Polaris highlights innovation and enhances employee engagement with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint spaces

Enhancing global collaboration with help from Teams

Previously, Polaris had lacked a consistent global communication and collaboration tool. The company had used Slack and Jabber as its primary messaging and chat tools, but using disparate solutions was challenging for the company’s globally distributed teams. Polaris undertook a slow and deliberate deployment of Teams to its different departments. The arrival of COVID-19, however, catapulted its usage and within two months the entire company had adopted Teams as its primary communication solution.

Polaris’ global engineering, manufacturing, and product development teams enthusiastically embraced Teams as their standard communication platform. “Using Teams and OneDrive resolves challenges with file sharing and collaboration,” says Sheila Miller, Modern Workplace Program Lead at Polaris. “Teams stands out not just for its private communication capabilities but also for the unrestrained collaboration we can now achieve.”

Transforming a flagship event with immersive digital content and collaboration

The purpose of the company’s annual ORV technology symposium is to generate excitement around new vehicle projects and gather feedback from employees in attendance before the new products are released. Historically, the in-person event was hands-on, with educational content, live presentations, and Polaris ORVs parked onsite. Because of COVID-19, Polaris used Teams and SharePoint spaces to create and host the virtual ORV symposium.

Boris Rubanovich, Staff Designer Technologist with the ORV Technology Group at Polaris, was the lead designer and event organizer for the symposium. “We had never done anything like this before,” he says. “Microsoft Teams and SharePoint spaces made setting up the virtual symposium simple and provided the flexibility to collaborate and create digital 3D project presentations with images, videos, and linked documents that were co-authored by global project teams.”

Rubanovich’s team partnered with various project teams and used SharePoint spaces, a web-based intranet platform for creating mixed reality projects, to design virtual 3D presentations with 3D objects, 360-degree images, videos, and linked product documentation, bringing them together in Teams. They created 27 Teams channels to house each exhibit, host conversations, and connect attendees with product teams. “We wanted to capture the in-person dynamic of live conversations as people looked at the products and explored ideas with questions,” says Miller. “Teams and SharePoint spaces delivered those dynamic employee experiences.”

The event’s virtual lobby featured keynote speakers from engineering leadership and product owners. Project owners populated each Teams channel with video content, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets, providing in-depth data on their systems. Each project room featured a chat window staffed by project owners to answer questions, and as attendees reviewed the virtual content, they could interact directly with project teams. Attendees were also able to call in at scheduled times to engage with product designers for more in-depth product information. Polaris designed scavenger hunts and trivia games to add a fun and interactive element to the event.

Improving employee engagement with Teams and SharePoint spaces

The first-ever virtual ORV event allowed employees to review information beyond a specified in-person period and spend more time learning and exploring content than in previous live events. Attendees could explore the virtual symposium and learn at their own pace, free to communicate with project owners using Teams chat and Teams meetings to interact and ask questions.

“Extending content exploration beyond the live event was a value-add,” says Janelle Byer, Program Manager with the ORV Technology Group at Polaris. “Our overseas engineering teams are active when we aren’t, so providing them access to symposium content during their normal workday was huge. Enabling our North American offices to explore content in different time zones at their convenience also added value. It was an extremely popular feature for employees.”

About 850 people attended the virtual ORV symposium—an increase from the average 300-400 in-person attendees—with a large contingent coming from the global engineering organization “The self-paced exploration helped attendees digest and understand what the project was about and learn more deeply than physically walking around a room,” says Byer.

Polaris used Microsoft Forms in Teams to easily set up a Forms tab to survey symposium attendees and collect response data for feedback—using the Net Promoter Score to measure satisfaction.

“This year’s virtual event scored a 73, which is a significant increase in overall engagement,” says Byer. “We knew that a virtual symposium would allow for additional participation in the ORV event, but we didn’t anticipate the increase in engagement and overall satisfaction that we experienced. Teams and SharePoint spaces opened our eyes to what’s possible, and we now have a unique way to reach our global engineering audience.”

The team behind the virtual ORV event envisions creating more meaningful, accessible content repositories that enhance innovation, streamline knowledge transfer, and improve future employee experiences. The goal is to create a more robust feedback loop for project owners and attendees and to collaborate on more immersive, interactive employee experiences.

Polaris is excited about pairing traditional in-person, onsite demonstrations and presentations with live virtual engagement for its global event audience using Teams. “We plan to embrace a hybrid approach for future events and project presentations,” says Rubanovich. “Polaris is an innovative company that’s pushing boundaries and standing still isn’t an option.”

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