Flexible working once had a reputation as a bit of a luxury, but the arrival of a global pandemic has seen working from home become a necessity, giving a huge number of people an entirely different experience of the workday.
According to this study looking at attitudes towards working from home before and during 2020, workers were reportedly unsure at first, but negative thoughts on not going into the office have tailed off, with nine out of ten (88.2%) of employees who worked at home during the lockdown wanting to stay working from home at least part of the time, even when returning to the office is a possibility.
If you’re looking to embrace this attitude shift within your business as part of the new normal, now would be a great time to implement technology so that your team has everything they need at their fingertips to thrive in their roles.
That’s where Microsoft Teams comes in.
If you already have an Office 365 subscription, you can make the most of Teams at no extra cost – it’s already included in what you pay. Just log in to teams.office.com with your Office 365 credentials to get started!
Here are just five of the reasons we highly recommend Microsoft Teams for keeping in touch.
1. Team motivation
There isn’t currently a technology able to replicate sharing a quick face-to-face chat whilst making coffee, but the Microsoft Teams chat feature is perfect for sharing quick messages with the whole team. It’s easy to write messages sharing good news, or positive feedback for a whole-team boost. You can even accompany it with an animated GIF!
When it comes to video calls, you can also use individual, customised backgrounds, or Together Mode so it feels like you’re all in the same place – team meeting from a tropical island, anyone?
2. Collaboration
Working from home doesn’t mean the death of teamwork, far from it! You can share your screen within a Microsoft Teams call which is great for both presentations, or showing colleagues how to do something by working through it step-by-step.
It also has a feature allowing you to connect to another organisation by allowing External Access, an authenticated connection which is perfect if there’s a partner organisation you work closely with.
For anyone concerned about their work-life balance, Microsoft Teams also allows you to create channels. This enables focused conversations between groups who need it, reducing time spent reading messages meant for others.
It’s worth mentioning that Zoom is fantastic for video calls, because that’s all they do – but Teams is great too and offers so much more in one easy to use package.
3. Use it anywhere, on any device
Microsoft Teams is cloud-based, which means you can log in anywhere with an internet connection. And you can also add the Teams app to any device, so it’s the ideal solution whether you need to work from a desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone, or a selection of all of those.
4. Security
Teams has been built with security in mind and not as an afterthought, keeping your business secure without annoying users.
Key security features include Conditional Access, which adds a bit of extra security in the form of multi-factor authentication (MFA) when certain conditions are met. MFA is just an extra step for users to provide a second method of authentication to confirm their identity and this can apply to those who have admin privileges, or if someone is signing in from a different device than usual or a different country, for example.
5. Accessible documents
Working on documents together in real-time is another great feature, which avoids the confusion of emailing multiple versions back and forth and includes instant sync and version history tracking.
Ultimately, Microsoft Teams allows employees to feel connected, working on documents together in real-time, and collaborating on work projects both internally and externally via chat, calling, video, and screen sharing.
Even if you’re not planning on having remote-working as part of your plan when we’re all able to fully return to our workplaces, if the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that having a strategy in place for unexpected events (like pandemics, or unusual weather preventing travel to the office) is a great idea. Book a time slot with us, we’ll be happy to help you out.