It's the winter of 2022, and New Years Resolutions are in full swing. I received an invite to my company's wellness team, where we focused efforts on promoting employee health and incentivizing active lifestyles. I leveraged our existing O365 suite to devise a full-scope, readily-available solution to bolster our dwindling engagement. The result: participation doubled, costs dropped to zero, and we proved that understanding user behavior matters more than fancy features.

The Problem

We had been through a few challenge cycles in the past hosted by our health insurance provider via a mobile app. Participation was low: only 15% of employees completed the last challenge. We needed ways to effectively engage employees. Prizes are obviously an incentive, but I decided to take a different approach by using what we already have and what employees use daily: the Microsoft suite.

The Solution

Having seen firsthand how powerful simple automations with RPA can strengthen business processes, I thought it was viable to take a shot using Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists, Power Automate, Power BI, and Teams. More importantly, meeting users where they already work (Teams) meant we could avoid the adoption friction that killed our previous challenges.

The most important factor in even considering this approach was simple: cost. We pay for the O365 licenses, have ample storage, and have institutional knowledge on their implementation. The hosted challenge with our insurance had a cost that wasn't justified by current participation numbers, so we were browsing cheaper options. I started proof-of-concept development while other members researched cheaper hosted solutions.

Technical Implementation

Testing started out smoothly: user submits their entry on a Microsoft Form while logged in with their corporate account, form submission triggers a Power Automate flow to add their entry into a SharePoint List, send a confirmation email. Easy.

Next, tracking.

How do we prompt regular submissions? Have them print a paper, scan it at the end? Send them to a website to type in their numbers?

As I mentioned before, we were a Microsoft shop, so everyone had Teams open all day, every day. Maybe we can use that. I discovered that Power Automate has a Teams chatbot that you can use for a multitude of things. This was perfect for our use case. So, I built another Power Automate flow to read the participant list and prompt everyone daily for their inputs. This particular challenge was for water consumption. Then, I reached a technical limitation.

The right tool for this job is Power Automate's Teams Connector, specifically the “Post a choice of options as the Flow bot to a user” block to ensure users can submit asynchronously. Every day at start of business, Power Automate will query the SharePoint List of participants and each participant a Teams message. The message will be interactive and receive their input. This card cannot be set up to take unstructured or semi-structured data; it must be choices. Well, if somebody drinks 85oz of water on Tuesday and 93oz of water on Wednesday, how do we differentiate?

After research, it rang true that there was no true way to get it down to single-digit precision. So, I researched the standard water intake for individuals to determine an appropriate range. A bottle of water is 12oz, and some people drink little to no water, so we had to start at 0. What about the people who drink a ton of water? This is where the technical interpolates with the human factor. A very strong water intake is 120oz in a day, so let's split it into 6 ranges: 0-20, 21-40, etc. 6 was the limit on choices to be given in this card (at the time).

Responses would query an update to the participant lists, where running totals were tracked. Given the range limitation, we decided that adding the range's max to the running total was appropriate. So, if 21-40 was chosen, 40oz was added to the running total.

After presenting this initial PoC, the team was excited but wanted to see a tracker of some sort. We already have a SharePoint site where the participant list is held, so why not embed a Power BI dashboard that displays leaders? That was easy enough: stacked horizontal bar graph sorted descending, with names next to the bars.

Results and Lessons Learned

Overall, this implementation was an overwhelming success. Participation doubled to over 30%. We had so many participants that I reached a concurrency limit on the Teams querying flows. I copied the flow and ran a paginated model for the Teams prompts.

And the best part: it was free! We were able to offer more prizes of higher quality to winners and incorporate a random drawing as well. A second challenge with exercise minutes followed a few months later. I used the same technical structure, just editing the tracked metric.

Writing about this now, it seems like Microsoft has taken Adaptive cards to a whole new level. I'd love to check this out again with a stronger input capability. Just plain numbers would've been ideal, but we made the best with what was available.

While it didn't integrate with Apple Fitness or other apps, I think participation was so high because it was easily accessible. Being on the same pane as normal business ops makes it painless and simple to click a button and submit every day. The convenience angle won this time.

Architecture