Five years ago employee satisfaction with finding information within the company was very low. it was the lowest rated it service among all those we surveyed about. Related surveys done by other teams supported this, for instance that our software engineers “finding information” as one of the most wasteful frustrating activities in their job, costing the company thousands of man years of productivity.
A project team was formed to improve this. In the years since we have pursued:
Microsoft has >300,000 employees working around the globe, and collectively, our employees use or access many petabytes of content as they move through their workday. within our employee base, there are many different personas who have widely varying search interests and use hundreds of content sources. Those content sources can be file shares, Microsoft sharepoint sites, documents and other files, and internal websites. our employees also frequently access external websites, such as hr partners’ websites.
We began with user satisfaction survey net score at 87 (scale of 1-200, with 200 being perfect). We have reached satisfaction of 117. Our goal is 130+.
Core to our progress has been:
In analyzing the click activity on our corporate portal, the most impactful elements are:
Bookmarks |
Are clicked on in 45% of all searches and significantly shortens the duration of a search session. We currently have ~1200 bookmarks making for quick discovery of the most commonly searched for content and tools around the company. |
Topics |
Are clicked on in 5-7% of all searches. |
Connectors |
Are clicked on in 4-5% of all searches. |
Metadata |
Good metadata typically moves an item from the bottom of the first page to the top half and from page 2 or later onto the bottom of page 1. |
Additional details will be published in later blog posts. If of interest, details as to exactly what Microsoft search admin does in its regular administrative activities are described here.
As shown in the preceding table, roughly half of all enterprise-level searches benefit from one of the search admin capabilities. Employees who receive such benefits average a one-minute faster search completion time than those whose searches don’t use those capabilities. Across 1.2 million monthly enterprise-level searches at Microsoft, that time savings amounts to more than 8,000 hours a month of direct employee-productivity benefit.
We achieve these results with an admin team of part-time individuals, investing a total of <300 hours per month doing direct search administration, responding to user requests to help find individual items, and maintaining a self-help site which advises employees on where and how to search best. We also have a larger improvement program striving to improve information discoverability across the company.
So 5 years into our improvement efforts, we have significantly improved user satisfaction, can now measure the productivity impact search is having, and built numerous partnerships across the company that are expected to continue yielding improvements in the years to come.
Lessons from this work is actively improving search has significant payback. The first step is to actively administer search, doing whatever helps the most popular searches to deliver the right results.
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