Managing new remote work situations

As more employees remote work from home and resources shift online, there could be disruption as employees adjust to new environments. For example, as collaboration becomes digital and there is a reduction of in-person interaction. There is a worry that people might feel isolated from a lack of contact with their team. However, Microsoft Teams can help maintain productivity and keep your teams connected with communication, sharing and collaboration. Microsoft Teams is your work, all in one place.

Maintain productivity no matter where you work

Communication and collaboration are crucial for productivity. Microsoft Teams has multiple features and the responsiveness you need to enable remote work. Furthermore, empowering your teams across the organisation will aid productivity. It is flexible enough for teams or departments to collaborate on projects effectively.

Microsoft Teams Overview: the hub for teamwork

Microsoft Teams is a hub for teamwork. It is a chat-based workspace that enables teams to be more productive by giving them a single and secure location that brings together everything your team needs: chats, meetings, calls, files, and tools.

Microsoft Teams delivers on four core promises to create a digital workspace for high performing teams.

Communicate through chat, meetings and calls.

First, Microsoft Teams solves the communication needs of a diverse workforce. Since its preview, Microsoft Teams has evolved to include a complete meetings experience, including chat, voice and video. You can use Teams for informal 1:1 or group chats directly on your phone if you are on the go. Or you can have an open conversation on a channel. As a result, this enables people to share information in a transparent way to accelerate decision making. Lastly, it is super easy to move from a chat into a face to face meeting, helping you bridge geographical barriers. 

Collaborate with deeply integrated Office 365 Apps.

 When it comes to collaboration, the deep Office integration enables your multi-generational workforce to use the Office apps they are familiar with and love – Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Planner, even Power BI – right within the context of Teams. Microsoft Teams is unique in how we enable collaboration. For example, when you want feedback, you send a file via email. They then store it locally with comments, and you receive and store it again. This method is a vicious cycle that results in 2, 3 or 4 versions – and you have to jump between an email and other apps to get the work done. Microsoft Teams brings all the Office 365 services together so that you can easily share and co-author files without the need for email attachments.

Customise and extend with 3rd party apps, processes and devices. 

Employees use services other than Office 365. As a result, they are jumping between apps and spending time in disparate experiences. In Microsoft Teams, you can access Office 365 services plus all the 3rd-party tools employees use daily. So, you can customise Teams with tabs, connectors and bots to include the apps and services you need, for example, GitHub, Trello and over 150 partners. For developers, Microsoft Teams offers an extensible platform for building apps that integrate with business processes.

Work with confidence with enterprise-level security, compliance, and manageability.

Microsoft Teams comes with the enterprise-grade security, compliance and manageability that you expect from Office 365, which customers tell us is a valuable addition for them.

Communicate through chat: communicate with ease and keep your remote work team in the know.

Microsoft Teams provides a shared workspace that enables teams to communicate without effort through chats across geographical boundaries. Furthermore, team chats are threaded, persistent and contextual, allowing your team to stay in the know and easily understand the context of the conversation. 

Today, teams are dynamic. Members, roles, priorities and goals can change, resulting in different communication needs. In Teams, people can choose how to communicate. They can engage in private 1:1: chats, group chats or team conversations visible to the entire team. Team conversations are open and transparent by default. As a result, working in the open has a transformative effect on the culture of a team and, it helps organisations move from personal to team productivity.

Furthermore, Microsoft has recently added guest access, so you can now chat with everyone on your team, whether they’re inside your organisation or an outside partner.

Moreover, Teams allows you to have fun together. Good relationships create a successful collaboration. So, people can include emojis, memes and fun graphics in messages allowing them to show their personalities and humanise messages. Most teams have a social channel to communicate about topics other than work. For example, when somebody joins the team or has a baby. Here, you can get to know the people beyond work interactions creating a culture of teamwork.

You can also use gifs, stickers, emojis to bring humour into the communication and soften messages. Changing the communication style can change the culture of a team. As a result, you can worry less about formalities and focus more on the substance. 

Collaborate with integrated Office 365 apps: quickly access your favourite apps.

Information often lives across siloed services like mail, files, meetings, PowerBI/ data and other SaaS apps. Microsoft Teams is a hub for communication and collaboration that brings all these services together in one single workspace. As a result, teams have one less place to go to, resulting in more time for productive work as you do not have to toggle between apps. 

All your tools, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, are all built-in, giving people access to the files and tools they need right within Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Teams also integrates with SharePoint, PowerBI and planner, so teams can work in a central place with all the necessary tools to pursue team objectives.

Users can share, co-author and edit Office and other files right in the app. As Microsoft stores all files on SharePoint, the latest document version is always accessible to any team member. As a result, this enables organisations to democratise knowledge and give everybody access to the information they need to get their work done. Also, you can take notes with OneNote or access an integrated calendar from Outlook.

Microsoft has built an integration with email so users can forward an email into a Team’s channel for further discussion. Furthermore, Microsoft Teams leverages the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph. A team member can access org chart information and do searches for contacts within an organisation. 

Customise and extend collaboration: tailor your workspace to include apps and services your remote work team needs.

Every group is unique, both in structure and in style. So, Microsoft has made it easy for teams to tailor their workspace to their needs and include apps and services relevant to their team or project. 

For example, you can set up your channels so that conversations on particular topics happen in designated spaces. Also, you can pin important files for quick reference for the whole team to access them in one click. 

Furthermore, you can add intelligent bots to interact with Microsoft Teams. Bots can answer natural-language questions and perform lightweight tasks such as FAQs. 

Also, you can bring in cloud services to explore data and get updates from Microsoft apps and 3rd party apps. You can include customised notifications where 3rd party services occur, so the team never misses a beat. To bring our users a breadth of customisation options, we’re working with more than 150 partners.

Microsoft has also created an extensible platform to enable app building with a rich set of capabilities to enable higher-performing teams. The Microsoft Teams developer platform adds integrations to your existing business process through publicly available APIs. Furthermore, IT can manage trusted apps for the employees and the organisation. 

Work with confidence: Get built-in security, compliance, and manageability.

Finally, Microsoft Teams provides industry-leading security and compliance and rich management capabilities. With Microsoft Teams, customers benefit from the Office 365 hyper-scale, enterprise-grade cloud. Furthermore, you can manage and monitor all the features in one centralised portal.

A big privacy topic for all European users is GDPR. Microsoft Teams supports the primary standards, including SOC 1, SOC 2, EU Model Clauses, HIPPA, and more. Microsoft has now added mobile management with Microsoft Intune, new features for compliance and litigation support. Including audit log search, eDiscovery and legal hold for channels, chats and files. 

The Microsoft Teams admin centre provides you with a single coherent admin experience, where you can manage all aspects of Microsoft Teams, including users, settings, and analytics. Furthermore, Microsoft Teams provides enterprise manageability. As a result, this helps to configure and set policies at a per-user level and manage trusted apps for employees and the organisation. For example, advanced call management controls include call routing, auto-attendant, call queues, and reporting. Moreover, PSTN connectivity in Office 365 will give you the option to connect existing on-premises investments in the future. 

While security and compliance are critical, the responsibility goes beyond this. We want to empower every person to achieve more. With that in mind, we are focused on providing an inclusive experience, including support for those who use screen readers, high contrast, and keyboard-only navigation to enable collective brainpower and all potential. 

Empower remote work teams across your organisation: How do different departments use Teams?

Microsoft Teams for Marketing

Strategise, share, and collaborate in real-time to coordinate go-to-market activities and deliver campaigns to internal and external stakeholders. Marketing teams can manage go-to-market, public relations, event planning and their budget within Teams. Furthermore, they can add guests, for example, agencies with secure guest access. Additionally, they can connect relevant third-party services to each channel, such as Bing News Alerts, Twitter Connector, Adobe Creative Cloud, HootSuite and YouTube. 

Microsoft Teams for Sales

Manage sales planning, training, and sales readiness all in one place. Sales teams can manage sales planning and RFP/Proposals. Microsoft Teams provides a single place where all this collaboration, reporting and knowledge sharing can happen. They can set up monthly business reviews as meetings in Teams, document sharing, for example, complete sales playbooks from within Teams or, write and share proposals easily online with team members and key stakeholders. Furthermore, they can also use apps like PowerBI, Planner or even task management apps like Trello.  

Microsoft Teams for Finance

Finance teams can conduct their finance reviews within Teams, and share content, for example, business insights, audits, and compliance. Microsoft Teams provides a hub in which all files, data, conversations and meetings can happen in a single place, safely and securely. Seamlessly gather and report on financial performance data in one place with integrated apps and sharing features. Your finance team can easily share files like annual financial statement review or audit reports and use apps like Excel, PowerBI, Planner or even pin critical files, internal or external websites to a tab. 

Microsoft Teams for HR

Manage resources across your organisation for recruitment, training, and reviews with quick access to file sharing and control settings. HR teams can manage their recruitment, training, events, and reviews from within Teams. Microsoft Teams provides a single hub where HR professionals can collaborate, plan, share notes and communicate decisions. They can upload files to the channels, for example, HR policies, candidate information, offers, training and recruitment guidance notes, internal websites, feedback forms and surveys. Furthermore, they can use a shared OneNote or Wiki for candidate feedback, training calls and do post-training surveys on third-party apps like Survey Monkey.

Microsoft Teams for IT

Transform IT planning and execution with organised communication channels and the ability to collaborate instantly with teammates. IT can leverage Teams as a hub for service strategy, problem, incident and change, deployment, health and reporting, readiness and adoption, support and management and governance. Furthermore, they can set up connectors, for example, bots for process automation.

Microsoft Teams for Engineering

Move quickly between ideation, development, and deployment with integrated developer tools. Engineering teams can leverage Teams for go-to-market, feature releases, testing, feedback, competitive information, research and product analytics. Furthermore, they can set up connectors or tabs for VSTS, JIRA, BitBucket and GitHub or leverage developer tools like Botkit. Microsoft Teams enables continuous discussion across a distributed team with integrated developer tools.

Microsoft Teams for Project Management

Digitally manage project stakeholders, tools, budgets, project reviews, and feedback. Project teams can leverage teams for planning, budgeting, analytics, reviews and feedback. They can use apps like Planner, PowerBI or set up connectors, for example, bots for process automation. As a result, Microsoft Teams enables collaboration in one central hub with all the tools needed to manage a project.

Stay connected to your remote work team with engaging digital meetings.

Microsoft Teams helps you prepare for meetings because you can access progress notes in one place, ready for you to join with more insights, history and context. Furthermore, Teams helps you run more productive and engaging meetings by leveraging voice, video and collaboration features. Then, follow up with your team and stay on top of projects with automatically captured notes, action items and quick access to your team.

Be more prepared than ever: always be ready to get work done.

Increase attendance in your meetings with meeting scheduling based on attendee availability. Furthermore, you can create agendas in your meeting descriptions to set the pace for your team. Stay prepared and find anything you need through searching across people, files and chat threads and review reports and team status easily with integrated apps and chat logs.

Run engaging and productive meetings with effective, real-time communication

Communicate easily in online meetings with VoIP and dial-in audio conferencing. You can join on mobile, desktop or a web browser. Start a Microsoft Teams meeting instantly with a single click and keep your team engaged with HD video. Furthermore, you can collaborate in real-time with screen share and integrated apps. 

Follow up and never miss a thing: stay on track quickly and easily.

Always be informed by accessing important team documents and chat history. Track progress and updates instantaneously with integrated Office 365 apps. Never miss a thing by sharing notes and other collaboration files openly or privately with your team and record meetings with transcription. Then, save to the cloud for viewing anytime. 

Elevating productivity with remote work

As more employees choose to work from home, remote collaboration needs to grow globally. As a result, businesses have empowered their employees and transformed their business collaboration with Microsoft Teams. 

Microsoft Teams is growing enablement across the globe.

According to The Verge, there are 44 million daily Teams users, a 1000% increase in video calls and a 200% increase in weekly meeting minutes. 

How Teams is empowering and benefiting users to overcome remote work challenges

Microsoft Teams helps users to enable new ways of working. For example, to be more collaborative, work in the open with everybody in the know, democratising information and decision making.

“Microsoft Teams gives us the ability to mobilise people in a way we’ve never seen before.” – Jamie McLellan, Chief Technology Officer, J. Walter Thompson.

It helps them to accelerate decision making. In Microsoft Teams, information is shared at the moment with context, enabling people to make an informed decision quickly.

“Through Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online to compare results in almost real-time and build a faster car.” – L. Bryce Whitson Jr., Aerodynamics Engineer, Hendrick Motorsports.

Microsoft Teams is also a driver of digital transformation by helping users modernise business processes and align them with how people work in the modern workplace. Also, we help customers adapt to this change.

“Pulling data from Power BI automatically from each group and combine it into one view in Microsoft Teams is a lot more efficient than our previous process.” – Sunil Yadav, President, Amplifi Asia Pacific, Dentsu Aegis.

If you are interested in utilising Microsoft Teams for your remote work teams, contact Northstar today.