United Bank for Africa Plc (UBA), is a Pan-African financial services group headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria. With subsidiaries in 20 African countries and offices in London, Paris and New York, the group has a staff strength of over 13,000 professionals.
Business Need:
With employees distributed across different locations, the institution faced the challenge of seamless communication because several platforms were used to communicate, and this had a negative effect on productivity. Since each of the organization’s projects involves a diverse group of individuals including employees, vendors, and stakeholders, it is critical that everyone can collaborate efficiently and effectively.
To boost collaboration and improve communication, UBA sought for a platform with seamless interface that could keep employees, vendors, contractors, and other stakeholders connected and updated – in real time. A complete online collaboration platform that combines workplace chat, meetings, files sharing, calls, attachments, and tasks all on a single platform and one single interface.
The Solution:
As a strategic Microsoft Partner, Signal Alliance brought to bear our competencies to support UBA in deploying the Microsoft Teams to help boost communication and collaborative efforts amongst stakeholders within and outside the organization thereby improving productivity. A chat-based collaboration solution, Microsoft Teams combines productivity tools like Office, chats, video & audio calling, third-party application integration and other Office365 features. This enabled different workflows to run smoothly for all users, even if the teams were distributed in different locations.
Business use cases were developed by the Signal Alliance Team toenable UBA stakeholders get used to Microsoft Teams such as enabling the Human Resource department to engage distributed employees in training, project management across non-functional lines, support treasury department to streamline data consolidation and analysis.
Thereafter, a company wide end-user training was conducted in collaboration with UBA Academy which cut across all locations where the bank has presence in Africa. The training covered:
- Overview of Microsoft Teams and the strategy around Teams
- Demonstrations on Chat, Audio/Video calls, Sharing files
- Demos on Managing Teams and Channels
- Demos on Calendaring on Teams
- Demos on Teams Customizations for individuals and departments
- Accessing resources via Teams
Results and impact:
Now with 80% active usage of Microsoft Teams, UBA is reaping the benefits of better, faster communications:
- Since moving to Teams, the company has experienced significant reduction in cancelled or missed internal meetings and a substantial increase in real-time project collaboration.
- Team meetings with stakeholders spread across different regions are scheduled and conducted seamlessly and since teams can effectively collaborate in real time, this saves the company time and money.
- Equipped with the security features available in Microsoft Teams, including data encryption and two-factor authentication, employees feel an increased sense of security when handling classified information.
- With the user-friendly and scalable interface, UBA has witnessed a great improvement in stakeholder collaboration. All trainings are now conducted online via Microsoft Teams:
- UBA Academy has adopted the use of Microsoft Teams as a veritable platform to implement all training programmes for 2020
- staff were trained in Compliance & Risk Management training which was deployed through Microsoft Teams
- The 2020 HR Virtual Summit which held from 20– 22nd April 2020 was hosted on Microsoft Teams with about 130 participants spanning all geographies where UBA operate (Nigeria, New York, London and 19 African countries)
- UBA Academy and HR have adopted the use of Microsoft Teams as medium for weekly Check-in Meetings and project team meetings
In addition, the Signal Alliance engagements has indirectly increased active usage for One Drive for business and SharePoint online through the conscious efforts of storing common departmental documents on Teams