Do you ever feel like your office is playing the “telephone game”? The one where the first person gives a direction and by the time it makes its way to the last person, the message is completely wrong.
Inefficient communication can drag down office productivity, cause mistakes (sometimes costly ones!), and cause you a ton of frustration.
Businesses with 100 employees on average can lose $420,000 per year due to miscommunication.
So, how do you improve communication and foster teamwork? By using a full-featured cloud-based collaboration tool, like Microsoft Teams, which was designed to give offices a central communication hub to keep their whole team on the same page.
Microsoft Teams is part of the popular Office 365 suite of productivity tools. Microsoft has taken a big step forward with this cloud-hybrid, offering the best of both worlds – their standards (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook) along with an entirely new toolkit of collaborative applications.
We’ve found that Microsoft Teams is one of the most impactful new applications for our clients that’s easy to use and can completely transform communication both inside and outside the office.
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams enables online chat, but before you put it into the category of “just chat software,” you need to know about all its other transformative features, because chat is just one of the things it can do.
This application is designed to be a central hub for:
- Real-time office communication
- Project management
- Application management
- File sharing
- Voice/video conferencing
- Client and vendor communication
Microsoft Teams for Better Business Communications
From replacing lengthy back and forth emails to centralizing all your cloud applications, there are a lot of benefits to using Microsoft Teams to improve your workflows and business communications.
Here are some of the application’s transformative features.
Organized Conversations
You can set up customizable “chat channels” within Microsoft Teams that allow you to organize team conversations. For example, you might have one channel for sales and another for human resources. All chat channels are also permission-based, so only those users invited can see them.
These real-time chats help eliminate time-consuming email communications because conversations are grouped by subject for easy recall and people also tend to be shorter and more to the point when instant messaging than they are in emails. This helps your whole team communicate more effectively and stay organized.
Central Work Hub
How much time does your team spend accessing the applications and websites that they use often? You can cut that time down significantly by having the ability to launch multiple applications and websites from within the Microsoft Teams interface.
Using their “Add a tab” feature you can integrate all of your Office programs, plus third-party applications, like Salesforce, plus websites you visit frequently. This gives you a singular launchpad for the tools you use each day, increasing efficiency and saving time.
External Project Management
Once you start using Microsoft Teams for internal communications and project management, you’ll find it so efficient, you’ll probably wish you could use it with your clients and vendors too. You can!
Microsoft Teams has a guest feature that allows you to invite those outside your organization to a chat channel you’ve designated. So, for example, if you’re coordinating a client’s construction project, you could create a “Project X” channel where your team, your client, and any sub-contractors could keep up to date and have fluid communications.
Audio & Video Capabilities
Have you been struggling with how to implement remote workers and still keep everyone productive and connected? Microsoft Team’s Skype integration is a perfect way to help your team communicate more fluidly no matter where they are.
When text chat isn’t completely conveying the message, quickly video or audio call to discuss a project. This helps replicate the benefits of being able to pop your head into someone’s office, while still giving you the freedom of a remote and mobile workforce.
File Share and Collaborate More Securely
If your team is using free public tools, like Whatsapp, to conduct business, you could end up with some security issues or compliance problems. Microsoft Teams helps your communications stay secure in a few different ways:
- Safeguards customer and user data
- Data encrypted in transit and at rest
- Transparent operational model
- Supports compliance standards (EU Model Clauses, ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, and more)
Highly Customizable
Studies have shown that happiness can increase productivity as much as 12%, and workers are happier when they can customize their workspaces. Microsoft Teams is highly customizable so each member of your staff can edit how their application looks. There are also notification features that allow users to control how and when they’re notified of a new message, set do not disturb times, and more.
Search Documents and Conversations
Have you ever spent an hour looking for that one email where someone sent you something important? While email programs do have search capabilities, they tend to be very limited and don’t always work for attachments.
If most of your inter-office conversations and file sharing are done within Microsoft Teams, finding information becomes much easier due to a powerful search feature that can bring up users, communications by channel, and shared documents quickly.
Would You Like to Learn More About Using Microsoft Teams?
Bring your business communications up to date by employing Microsoft Teams as your central workspace hub for collaboration. Our Neuron Computer experts can show you what the interface can do and answer all your questions.
Contact us today to see Microsoft Teams in action at 1-833-4-NEURON or reach out online.
