Supercharging the Energy Sector

Contents

1. Introduction & the Energy Context
2. The Energy Sector in Numbers
3. Providing the Right Tools to Adapt & Respond
4. The Microsoft 365 Digital Workplace & How it Can Help
5. The Energy Mix: Supporting Your People
6. Problems Solved: Six Key Challenges Facing Internal Communications Teams in the Energy Sector
7. Benefits Realised: Case Studies – Putting Microsoft 365 Tools into Practice
8. What’s Next

Introduction

The Energy Context

The UK’s 2008 Climate Act committed us to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050, and established UK carbon budgets.
In June 2019, this was strengthened by a commitment in the UK to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050.
As the energy sector moves at speed to meet these demands – including to achieve 95% clean power by 2030 (source: gov.uk) – this huge shift now requires the industry to reshape itself.

Not only strategically, but also operationally, and across all of its activities.

This presents a significant challenge for the energy sector – because it means systems and processes also need to change, from introducing new safety procedures, to assuring more robust governance across the board.

There are other pressures facing the energy sector, too. An ageing workforce, a skills shortage, the perpetual potential for mergers and acquisitions, to name just a few.

With this in mind, the need for better, digital tools to support more effective, timely collaboration, clearer communication between teams, and faster decision-making, has never been more important.

The Energy Sector in Numbers

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Providing the Right Tools to Adapt and Respond

Whatever position or role your people have in your energy company, they need to be given the right tools at work to help them work happily. They need to be better equipped to adapt, and to respond, and to make the right decisions by being well-informed and up-to-speed in a fast-moving sector.

That means having to hand the right tools and technology that can bring teams together, wherever they work, and whatever they do. It means underpinning a digitally powered workplace that intuitively supports close and effective collaboration within teams.

And it means listening to your workforce, and encouraging two-way conversations, through digital tools that enable clear, consistent, internal communications.

Why is this important now?

Because all of the changes that are now happening across the energy sector will land on employees. Added to which, many legacy, disjointed systems, fragmented communications channels, and outdated ways of working are no longer up to the job. Many systems still in use across the sector only add to inefficiency and increase employees’ frustration. Even worse, they can weigh heavily on mandatory safety, compliance and operational performance, too.

Inclusivity and Supporting All Of Your Employees

Frontline engineers, technicians, planners, and corporate teams – in fact, everyone who makes up your workforce, and who depends on timely, clear consistent information to perform their roles successfully and happily – need to be supported by the right digital tools.

Now, more than ever before.

In this guide we walk you through how the Microsoft 365 suite of digital tools, ones you’ve probably heard about but might not be sure of all their features and benefits – such as SharePoint, Teams, Viva, Power Platform, and Copilot – can truly assist in creating better ways of working.

We’ll showcase their features and benefits, and their relevance to your sector – and reveal their power to supercharge your internal communications channels, and ways of working and collaborating, within and across your organisation.

Digital Tools That People Like using, It’s As Simple As That

Internal communications in any sector work well when they’re clear, consistent, correct, complete, and courteous.

This is categorically the case in the energy sector too – but where the energy sector is different today is the new landscape its facing.

• Workforces are more highly distributed than ever before – often across continents and time zones, onshore and offshore, in the field, in processing plants, in offices, and working at home
• The UK energy industry rightly puts safety as a critical first, and as a sector it’s highly regulated by Ofgem. But now, additional influencing factors are putting the sector right at the centre of unprecedented change
• Geopolitics are shaping change, and with the drive towards clean power by 2030, National Energy System Operator (NESO) requirements, and strict environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting expectations – mandatory activity is also shaping change.

Better Channels Equal Better Reach

Your internal communications team can empower colleagues working through this change, and the sector’s demands and constraints, when supported by Microsoft 365 tools.

Useful, user-friendly, everyday digital tools that are intuitive to use, and which better support employees by giving them better channels, better reach, and better governance.

We believe that now is the time when the internal communications function in the energy sector has a watershed opportunity – and more influence than ever before.

Senior leadership need help explaining complex topics like Clean Power 2030, NESO’s priorities, and ESG commitments in a way that feels real and relevant to people and connects them to their daily tasks.

Good communication guarantees connectivity

Safety, compliance, and culture are now perceived as strategic imperatives: good communication not only sits at the heart of all three, but it is essential to guaranteeing them. And, as with many other sectors, the digital workplace is becoming the norm, and the principal way that people interact with their employer, and their companies, day to day.

In our experience, the very best results happen in the workplace when we work in partnership with your internal comms team, and your IT and operations team, to shape new Microsoft 365 workplace solutions – such as intranets, Teams, Viva and Power Platform around the real needs of field-based, frontline and office based staff.

Also, AI tools like SharePoint Knowledge Agent help assure better governance, by making it much to keep your central source of knowledge and document management system up-to-date and in check.

For example, Viva Engage is great for supporting two-way comms, encouraging a strong sense of community, and knowledge sharing.

Viva Connections is good for making your intranet and news channels more accessible by bringing them into Teams, with the added benefit of making them easily accessed via a smartphone for employees in the field.

Also, Viva Learning and Viva Insights help to support learning and development activity and company insights.

Problems Solved

Six Key Challenges Facing Internal Communications Teams
in the Energy Sector

Real communication challenges face the energy sector, and Microsoft 365 tools are helping to ease these pain points.

Challenge 1
Engaging Your Teams Amidst a Shifting Energy Sector

“How can we better explain what Clean Power 2030, NESO, and regulatory changes really mean to our organisation?”

Clean Power 2030 targets, NESO’s coordination role and new regulatory frameworks can feel abstract or confusing to employees. Different teams (field, operations, corporate, support) need different levels of detail but a consistent core story. Here are three ways that Microsoft 365 can help:

SharePoint and Campaign Agent

Use SharePoint to create a clear, branded “Energy transition hub” with explainers, FAQs, roadmaps and role specific pages to act as your single source of truth, that’s easy to keep updated and mange centrally. Further enhance this asset by creating an AI-powered Campaign Agent – which makes user navigation to this information much easier, while also helping your internal comms team with content management. It’s an ideal solution for campaign-specific information, such as data or messaging relating to your organisation’s 2030 initiatives.

Viva Connections

Put the hub front and centre of your employees’ workspaces, in Microsoft Teams, so that everyone – frontline and remote workers alike – can access it and interact, via desktop or mobile.

Viva Engage

‘Ask me anything’ sessions are a great way to boost employee engagement with senior leaders. You can use them for Q&As and also to share leadership briefings and the latest updates. We’ve also added optional mechanisms to avoid misuse of two-way feedback channels, such as a structured process for flagging keywords or reported content, and code of conduct guidelines.

How we helped

For client Argent Energy, a European waste‑based biodiesel producer, we helped to shift the company’s overarching ambitions to decarbonise into practical, day-to-day, ways of working. This involved getting multiple departments to work consistently and compliantly as the organisation evolved, supported by a SharePoint intranet and document management system that served the whole organisation, with structured approval workflows for policies and operational documentation.

This intranet markedly helped to embed strategy and compliance into everyday working processes for employees, rather than relying on top‑down messaging, while improving clarity of purpose for each team involved.

For global renewables company TagEnergy a company branded, optimised SharePoint intranet and Viva Integration has connected employees across Lisbon, London, and Sydney – replacing scattered regional sites and ad hoc email. This has helped to drive better engagement, and a shared company culture during a time of rapid global expansion in renewables. Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams has also put the intranet into field engineers’ hands, so that wind and solar farm crews get news and resources on the go via smartphones. The system supports department and project pages, including a dedicated Health and Safety section, so content can be targeted, boosting its effectiveness.

Challenge 2
Making Your Mandatory Safety Information Unmissable

“Our health, safety and wellbeing procedures, notices, and compliance updates are in multiple places, and can quickly become outdated formats – how can we manage them better and boost their visibility?”

Microsoft 365 is great for helping your internal comms team create, manage, and update mandatory training information and modules.

SharePoint

Use SharePoint to design an intuitive, easy-to-navigate intranet, or a policy hub, where essential information is much easier to find. Structured libraries and version control also help to make sure that there’s only one master version, that’s centrally updated.

Viva Connections and Teams

Use these handy channels to highlight critical updates, such as targeted, visually appealing news cards, or send out notifications to specific locations or job roles.

Power Platform

Use these simple apps and workflows for reporting incidents or near misses, routing them automatically to the right teams.

How we helped

For clients ElecLink and Argent Energy we’ve built approval workflows so that stakeholders and internal communications teams can approve any changes to important documentation – such as on safety or compliance matters – before it’s published. This approach assures that intranet content is reliable and trustworthy, and employees can only see the most up to date version.

For TagEnergy, we’ve made safety communications immediate and prominent through targeted alerts on their intranet and via Teams, thanks to a ‘mandatory read’ Power App. The internal communications team can now ensure that important health, safety, and compliance documentation is always read as a priority by employees.

For UK utilities contractor Network Plus we have helped to ensure across-the-board access to a new company intranet for all employees – including field engineers with only a smartphone to hand – via Teams and a responsive, optimised design. This is particularly critical for ensuring everyone sees mandatory safety updates, which, along with operational bulletins, are ‘pushed’ out to individuals so no one messes anything important.

Challenge 3
Reaching Everyone Everywhere, Wherever They Work

“Many of our employees are out in the field, not office or desk-based, and have very limited access to company emails or our current intranet – how can we make sure they’re included in everything we need to communicate, too?”

Viva Connections in Teams

Microsoft 365 can help via Viva Connections, which can easily be accessed via Teams for people using their smartphones at work. This is a front door for news, safety information, and quick links, fully optimised for phones and tablets.

News

Employees increasingly want to choose to receive company news that’s relevant to them. [EP12.1]With Viva Connections and SharePoint, your internal comms team can ‘push’ out news stories to different employee groups, depending on their location or role. Similarly, our Beacon news tool lets employees choose the news topics they’d like to read according to their interests – plus there’s an override function to make sure the important headline stories aren’t missed by anyone.

Viva Engage

This is a great way to bring employees working in the field or in remote areas into the conversation and engaging all colleagues into your organisational culture – for example, by setting up community groups based on shared interests or job roles.

How we helped

For global renewables company TagEnergy and global oil and gas company Gulf Oil, Viva Connections in Microsoft Teams has united a distributed workforce, by putting put the intranet into field engineers’ hands. Employees can now access intranet content, important news, and company updates, wherever they are via an optimised smartphone app.

Challenge 4
Presenting the Facts When a Merger Looks Imminent

“The energy and utilities sectors are well-known for having frequent mergers and acquisitions, and the various challenges of communicating change in times of uncertainty is always down to the internal comms team. What tools can help us with consistent messaging on one reliable platform?”

SharePoint

Using SharePoint to create a new ‘Change and integration’ internal intranet microsite will prove a great resource, providing a single source of truth where you can keep regularly updated information on timelines, FAQs and leadership messages.

Navigation

By using SharePoint’s navigational features, you can signpost to hubs and other resources to make sure your messages flow, gradually creating a single, coherent digital home as systems, following a merger or acquisition, are integrated.

Viva Amplify

This lets you write your message once and post to multiple channels, such as Outlook, Teams, Viva Engage, and SharePoint, making sure that all employees receive the same message, regardless of where they work or how they access company news. It’s a huge, timesaving plus for the internal comms team, by only needing to write one message that gets published across different channels.

How we helped

For a new nuclear venture company, we have helped to ensure facts and key updates stand out clearly, through a ‘need to know’ filtered search option, which is now helping employees to find authoritative information in quick time during uncertain or complex situations.

Challenge 5
Safeguarding Valued in-house Knowledge

“We’re concerned that, as many of our highly experienced engineers, operators, and leaders approach retirement age, that they’re going to take lots of institutional learning and knowledge with them. How can we avoid that happening?”

It’s true that newly hired staff will be joining a more complex environment than their contemporaries who’ve worked with the company for years, and they’ll still need to get up to speed quickly. Without a structured way to capture and share know how, internal communication becomes person dependent: but “ask Chris, he’s been here 30 years” is not enough! Microsoft 365 can help.

SharePoint

Your internal comms team can create well structured knowledge hubs for procedures outlining “how we do things here”, with lessons learned and FAQs that can be searched and reused.

Viva Engage

This is great for setting up communities of practice where experienced staff can answer questions, share stories and mentor new starters across locations. Conversations may be archived and searchable, and an option to provide ‘Answers in Viva’ means that your employees can provide answers themselves to common questions.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

By embracing the power of your corporate AI tool, with added safety features for security, you can use Copilot, alongside well-structured background criteria, to help new staff to find relevant, trusted information.

How we helped

For client ElecLink, the UK–France power interconnector, we provided a secure, cross-company intranet that is a single source of truth for both UK and French employees, enabling seamless cross-border collaboration, which safeguards project knowledge, and which offers guest access and special permissions to meet strict regulatory controls.

For a new nuclear venture company client we have created a central hub for knowledge, containing policies, procedures, and technical documentation, so that valuable expertise remains accessible and retained as the workforce expands.

Challenge 6
Communicating the Benefits of ‘Disruptive’ Technologies

“Employees are starting to worry about AI taking their jobs, as new tools such as control systems, and Microsoft 365 Copilot, are now available. How can we explain the benefits and reduce uncertainty among our staff groups?”

SharePoint and Viva Connections

Remove the fear factor by using these two tools to create a ‘new ways of working’ area on your company intranet, with stories, examples, and timelines for change.

Viva Engage

Get talking, by running short a learning series, Q&A threads, and ‘day in the life’ stories from colleagues who explain how tools like Copilot, Teams and Power Apps help them carry out daily tasks more quickly or effectively.

Power Platform

This lets you set up self service forms to gather employees’ feedback on new tools that have been launched so that ensure continuous feedback, and therefore improvement.

How we helped

For global oil and gas company Gulf Oil, we have helped employees and senior leadership understand the benefits of new technologies including AI, such as exploring Copilot and new features on Viva features. This involved us running a 12-week Microsoft 365 Copilot AI discovery trial to showcase future possibilities, such as auto-summarising content, and AI-driven Q&As. It gave leadership valuable insights into the possibilities of using cutting-edge tech within the energy sector.

What’s Next

Working together on your Microsoft 365 digital workplace

We are Microsoft 365 specialists with a keen interest in working with internal communications teams to translate complex M365 tools into practical, everyday solutions that improve the digital employee experience, and make internal communicators’ lives easier.

Always looking ahead to new and emerging technologies, and their power to support busy internal comms teams, we now provide a Copilot AI agent with every intranet we deliver. This super-useful tool helps to save valuable time by speeding up the search for timely and relevant information while keeping your intranet content clean and current.

Book a session with us to discuss what your dream state with Microsoft 365 could look like, or if you’d like to discuss a specific project that we can support.

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