Using Power Apps for Remote Employee Appreciation

As we enter our 7th week (correct on date published) here at Allsop of working at home, we have reflected on some of the positive outcomes this shift has enabled. This has included team members feeling more productive, less stressed and having more free time. This free time has been used to learn new hobbies, take more regular exercise, spend quality time with family, friends and pets or just catch up on sleep.

Although we realise we were in a fortunate position to easily switch to working from home seamlessly, due to working remotely already being an option for the team and the cloud-based technologies we use being able to facilitate this. We have recognised that one negative of the current situation of prolonged remote working, is that we all miss the team interaction in the office.

For now, gone are the days of buying your work buddy a coffee to say thanks for their help on a certain project or a beer on a Friday as a thanks for staying late to sort a glitch for a client. In a bid to try and replicate these gestures of appreciation, we wanted to use technology to encourage employee communication and say thanks when team members have gone above and beyond.

At Allsop even prior to working from home, most of our internal digital interactions happen on Microsoft Teams. So we knew that this was the platform we wanted to use. Looking at teams we researched a few of the different apps available. We found that many of apps available did part of what we wanted but none of them were quite right. Because of this, we decided to build our own app using Microsoft Power Apps.

The Solution 

Microsoft Power Apps is a powerful app builder that allows you to easily and quickly develop and launch your own apps. This meant we could develop and customise it to be exactly what we wanted. We were able to quickly develop a simple to use solution integrated with other Microsoft products such as Microsoft Teams, Power BI and Power Automate.

We developed our Power App using the pre-existing Shoutout app to create our very own ‘Allsop Shoutouts.’ To keep it in line with our culture we based our Allsop shout-outs on our core values allowing employees to recognise these as they are displayed by the team. Our core values include putting the customer first, being accountable, respectful, continually improving and passionate.

Solution Architecture

Allsop Shoutouts – Screenshots of Workflow