Gathering employee ideas is a huge opportunity to hear from new perspectives, improve business processes, and create a culture of innovation inside your organisation. Luckily, Microsoft Teams has an app for that!

The app is called Employee Ideas and is a PowerApp added as a Tab in a Channel. To add the app as a tab, open the Team and channel of your chosen destination and click to add a tab. Then search for employee ideas.

When you add the employee ideas app, it will create two tabs; Ideas and Manage Ideas. One is for employees to create ideas, and the other is to manage them.

I can see my top weekly contributors, weekly top ideas, and then a list of campaigns in the Ideas tab.

The HR team (or whichever group of people collect ideas) usually manage campaigns created in the Manage Ideas tab. Each campaign can have several ideas in it submitted by employees. For example, you can have a return-to-workplace campaign, and some ideas can be mask-wearing or an in-office schedule.

I can submit a new idea or like existing ideas as an employee. When I submit a new idea, I can add a title, description, image, and answer questions such as how many employees this will impact.

I can create a new campaign in the Manage Ideas tab and add an image, title, and description. I can also choose a duration for the campaign. Having an expiration on campaigns helps clean up campaigns that are perhaps not relevant anymore.

I can also customise questions to ask employees when they submit an idea. Questions responses can be rating or text responses, and you can use the arrows to change the order.

Employee ideas is a PowerApp, which means it’s also customisable, so you can add your company branding and colours to make it more in theme with your organisation.

Continue reading all about Microsoft Teams at Your Guide to Microsoft Teams.

About the Author:

Hi! I’m Kat Greenan, a Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Solutions Specialist. I currently live in Cardiff but originate from Edinburgh, Scotland. I started my career as a Customer Success Manager at a Microsoft Partner, Core Technology Systems. I then moved into a Microsoft Solutions role and now spend my day working with businesses around the UK, helping them plan and deploy Microsoft 365.
I was recently awarded the Microsoft Office 365 MVP award and am pleased to be part of such a great community of tech experts.

Reference:

Greenan, K. (2022). Available at: https://collabwithkat.com/2022/04/04/how-to-gather-employee-ideas-in-microsoft-teams/ [Accessed: 7th September 2022].