By Janus Boye
Lesley Crook is M365 Apps & Services MVP focused on Viva
This career started with secretarial duties in the 80s, followed by ten years as an executive personal assistant at British multinational pharma company GSK. Then went on to work in Internal and Digital communications. Now a technology consultant and certified Microsoft 365 Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and often speaking at international conferences on better ways of working.
This is the tenacious career journey Lesley Crook has been on. Since 2021, she has worked hybrid from the UK with Norwegian Microsoft Partner and IT services firm CloudWay to remove blockers and help combine existing services with cloud services - in Microsoft Teams and the integrated ecosystem in Microsoft Viva. In her role, she applies a background in internal communications and a deep understanding of how large, complex, and global organisations tick supported by ADKAR, the adoption and change management framework by Prosci.
Lesley is also our expert of the month!
I never thought I would leave GSK
Lesley joined GSK in 1991 as a personal assistant to the Manufacturing Strategy Director. Throughout the 90s, they communicated with over 100 manufacturing sites and factories with fax machines and huge email distribution lists. His manic routine would be to finalize board papers “just in time!” Then, travel to the senior leader meeting the next day or even that night, long haul. Lesley often sat by a fax machine, praying the papers were delivered. Another big issue was managing ever-changing email distribution lists.
Then, an empathetic consultant from BCG introduced her to file shares. As Lesley said in our conversation, this was mind-blowing and changed the way of working for the better and it was also the beginning of the end of fax! This opened her eyes to how IT helps make work better.
After a decade as a personal assistant, she moved briefly into HR and then into a new team in internal communications owned by HR. Now a long-standing trusted member of staff who understood the company structure and the frustrations with the limited communications channels – but forever visualising better ways of working and being the first to volunteer and try new features. This often meant going the extra mile at work with IT experiments prone to fail and iterate, but always keen to be a pioneer of modern work.
Lesley created the first intranet site for GSK Manufacturing on Frontpage, in a newsletter style. This became her first step into digital communications. After Frontpage came her extensive work in SharePoint and intranet governance. You might say that the rest is history, but not for Lesley; this was just the start, as it wasn’t all about IT. She remained at GSK until 2015, that’s 23 years with deep work in SharePoint. Before we move on to her recent career, let’s look into her work in the early 2010s using the digital workplace to improve work with Yammer (now Viva Engage).
Experimenting with social collaboration
While in communications, one of her colleagues in IT Communications pointed her to Yammer, positioned like an internal Facebook - back then, Facebook was groundbreaking employee empowerment and substantially more optimistic.
IT graduates were encouraged to experiment with disruptive technology like Enterprise Social Networking (ESN). To quote Lesley:
“This changed the company culture forever as employees started to feel empowered to share their views and news. Remember, LinkedIn was little more than a CV database; you could not talk externally about your company for fear of being reprimanded.”
GSK was invited to the external Yammer Customer Network (YCN) as a large customer and brand name. Yammer owned this trusted community to share like-minded insights on modern work with other “intrapreneurs.” As Lesley said,
“This helped get the benefits out of working in a new serendipitous way; we weren’t discussing pharma activities but simply enabling modern ways of working.”
Lesley and two GSK IT colleagues hosted a groundbreaking Pharma cross-company Yammer group, one of the first YamJams for the pharma sector on the YCN. You can find more about this pioneering work in this blog post from 2015: Demonstrating Yammer’s business value.
Improving the employee experience
On leaving, she worked as a consultant, and since 2021 at Norwegian CloudWay. She doesn’t regularly go to Oslo but often meets with colleagues at events alongside other Microsoft MVPs.
A high point this year has been presenting at the M365 conference in Las Vegas back in May. Recent work focuses on the many possibilities with Microsoft Viva through the lens of Microsoft Teams and the employee journey from onboarding to exit - with employee engagement at the heart of the employee experience.
Lesley enjoys to present at conferences. Here she is with her Viva Origami - for more see Start a conversation about the Viva suite.
While the innovation and rapid changes happening with Viva can be overwhelming, Lesley’s focus continues to be on making work better, and at the center of this is her vast experience with internal communications, adoption, and change management. Bringing employees with you on the digital transformation journey with ADKAR and empathy. As Lesley likes to say:
“People are the heart and soul of every digitisation project.”
Cofounder of the Viva Explorers
To help demystify the high pace of enhanced and new employee experience features with Teams and Viva, Lesley last year founded the Viva Explorers - a movement of Microsoft MVPs and Microsoft employees to share the Why, What, and How of Microsoft Viva.
Lesley co-presenting with other Viva Explorers at the TechNow (Women's Day)
This is how this community describes itself:
“Viva Explorers are a passionate group that draws on diverse origins to influence a serendipitous employee-centric technology movement, enabling a modern, empathic, enthusiastic workforce mindset!”
Today, the community has grown to count some 80 MVPs in 17 countries and notably 50% are women. They regularly do online community events and have also held local in-person community days.
Learn more about Lesley Crook
Being a Microsoft MVP, Lesley is hard-wired to share knowledge, network generously, and let others be a part of her continuous learning journey.
She considers “Working Out Loud” and the method created by John Stepper priceless! This is simply sharing your work with a view others might find helpful and others might help you improve your work.
On her Viva Visionary blog you can follow her recent insights on everything Viva.
UPDATED November 2023:
Lesley gave a talk at the Boye Aarhus 23 conference titled: “Seek, and you will find the Answers in Viva!”. You can Download the slides (PDF)