When your staff are working well together, good things happen for your business. But what if they could achieve even more? To get the most out of their collaboration, they need workspaces and tools they’re comfortable using. The way we work has changed significantly over the last few years. Technology has driven this – the days of communicating outside the office via phone and email have been joined by instant message style communication tools.
What is the right technology solution for modern collaboration and teamwork? It must be flexible enough to meet all your teams’ communication needs, become a single hub for teamwork, be customisable, and stay secure. Here’s how you can use tools to improve communication and teamwork inside your organisation.
How Teamwork and Technology Can Work Together
1. Effortless Communication
The best ideas often start small, among a few close collaborators, then quickly grow. To keep the momentum going, you need intelligent communication capabilities. Employees need to be able to communicate freely, bring additional team members into the conversation while giving everyone a way to stay informed about what’s going on. One-on-one, small group, and large group conversations should all be supported, and from the devices and locations of their choice.
This is where Microsoft Teams comes in. Teams offers one-to-one and group conversations. Work that has traditionally required in person meetings can take place in Teams – chatting, video conferences and file sharing couldn’t be easier – you can even have guests from outside your organisation – perfect for client and supplier input. Teams lets you work in files directly in the Teams app, with multiple people editing the same document at the same time. And with the whole conversation in the same place, it’s easy to bring new members up to speed, and make discussions easy to find.
2. Better Integration Means More Productivity
When employees are using different applications, they’ll waste a lot of time switching between apps, locating files and remembering different login information. Teams help to solve this – integrating a number of useful apps, so all information can be found in the same place. Apps like SharePoint, OneNote and Planner can all be integrated with Teams, so everyone can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. And because every document shared in Teams is saved to the Cloud, you know everyone is working from the most up-to-date version of a document.
When your applications work together as well as your teams do, productivity soars. If new employees only have to sign in to and learn one new program instead of six, and they won’t have to toggle between apps. With fewer passwords to remember and fewer blockers, your team can focus on what matters most: their work. Teams also enables visual communication between teammates. They can easily share pictures and video, whether for clarity, emphasis, or for fun. Need some face-to-face contact? Users can launch a video call from a conversation in seconds.
3. Customisable For Every Team
Every team is unique. And every team needs a shared space they can use to work together, that they can truly make their own. Your sales team may use chat to share updates on leads and website analytics, while your customer service department might rely on quick calls to resolve customer request. Teams should be able to pull preferred tools into their hub and have multiple conversations and work threads, as well as pin important files for easy reference. Intelligent communications including automation, notification settings, and chatbots can provide additional support to ensure everyone has what they need.
Microsoft Teams enables threaded conversations within a channel to keep conversations organised and keep those who need to be in the know informed. Work that has traditionally required an in-person meeting happens in the channel instead.
4. Work With Confidence
When collaboration is needed, employees will find a way. Whether company-approved or not, workers will still use instant chat solutions, shared document spaces, and more – giving rise to management complexity and security risks. Microsoft Teams provides industry leading security and compliance capabilities, with data encryption for data in company cloud storage and email.
And because everything is from one vendor, you won’t have to worry about another set of security and compliance issues – or another possible breach point. A recent survey showed that nearly 60 % of IT professionals believe sensitive files/information should not be shared via group chat apps.
Once you know what to look for, choosing the right tool can reinvigorate your entire collaborative process. If you’d like to learn more about Teams or any of its features, get in touch with ACUTEC today.
