Article Connecting the Workplace with Office 365 and Teams
By Insight UK / 9 Jan 2020 / Topics: Microsoft 365
By Insight UK / 9 Jan 2020 / Topics: Microsoft 365
Workers today spend more time than ever collaborating. Yet the notion of teamwork has changed. Instead of scheduling an endless stream of meetings, the most effective teams are working smartly, strategically and often remotely. Let’s take a look at how they do it. But first, why bother?
Over the past two decades, the amount of time employees spend engaged in collaborative work has increased by around 50%. In fact, today, employees spend 80% of their time collaborating. Collaboration fosters the sharing of ideas and the pooling of skills to produce better outcomes for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It also boosts employee engagement – the holy grail that helps you hold onto your best people, gets them to do their best work, and avoids the costs of attrition.
Technology is now cited as one of the key ways to boost employee engagement, along with more traditional strategies like career development, recognition of great work and training. A staggering 93% of millennial workers say that working for a company with updated technology, services and solutions is important to them.
Across generations and across the business, workers today expect the ability to use the latest technologies and tools to get their work done and to collaborate effectively. They also expect the ability to work remotely with flexibility – mobility is now a must for any forward-thinking business. If you don’t deliver on these expectations, then your employees are more likely to walk out the door.
So how is collaboration and flexible working done right? How can you leverage the collective brains of the business without compromising productivity or putting your data at risk? It’s all about taking control and empowering employees. This means migrating from a mix of on-premise productivity tools and ad-hoc collaboration platforms to one, cohesive solution that balances the expectations of employees against the security requirements of the business.
Office 365 (O365) delivers on the needs of the modern workplace. It streamlines workflow, improves collaboration and productivity, and enables teams to work simultaneously on single documents. With O365, attachments become a thing of the past.
Prior to moving to O365, one client of ours was wasting significant time as employees struggled to keep track of projects across email and third-party (often unsanctioned) cloud storage systems. The team’s productivity was suffering, team members struggled to collaborate effectively. O365 has changed all of this.
Examples like this show just how empowering O365 can be. Plus, given that it can be installed on up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets and five smartphones per subscription, it provides a secure answer to the mobility problem – employees can access their files from anywhere on any device.
A key feature of O365 for the modern workplace is Microsoft Teams. Teams is the tool of choice for companies seeking a secure, cloud platform that workers can collaborate on from wherever they are – in fact, it’s the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history, with more than 13 million daily active users.
Teams brings everything together in a shared workspace where you can chat, meet, share files, and work with business apps. It helps your workers communicate more effectively and work better together; it’s completely customisable so you can add in your favourite Microsoft apps and third-party services; and it delivers end-to-end security, administrative control and compliance.
In short, Microsoft Teams powers productivity. And it’s not just for big enterprises. Small and mid-sized businesses are perfectly placed to take advantage of Teams thanks to the affordable and scalable Office 365 platform.
Find out how to get your employees using Microsoft Teams, and learn more about how features in Microsoft Teams can help your business collaborate effectively and securely.
