Is your team ready to start embracing the remote working culture?
The sudden rise of remote working, in response to the global pandemic, has presented unique challenges to workplace teams when it comes to maintaining productivity and overall effectiveness. In this article, we are going to explore how you can successfully utilize the many features of Microsoft Teams to keep your workforce productive and effective.
If your workforce is currently using Slack, we also recently published Remote Working with Slack Guide.
Microsoft Teams is one of the go-to applications for remote working and it has been managing to keep workforces across the globe operational during this unprecedented time. Although some teams are having more luck with this than others. Are you looking for practical ways to match the level of productivity that you would expect in the physical workspace?
If you don’t have time today to read our full article on remote working with Microsoft Teams, we’ve compiled an essential, must-read list of practical tips for fostering a positive team environment on Microsoft Teams. To establish a successful remote working culture on Microsoft Teams, you could:
- Promote human interaction with video calling within Microsoft Teams, making the rest of the team feel more connected.
- Create shared virtual task lists to keep everyone on-track for meeting daily objectives.
- Open up shared workspaces for your team to collaboratively edit and review documents in real-time.
- Make use of the ability to instantly message your team members and find out how they’re getting on with completing their daily tasks and whether they require any guidance or help from you.
- Add tools, ‘vitamins’ like Karma to Microsoft Teams to foster a high-performance remote working culture that is built on positivity.
- Setup a remote business phone from any computer with the Microsoft Teams cloud-based VOIP phone system.
- Encourage team members to use background blur in their video calls to focus on the person in front of them.
- Encourage your team members to take breaks and stay hydrated to ensure they maintain a healthy work-life balance.
- Pause video calls frequently to allow time for questions and remind the participants that they can use the chat window to share their thoughts.
- Record your meetings for team members to watch later or read the automatically generated transcript for essential information.
As we have just briefly detailed, there are an abundance of tools and features that you could be using inside of Microsoft Teams to boost the overall effectiveness of your workforce and keep them on-track towards meeting targets and achieving objectives. There are many remote working platforms that you could be using, but we believe Microsoft Teams is certainly a safe bet.
Sometimes, it can take months for a business to fully transition from a physical workplace to remote working. This is something that can take a considerable amount of time and effort to fine-tune and tweak to get your team back to their optimal levels of performance. With the emergence of the global pandemic, businesses haven’t had the time to thoroughly map out and plan their remote working strategy.
Let’s take a look at some of the ways in which you can boost productivity and foster a strong remote working culture on Microsoft Teams in more detail.
Remote Working With Microsoft Teams: 10 Ideas For Team Productivity
Team Video Calling
Strong levels of communication are key to a highly-productive remote workforce, they are the glue that binds your team together. The nuances of spoken words are important as they help add depth of dimension to a conversation.
With Microsoft Teams, you can use video calling to make sure that you can effectively communicate essential information to team members, whilst also having those in-depth conversations that you would normally have face-to-face in the physical workplace.
Shared Virtual Task Lists
It can often be challenging to keep track of everything that’s going on in your virtual office. With virtual task lists, your team members can see lists of all the tasks and statuses. This will help team leaders to track the overall progress of the team.
The streamlined process will keep everyone ‘in-the-loop’ with everything that’s happening across the virtual office, all within Microsoft Teams. In some instances, team members will be able to attach documents and files to specific tasks, collaborate on those documents and exchange notes without leaving the platform, keeping everyone in a single place.
Shared Workplaces
Even though you won