How to Use Microsoft 365 Copilot for Employee Listening

Understanding the feelings and experiences of employees is an essential part of building a motivated and engaged workforce. This blog post explores how Microsoft 365 Copilot can become your most valuable employee listening tool, saving both time and budget.

A structured approach to employee listening is one of the most important parts of a results-driven engagement strategy. Research shows clear links between effective employee listening and both engagement and productivity – with ‘highly engaged’ employees being three times more likely to report feeling heard at work, and 74% of people saying they are more effective at their job when they feel heard.

Despite these benefits, 86% of employees don’t believe people in their workplace are heard fairly or equally, and a quarter of UK employees feel completely voiceless.

And as the complexity of the working world continues to accelerate while a significant number of people feel totally unheard at work, it’s not much of a mystery as to why so many organisations report a struggle to retain talent.

The bottom line is that employees need to be given a voice and feel heard by their employer to be genuinely engaged and motivated. So, if it’s that straightforward, why isn’t every organisation prioritising employee listening?

It usually comes down to a lack of resources.

For time and budget-constrained internal teams, working with a costly external survey provider to gather and analyse employee feedback isn’t always an option. And without an army of team members who can manually analyse hundreds – if not thousands – of pieces of qualitative data, gathering company-wide feedback in-house is also not always a realistic option. And, of course, employee listening is about far more than just surveys. It includes reviewing feedback from an array of different sources including emails, focus groups, chat messages, and exit interviews to generate insights into what employees are thinking and feeling.

The solution is the effective use of AI.

Using an AI assistant such as Microsoft Copilot is becoming a game-changing approach for many internal teams. By marrying human creativity with AI efficiency, Copilot can become a powerful extra pair of hands to alleviate resource pressures and supercharge employee listening capabilities. While content creation is often one of the first things that comes to mind when we think about AI support from an internal comms and engagement perspective, things have moved on from the early days of AI assistants and employee listening is fast becoming one of Copilot’s most valuable use cases.

What is Copilot?

Let’s pause for a moment to consider what Copilot actually is. There are two different versions of the application for business:

If you have Windows 11 and/or use the Edge browser, you can access Copilot’s foundational capabilities through its chat-based AI assistant on your desktop, which also brings web data into the responses. This version of Microsoft Copilot does not have access to your business data, and is not integrated into your M365 apps like Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, etc.

The other version, ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot’, requires an additional licence within your M365 suite. Despite the similar name, this version of Copilot takes things up a level regarding AI integration. It draws data and inputs seamlessly from other M365 apps, such as Teams, SharePoint, Excel, Viva Engage, and Outlook.

Microsoft 365 Copilot – the fully licenced and integrated version – is what we’ll be talking about throughout the rest of this blog post. But both versions have been designed to help you streamline and automate the mundane or admin-heavy tasks so that you can focus on the things that really matter. It’s an extra pair of hands in your team, and it’s all about reducing the admin burden to allow you to do more with less. 

4 ways Copilot can transform employee listening in your organisation 

So let’s get down to business – how can we leverage Microsoft 365 Copilot to support employee listening?

It’s important to remember that any type of AI assistance will only ever be as good as the data it is given access to. Which is precisely why Copilot is so powerful. The simple fact that it draws data and information from right across your suite of Microsoft 365 applications is what amplifies the value of its outputs.

With that in mind, here are four ways you can use Copilot to switch things up and bring employee listening front and centre.

1. Gathering employee feedback 

There is real skill involved in writing questions for an employee survey. Knowing what to ask, and how to ask it, is certainly not a simple exercise. Copilot helps with this by using large language models to generate high-quality questions for employee surveys, which can then be edited and adjusted as needed.

It then works hand in hand with other applications, such as Forms, Viva Pulse, or Viva Glint, to build out the survey or poll and plan the distribution to employees. In Forms, Copilot will analyse the requirements based on your prompt, create the questions and then physically build the survey in a matter of seconds. In Viva Glint, Copilot opens as a separate panel to provide you with survey prompts and question suggestions.

Whatever tool you decide to use for the survey or poll itself, typically selected based on the size of your audience, Microsoft 365 Copilot can significantly save time and budget on both question generation and survey build. 

2. Analysing the data

This is where the Copilot magic really starts to happen.

Whether there are 10 or 10,000 employees in an organisation, the quantitative and qualitative feedback they’ve provided needs to be thoroughly analysed. And while this is arguably the most important part of the entire employee listening process, it can often take months and months – not to mention the large vendor consultancy expense – to complete, which can lead to a loss of momentum and frustration from employees.

Copilot will instantly analyse the data. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s not.

By taking the results from MS Forms or Pulse as an export and using Copilot in Excel, you can immediately generate pivot tables, graphs, or charts without any manual intervention. A task that could have previously taken half a working day can now be completed by Copilot in seconds. It will help to identify key trends and sentiments and generate visual reports that are easily digestible.

You can also use Copilot in Viva Glint to analyse survey responses directly within the application rather than exporting them into Excel. It generates immediate insights into the employee experience, making sure every employee’s voice is heard. In one case study, Copilot in Viva Glint summarised 14,000 employee comments in just 15 seconds. 

3. Generating insights 

We mentioned earlier that employee listening is about more than just surveys.

It’s important to think about the different sources of feedback that can be pulled from across the organisation. Everything from intranet poll results to absence data to comments from online Q&A events can provide extremely valuable employee feedback.

But regularly pulling information from all of these different sources, integrating with employee survey data, and manually analysing on a regular basis could easily become a full-time job. Luckily, Microsoft 365 Copilot has your back. Its ability to draw data from across the M365 suite of applications means that the application can synthesize feedback from all of these different sources and create detailed reports that can be shared with leadership. Boom. 

4. Presenting information and creating reports 

Once all of the data has been gathered and insights have been generated, the findings and next steps need to be summarised and presented back to the business. But creating detail-driven reports that effectively summarise the insights from the most recent employee listening efforts can be an incredibly resource-intensive activity.

Thankfully, this is another task that can be automated. Microsoft 365 Copilot in PowerPoint will generate professional-standard presentations around whichever insights and data you provide it with. By simply uploading the information into Copilot in PPT, the application will automatically build a top-notch visual presentation that clearly summarises the key points and next steps. In Microsoft Word, the integrated Copilot application will produce reports and effectively summarise information based on whatever you feed it. Gone are the days of having to spend weeks on end writing up a report to share your findings and set out recommendations.

Automating this relatively simple task gives you everything you need to be able to share the findings with key stakeholders, saving a significant amount of time.