Sift is an information organisation tool that helps you visualise your organisational make-up beyond the traditional org chart. The company was founded in 2015 and has recently raised $3 million in Series A funding as of July 2020. Using Sift, you can create smartly organised employee profiles, discover colleagues, navigate through the enterprise hierarchy, and visualise the data for further analysis. Importantly, it can prove extremely helpful for handling remote work use cases where employees do not always have a clear understanding of the organisation’s various stakeholders and their interconnected relationships.
Sift is used by leading enterprises such as Ping Identity, Rocket Mortgage, Amrock, and 150+ companies.
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Sift announced a new app for Microsoft Teams in January 2021, specifically targeting remote collaboration and organisational engagement for distributed teams. “Organisational knowledge”, said Larry Angeli, CEO of Sift, “is increasingly difficult to come by as workforces grow and become more distributed and remote.” The Teams app addresses this by bringing advanced and intuitive org charts, better employee searchability, and HR/IT integrations to Microsoft Teams.
Using the Sift Teams app, you can quickly find employees and HR data inside the Teams interface and stay connected with all your co-workers. Let us review it in detail.
Inside Sift for Microsoft Teams
To use the Sift integration for Teams, you need to procure a paid licence starting at $1.50 per profile per month. For a little extra (at $2.50), you will get enhanced search instead of basic, unlimited integrations, and an additional intranet widget. The Teams app, however, is available with all paid editions of Sift.
Once you have set up your Sift account, go to Microsoft AppSource, to download the Teams integration. Remember to connect Sift with your HR systems at the backend to enable its full functionality.
Here are the key features to expect:
- Detailed employee profiles – Once you have installed the integration, Sift will populate the usual employee profile on Teams with data from your HR systems. While Team natively displays a person’s name, contact information, role, and availability status, Sift gives you a summary of their professional history, the groups to which they belong, etc. – almost like a social media profile.
- Intuitive organisational search – The Sift integration significantly adds to Teams’ basic search capabilities. Team members are discoverable to a search of any aspect of their profile, and not just their first or last name. You can also access Sift Search from the messaging extension right below the message compose area.
- Interactive org charts – Organisational charts are the key value proposition enabled by Sift. Teams does natively give you a functional org chart that shows how an employee is related to their immediate peers and reporting managers – but Sift goes several steps further. From the Sift Teams app, you can visualise the entire organisation’s structure with a summary of every employee’s role. You can file the org chart view by department, team, job title, and other parameters. The org chart can be directly printed from the Teams app or exported somewhere else.
- Sift meeting notifications – Sift helps to promote employee engagement during meetings by sending notifications on who you are about to meet. Before a meeting, the app will send you a card-carrying the meeting participant’s/owner’s contact information, role details, skill summary, and embedded buttons to view their full profile and place them in the org chart. That way, you can familiarise yourself with the different meeting participants and their professional backgrounds to break the ice and make meetings more engaging.
- Feature-rich employee directory – When you open the Sift app on Teams, you will be greeted by several tabs – Chat where you get app notifications, My Profile where you can see your details, the Org Chart, and a feature called Search. The Search functionality gives you a full directory of team members along with their contact information and job roles. Again, you can look up employees based on any criteria and not just their names.
Why the Sift App Makes a Difference
Sift integrates with several apps to aggregate employee information. Teams users can perform any Sift function and gain from the full suite of features without ever leaving the Microsoft Teams environment.
What We Think
For mid-sized to large organisations, Sift is incredibly helpful in driving organisational cohesion and visibility.
Download it here.
