Elly Yates-Roberts |
QBE Insurance has rolled out Microsoft Teams to transform how its employees communicate across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia.
The business community migration started in the US in January 2020 and was completed in early March 2020, transitioning 15,402 people to Teams. This has enabled QBE to support staff working remotely and maintain business continuity plans.
“We managed to migrate North America in seven working days, Europe in nine working days, Asia was one event and then Australia in 10 working days,” said Scott Paterson, global workplace services portfolio manager at QBE, in a Microsoft news story. “We really condensed that to limit the in-region impact.
“Where we are right now in the midst of Covid-19, we’re busy with our business continuity plan. Leaders throughout the company have recognised the role that Teams offers. We are in a fantastic position now with everybody having Teams, allowing people to communicate and collaborate.”
The firm also piloted the migration with its Technology Services group in 2019, which enabled it to structure its communications and training programme to optimise its impact, better understand how staff felt about the change, and ensure the rest of the transition was seamless.
Prior to Covid-19 measures, Microsoft Teams had seen huge growth within QBE - Teams Chat messages increased by 3,000 per cent, Teams audio calls by 2,500 per cent and Teams Meetings by over 2,000 per cent. And since the Covid-19 precautionary measures have been in place these figures have continued to increase.
“Everyone was ready to use Teams to carry on their roles within the organisation and we haven’t witnessed any service disruption since switching to a remote model relating to collaboration or team communication,” said Paterson. “[The] migration itself was pretty much a non-event, which being in charge of migration is exactly what you want to see. We had next to no disruption. We had no executive or manager level escalations. We had nobody without service…”
QBE is planning to extend its use of Teams, Office 365 and OneDrive even further in the coming months.