As mentioned previously, the world is in the midst of the worst health epidemic in a generation and businesses have been forced to redirect their usual ways of working to an at least partially remote setting.

Microsoft has made this transition possible with the introduction of tools designed and adapted with the sole purpose of improving the ease and quality of remote working.

Microsoft Teams (the platform designed for communication, collaboration, and productivity) has features that will dramatically improve the way you work remotely or in office.

Let us take a look at some of the features of Teams that can help you to ensure a good remote work setup.

 

Email forwarding

‘Conversations’ and ‘Private chat’ help to reduce the number of emails cluttering your inbox. Teams offers so many unique ways of communicating that it makes you wonder why you relied so heavily on email in the past. Since Microsoft Outlook and Teams integrate so well together you can create or forward emails that will post in the Teams environment for your entire team to view.

This is particularly good for a remote work setting as all employees will be able to view things in the one place, allowing you to know who has seen what and when. This will give you complete control and an overview to monitor staff whilst being there to offer your expertise.

 

Bookmarking content

Teams uses persistent chat when having conversations or on-line discussion which means messages are saving in succession over an indefinite period of time. Some get worried they will not be able to find items in their history – but you do have the ability to ‘flag’ (save) important items from posts, conversations, or chats.

When you have an item you want to save you must hover over the item and select the flag, then when you need to review this item at a later date navigate to your profile icon and choose ‘saved’ which will bring up all your saved items.

Again, this is beneficial to a remote work setting as it can facilitate better organisation and minimise the back and forth between you and employees or them with each other.

 

Recording transcripts

Most people that are familiar with Teams know that Teams has the ability to record meetings, however, not everyone knows that Teams has the capability to transcribe that meeting.

When your recording is completed open the recording. Go to the ‘edit’ option and under ‘video language’ update it to English and then select ‘auto-generate a caption file’. Now choose ‘apply’. The next time you open the video you can see the transcript created from the dialogue of the meeting. If it does not automatically appear select ‘settings’ followed by ‘show transcript’. (Transcripts can be created in both English and Spanish.)

This also has advantages to remote working. For management, it can be a great way of quickly scanning through a meeting when reviewing it to ensure a particular matter was projected correctly. Another is for employee use, in that if a certain part of the meeting was directed at a certain sector of your business (accounts, for example) then they can easily find the part specifically for them as opposed to having to go through the whole meeting to find it.

Do you need help finding the tools that would be best for you and your team? Do you feel under-equipped for a potentially long future of remote working?

Need help in making a smooth transition?

This is where we come in!

 

Need to get more from your tools?

We are here to ensure you get the correct tools and are well equipped for a smooth transition to remote working. With our wealth of experience, we have the ability to guide you to a prosperous future with technology as an ally rather than an enemy.

We are uniquely placed to support you in achieving a frictionless transition to the cloud or we can help you along on the journey in acquiring more from the tools you may already have in place.

To learn how our team can support your digital transformation by aligning technology to your business goals and challenges, please book a discovery call with us today.

If you have any questions or wish to discuss anything read in this article further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.