Exercise 1, Task 4: Use Copilot in Loop to facilitate collaborative manager development planning

Contoso just completed its annual review of manager performance and team health. Following the review, Contoso’s Chief People Officer, Holly Dickson, asked you to lead a collaborative planning session to help managers turn data-driven insights into concrete development actions. Holly wants to ensure that every manager receives clear, actionable feedback and has a plan to address areas for growth.

[!NOTE] While the manager data used in this task is fictitious, your goal is to simulate how HR would guide managers through interpreting their results, setting goals, and tracking progress in a real organization.

You plan to use Microsoft Loop to organize and facilitate this process. You want to create a collaborative Loop workspace that serves as the central hub for manager development planning. Copilot in Loop can help summarize findings, generate action steps, and facilitate discussion, just as you would if working with real managers.

Perform the following steps to complete this task:

  1. In your Microsoft Edge browser, go to the Microsoft 365 home page, select Apps in the navigation pane, and then select Loop from the Apps menu. If Loop doesn’t appear in the list, select All apps. Under the top section of apps in the Apps window, select All apps. In the All apps window, scroll down and select Loop.

  2. In Loop for the web, create a new workspace titled Contoso Manager Development Plans.

  3. While the Manager Performance PDF file contains insights on 15 Contoso managers that you analyzed in earlier tasks, this training doesn’t have enough time to summarize the findings for all 15 of them. To give you an appreciation for how this exercise would work in a real-world scenario without being overly time-consuming, this task only focuses on two of the managers, Jacob Hancock and Kerry Allen.

    You want to create a Loop page for each manager. To begin, change the current title of the first page from Untitled to Jacob Hancock. Then create another page under this Loop workspace for Kerry Allen.

  4. Select the Jacob Hancock page and then open the Copilot pane.

  5. In the Copilot prompt field, attach the Manager Performance PDF file that you created and stored on your OneDrive at the end of Task 2. To do so, select the Reference files (+ sign) icon in the prompt field and select the PDF file that you created in Task 2.

[!TIP] If the PDF file doesn’t appear in the menu of files that’s displayed, enter /Contoso in the prompt field to display all files in your OneDrive that start with Contoso. The list should include the PDF file that you created in Task 2. Select this file.

  1. Ask Copilot to summarize Jacob Hancock’s top strengths and development areas based on the attached report. Also ask Copilot to suggest three actionable steps that Jacob Hancock can take to improve team engagement and reduce attrition.

  2. Review the results. Select the Copy icon that appears after the results and then paste (Ctrl+V) the copied content into Jacob’s Loop page. Delete the conversational text that appears at the start and end of the content that was pasted into the page.

  3. Select Kerry Allen’s Loop page. Notice what happened—the Copilot pane disappeared. Now scroll down past the suggested prompts and select the Chat History button. It should display a message indicating there’s no previous Copilot chats in this document. So when you switch Loop pages, you can’t access the chat history associated with another page.

[!NOTE] In Microsoft Loop, the Copilot pane is context-sensitive and operates exclusively within the currently open page. Any prompts, responses, or chat history you access are specific to that page alone—Copilot doesn’t retain or display conversations from other pages in the workspace. This design ensures that your analysis and collaboration remain focused and organized, with each page serving as a distinct workspace for its own set of Copilot insights and discussions.

  1. Select Jacob Hancock’s Loop page again. Note how Copilot opened a new pane that didn’t display the previous conversation related to Jacob. When you return to a Loop page, you can either start a new Copilot chat session for that page or return to an existing one.

    To see how you can return to a prior conversation, scroll down past the suggested prompts and select the Chat History button. It should display lines from each of the previous chat sessions for this Loop page. In this case, there should just be one chat session, so select the line to open that conversation.

  2. We asked you to perform these prior two steps to see how Copilot in Loop handles chat sessions within Loop pages. We now want you to perform the same analysis on Kerry’s Loop pages that you did with Jacob. To do so, repeat steps 4-7 for Kerry.

  3. Next, add a new page under your Contoso Manager Development Plans workspace. Change the title of this page to Action Plan Summary.

  4. Open the Copilot pane for this new page. Then ask Copilot to review the action plans in each Loop page for this workspace and summarize how the action plans for each manager could be implemented in a real organization, including potential challenges, support needed, and how progress would be tracked.

  5. Review the results and then copy and paste the content into the Action Plan Summary page. Delete any extraneous text that was copied and pasted along with the ideas.

You just created a collaborative Loop workspace that could serve as the central hub for manager development planning. This task provided a realistic experience of facilitating manager development planning in a modern HR environment, using Loop and Copilot as collaborative tools.