cities and then things become farther away. Like, if you're really far away from your food—I mean, I live on a farm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:14) Right? So I am, like, super close to—I mean, food grows on my—where I don't even want it to grow. You know? So I'm, like, really close to the whole life cycle, but, you know, I wasn't always. And when I was in a city, until you start questioning it, it's just this magic box you go to that has all your food in it, and you just give them money for the food.

(Wes at 00:25:35) Yeah. Well, we've supported—there's another one of our customers, ASMPT, which again is a kind of unknown brand name to most. Right? Unless you're in that industry and you kind of understand semiconductors. You probably won't have heard of ASMPT.

(Wes at 00:25:52) We started working with them just at the beginning of lockdown, and their sort of big challenge was how do we continue to manufacture semiconductor placement machinery, semiconductors, and all the bits that go into all modern electronics globally when most of the world has moved to remote working? So we used our Workhub product, and we put into flight a program where we were helping R&D teams move into virtual working. So we were helping them understand how to do better document sharing, use Teams more effectively, use our Workhub product to kind of shape how to do things using the knowledge-based capabilities of Workhub to allow specialists to be scaled. So if you imagine a manufacturing floor for resilience, they tend to have, you know, a region in APAC that produce something and then a region in Western Europe that produce something. So if one is offline, let's say there's a natural disaster, earthquake, the other can pick up the slack of production.

(Wes at 00:26:59) So we were helping best practices get shared between those sites, the pairings getting set up correctly. And what we watched was their operational response to an effective labor shortage because lockdown put a strain on how many people could be in a physical vicinity, couldn't stand next to each other on a production line anymore, so you had to space out. So you could produce as much. And, you know, I saw firsthand how organizations that were in the manufacturing sector were benefiting from this Teams technology and the Workhub capabilities within it to make sure that, yes, they had physically less people in places, but they made sure that if they were standing up more sites and they were working in more sites, that the consistency, the knowledge-sharing aspects were pushed across those sites in a consistent fashion, and they were using our kit to do it. And, you know, that was quite—again, it was another exciting customer because, you know, most reversing cameras that go onto cars, they've had a hand in making.

(Wes at 00:28:05) Bits of everybody's iPhone, they've had a hand in making. So it was an organization where you were kind of seeing projects spin up. It's like the next generation of X. It's like, oh, I know where that'll be. That'll be an iPhone version whatever.

(Wes at 00:28:19) And, you know, IP being sensitive. So thinking about sensitivity and information protection. And in late twenty-one, we put in a whole collection of capabilities to abstract the business user from knowing about it, caring about it, being trained on it. It was, oh, you want a team, you want to work with somebody external, that somebody's classified as a supplier. Here's a Teams environment to run.

(Wes at 00:28:49) Behind the scenes, we've named it correctly. We've applied the information policies to it. We've set up the security correctly. We've invited the guests you've asked us to, and we've taken care of all the governance that IT and security care about. Business users just said, hey.

(Wes at 00:29:05) I want somebody to work. And that for us has always been really important, which is business user, don't confuse them with IT. Like, if you're talking about Microsoft terms or technical terms, you've made a mistake somewhere because people don't think like that. They're like, I want to run a project. Okay.

(Wes at 00:29:24) Well, they lean towards Excel. So give them an Excel sheet that works for them quickly, and they'll be happy. It's the same thing. It's like, I want to work somewhere where I can get a place to put my files and it's well-structured and it works for me. I don't care what IT need.

(Wes at 00:29:42) I don't care what information security policies need to be applied. Like, just give me places to work. Because if you don't, I'm going to find OneDrive on my personal thing or I'm going to share on Dropbox or I'm going to go on to WeTransfer, and I'm going to send stuff outside the firewall. It's about employee experience. It's about making it easy.

(Wes at 00:30:01) And, you know, and everything we're doing as a business right now is in that employee experience bubble. It's Viva everything, which is make it easy. Use the language that a business person's using. Make sure they don't understand they're in SharePoint almost. Like, you're in SharePoint.

(Wes at 00:30:20) I know I'm in SharePoint because I'm a nerd, and that's my job. But does the person in the marketing team care? No. They want to see their brand guidelines, and they want to be able to use them in the project they're working with the brand agency for. That's their ask.

(Wes at 00:30:34) They don't care. They don't care.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) Yeah. They just want it now and it to be easy. It's hilarious. I won't name names, but the projects I've been on that have dealt with sensitive data, maybe payment data or any sort of sensitive data, it was so impossibly long of a process to get access to something you needed. Everyone just went through, like, Google Docs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:57) Like, here you go.

(Wes at 00:30:57) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:58) They just did it all outside of their company because IT was so restrictive that they, you know, couldn't get any projects done and were just sitting around waiting for stuff. And humans will find a way. They will find a way if they have an outcome that they're trying to achieve.

(Wes at 00:31:13) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:13) I was curious, though, to ask you because you're over in the UK. Obviously, in the United States, there's a lot of talk in the media and whatnot about inflation and such. And so inflation's a big topic, but so is, like, the great resignation or people changing jobs and, you know, talent shortage and all that type of stuff. Are those two conversations happening in the UK as well?

(Wes at 00:31:36) Yeah. I mean, there's—you know, you have to take some of the volume of that message and understand those that are saying it loudly have a vested interest. So if you're running a SaaS platform that's managing projects and you want people to be using your project management capability, of course, you're going to tell people there's a high turnover of projects, and we need lots of projects. It's the same thing with, you know, big numbers announced by Google, by Adobe, by Microsoft about monthly active usage of a cloud service. And them saying, well, it's because of hybrid work.

(Wes at 00:32:13) It's like, well, no, actually. I think a lot of it's to do with the fact that people have now realized it's quite cool and it quite works, and that their misconceptions about how some of those services function for them has been changed. And I think COVID's lockdowns and remote working has had some positive effect in the sense that, you know, certainly Yammer, SharePoint, they used to be dirty words because of bad implementations. Whereas now it's like, oh, that's in SharePoint. Cool.

(Wes at 00:32:43) Let me just go and use it. Oh, it's consumer grade. It's like, it looks nice. Great. Let's go and use it.

(Wes at 00:32:49) You know, and Teams unlocked a lot of people's ability to communicate, and projects just accelerated. So what we found is that that moment in history forced many organizations to just get stuff done from an IT level. It's like turn things on, and then we'll pick up the pieces afterwards because we just need to be our function as a business. What's differentiating great organizations from survival organization? And I use that word carefully.

(Wes at 00:33:18) Survival organization for me is one that is aware of its place in the world, but is just maintaining the status quo. It's kind of like that. We've adopted a way of working that's how we're performing how we used to, but we're doing it differently. The ones that are thriving are recognizing that talent comes from different places. It comes from tools being easier to understand.

(Wes at 00:33:47) Not use, but understand. Like, what is the positioning of Teams versus picking up the phone? When should I do one versus the other? The great resignation thing has been discussed. I mean, firsthand, what I see in my organization is we've grown.

(Wes at 00:34:06) So somebody somewhere lost out because we've hired people. We've got a lot of talented new staff into the business in the last two years. So somewhere, somebody lost those employees. And what did we do to attract them? Something that's maybe a controversial one, which is we actually have a fairly strong lean to being in the office.

(Wes at 00:34:29) So we do three of five in the office. We do Monday, Thursday, Fridays in office. We have a very specific reason for being in the office on those days. Mondays, about kicking off the week, workshopping together, problem solving together. Tuesday, Wednesday, head down wherever you want. You want to lay in your bath and work?

(Wes at 00:34:51) All good. You want to sit in your garden? All good. You want to come in the office? Also, all good.

(Wes at 00:34:56) You can be where you want to be. Thursday, it's coming up to the run up to the end of the week, grab people, solve the final problems, get the polish on the product, whether that's consulting, whether that's actual product. And then Friday is about closing out, preparing for next week. So our pattern is quite different to many organizations as our customers. We'll be dealing with there in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, kind of middle of the week. And we see differences.

(Wes at 00:35:24) We see different organizations. I mean, some of the larger organizations are only just going back to any kind of office presence. I haven't really seen a strong correlation between movement of people between businesses and the working hybrid pattern. I've seen a strong correlation of people's movement in terms of they've understood where they get their energy. So an employee that wants to learn and wants to thrive and wants to work with smart people is now looking for somewhere that that is facilitated.

(Wes at 00:35:57) And we found that the people we've brought in, I mean, if I take my engineering team, my developers, many of them in the last twelve months have changed career. Full blown. One developer in my team, he used to work in a paper mill, and he was responsible for the machine operation of big paper producing equipment. And he decided that he wasn't really getting a lot of emotional energy out of that, and he wanted to get into coding and IT. Took a course, trained himself, sat through the interview process, and he's absolutely thriving.

(Wes at 00:36:35) And there's a whole collection of them. They come from different backgrounds. And we've got ski instructors. We've got paper mill guys. We've got university graduates in what I would class as the academy layer, the first two commercial years of working.

(Wes at 00:36:50) And all of those people have come from different backgrounds, different energy spaces, but they all share something really, really similar in common, which is they have this kind of thirst for wanting to contribute, and they want to make a difference by turning up and getting involved and doing those things. So I'm seeing the kind of resignation thing as really organizations that aren't offering that. They're not offering some kind of growth for the individual. They're not potentially attracting the talent. But it was interesting in recruitment because, being part of the senior leadership team, our business, obviously, we ponder how we're going to attract talent and we have to consider the commercial footprint, salaries and payments, all that sort of stuff.

(Wes at 00:37:40) Microsoft 365 has, I think, fundamentally changed the talent pool as a business owner in an interesting way. When it was on premises, your skills were cumulative. And if you had somebody with ten years of experience of SharePoint on premises, they were worth a lot of money, so you paid a decent salary. With the cloud, those skills, they have a finite moving window, where at some point, that skill is kind of good to have, it's nice to have, but it has a lower and lower market value. And I've seen in the last sort of two years a big shift from people that have a large number of, you know, decade plus experience commanding huge salaries and being able to deliver stuff versus people that are the same relevance of current skills, but have only been in the industry three years.

(Wes at 00:38:40) And the value they're delivering is the same. The price points are not. I think to the talent shortage problem and this idea of competing for talent, you don't have to purely pay a big salary, you have to have a rounded package. I think the approach we're taking is having a very rounded package, which is we've got the benefits, we've got the hybrid working, we've got, you've got great equipment, top of the range computers, enough screens to fill a desk. You know, we've got that working part right, but we've also then got a very clear progression.

(Wes at 00:39:19) So if you come in at academy level, in the first two years, the skills we're looking for you to develop are these. They have a price point. If you can do skill A by the end of the year, that's a pay rise of X, and it's transparent. And we've taken that kind of new approach to it by being a bit more transparent about your progression and how it relates to pay increase, but also being clear of the skills and where we want you to focus energy and at different levels. You know?

(Wes at 00:39:47) So we got some senior consultants that are in, you know, ten years plus of SharePoint experience, upper end of salary range. And where we're trying to stretch their expertise now is in customer relationship. You know, making sure that they put their heart and mind into, we're trying to give the customer the best employee experience. So how do we put ourselves in their shoes and how do we develop those things with the backing of all those decades of technical expertise? So a big, big, big shift in the way that you recruit, big shift in the way that you train, big shift in the way that you actually work as a pattern.

(Wes at 00:40:23) You know, and that great resignation, I mean, touch wood, we haven't felt it ourselves, but we know we've been the beneficiaries because we brought people in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:32) I love it. I love it. People want to learn more, where do they go?

(Wes at 00:40:37) So a good place to start is follow it, Addin365 on LinkedIn or Twitter. So if you did search on LinkedIn for Addin365 or Twitter is Addin365, you'll get regular updates from Paul, myself, and Susie in terms of what's latest in Office 365, good insights into customers' case studies. We've got a huge bank of real life storytelling around how you employ our products to solve real business challenges. In a broader sense, if you're in this space and you're interested in learning more about the overall capabilities, then the European SharePoint Conference, Copenhagen, is a great place to meet us and learn more from Microsoft directly in those spaces. And basically, you know, just keep an eye on the Viva suite from Microsoft because that's the big push.

(Wes at 00:41:32) That's where Microsoft are putting, you know, huge energy in this employee experience deliverable that they're now kind of creating in the 365 space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:42) Well, thank you so much for doing this, Wes. Man, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Wes at 00:41:46) It's great. It's great talking to you, Joel. It's always fun to catch up and share insights from this side of the pond.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:52) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn, or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.