How Can Microsoft Teams Accelerate Employee Productivity?

Microsoft Teams has emerged as one of the most successful collaborative platforms in the last two years. When organizations worldwide suffered a setback due to a global pandemic, MS Teams helped them keep their businesses running virtually without letting their processes get affected. The credibility of Microsoft and the features of MS Teams significantly increased the platform's adoption over time. 

As a collaborative platform, Microsoft Teams helps employees in communicating with their peers on a centralized interface. It also helps the management collaborate with the employees, keep track of the processes carried out daily, and make regular assessments. This has resulted in the platform being a virtual replica of a physical workplace for organizations functioning remotely. 

Important Features Of Microsoft Teams

1. Full Integration With Office 365
   
   If your organization uses Office 365, you can optimize Microsoft Teams to the fullest. The collaborative platform is fully integrated with Office 365 applications used within an organization daily, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, SharePoint, Outlook, and many more.
   
   MS Teams provides exclusive Explorer-view access to OneDrive and SharePoint from the Office 365 Suite and Windows Explorer for the employees working on Windows Explorer.
   
   
2. Dedicated Conversational Channels
   
   To streamline effective communication, Microsoft Teams provides users with conversational channels dedicated to specific topics. This allows your employees to have focused discussions and find solutions to issues specific to a particular topic.
   
   This also makes it convenient for employees to search for information and conversations related to specific topics as the platform makes collaboration clutter-free.
   
   
3. Teams Chat For Lesser Emails
   
   Microsoft Teams helps users in reducing the clutter in their email inbox with the help of Teams Chat. The chatting tool allows your employees to talk to their peers and managers in real-time and on dedicated windows. As they can send documents in the chat and obtain quick responses, your employees no longer need to be a part of long email threads that take forever to end a conversation.
   
   
4. Seamless Mobile Customization
   
   Microsoft Teams facilitates seamless collaboration and communication across all digital devices. A highly responsive mobile application allows your employees to stay in touch with their teams from their mobile devices while being on the go.
   
   
5. A Secure Platform
   
   MS Teams makes sure that all your data and communication is kept secure. It provides users with all security and compliance features that come with Office 365. The platform allows you to customize your teams for private or publicly available to specific users within your organization. It helps managers set user access and permission to prevent threats like data leaks, unauthorized access, and other cybersecurity issues.
   
   Microsoft Teams meet all major data compliance standards, including HIPPA, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and EU Model Clauses.
   
   
6. Collaborating With External Entities
   
   Along with helping your employees collaborate with their internal teams, the platform allows them to interact with external entities such as suppliers, vendors, and partners. MS Teams allows users to tag these contacts as "guest users" and access their teams and channels.
   
   
7. Automated Setup Across Office 365 Suite
   
   On creating a team, the collaborative platform also creates an additional shared selection of Office 365 elements for the work they are doing, including a SharePoint site, a shared OneNote notebook, and a shared Plan for the team.
   
   
8. Seamless Search For Information
   
   Microsoft Teams allows your employees to search for specific information across the platform, from past conversations to particular documents. This prevents your team members from spending their time scouting their mails and asking for specific files from their peers.
   
   
9. Organizing Topic-specific Emails
   
   By using MS Teams, users can forward emails directly to specific channels. Team members can generate an email address dedicated to each channel they create. This facilitates organizing incoming and outgoing emails based on specific topics they deal with.
   
   
10. Slash Commands For Faster Activities
    
    Microsoft Teams provides users with slash commands to perform specific activities without taking the longer route. For example, the "/away" command would automatically change your status to "away".
    
    

Accelerating Employee Productivity Using MS Teams

MS Teams allows organizations to leverage the overall productivity of their employees by integrating a modern service desk with the collaborative platform. These service desks are powered by AI and allow companies to provide automated and personalized support.

When you integrate an AI service desk with Microsoft Teams, you allow your employees to obtain seamless support on the same platform that they use for work. This way, your employees spend less time looking for solutions to their problems and more time focusing on their work, increasing their productivity.

Moreover, integrating a service desk with Microsoft Teams allows you to automate several repetitive processes by giving simple commands using the collaborative platform. This helps both the employees and the management get their work done with utmost ease and efficiency.

Here are some of the major ways in which you can accelerate employee productivity with the help of Microsoft Teams: 

1. Resolving Employee Issues With A Simple Chat
   
   One of the biggest drawbacks of traditional service desks is that they do not provide personalized solutions to the issues faced by employees. This often results in the employees not giving their 100% and getting their work done effectively.
   
   With a modern service desk integrated with Microsoft Teams, you can help your employees get their issues resolved with a simple chat. All they need to do is log into the platform and interact with AI chatbots. These chatbots understand the context of the issues raised, consider the employee's historical records and provide personalized solutions.
   
   Here, the chatbots optimize your knowledge base by scanning the same whenever your employees ask questions. They scan the knowledge base and return with solutions that are tailored specifically for your employees.
   
   
2. Letting Your Employees Auto-resolve Their Issues Through Automated Ticketing
   
   A modern service desk integrated with MS Teams helps your employees be relieved from raising support tickets themselves and focusing on their work. The AI service desks allow your employees to raise a ticket by initiating a chat on Microsoft Teams. A simple command would create a ticket, and their case would get routed to a support agent.
   
   The service desk would also send all important details about the case and the concerned employee to the agent from your enterprise knowledge base. This allows the agent to provide a more holistic solution to the employee.
   
   When the concerned issue has been resolved, the service desk would automatically close the ticket, and your employee can get back to work on MS Teams.
   
   
3. Getting Trained Through Conversational Microlearning
   
   With a modern service desk, you can train your employees and teach them specific skills using Microsoft Teams. The feature of microlearning allows your employees to train themselves by consuming bite-size content daily. Instead of taking a full-time course and reading long handbooks, this requires your employees to spend not more than 10 minutes of their day learning the required skills.
   
   Such a training module helps your employees retain more information as they consume limited content daily. All you need to do is add the training materials and resources to your enterprise knowledge base and have your employees access them using their MS Teams account. You can also have your employees add relevant training materials to share with their peers and get them trained for improved training.
   
   The use of Microsoft Teams for microlearning allows you to empower your employees as they get themselves trained. This makes them increasingly self-reliant and confident about the skills they learn and the training they obtain. Ultimately, this leads to higher employee morale and improved productivity of your team members.
   
   
4. Automating Repetitive Processes
   
   IT employees often spend a lot of their time handling repetitive requests like changing or resetting passwords. This distracts them from their core focus and makes them perform the same activities for different employees across the year.
   
   By integrating an IT service desk with Microsoft Teams, you can automate these processes and save the valuable time of your IT employees. If an employee requires reset or change their password, a simple chat with the service desk will initiate the process. The relevant action would be performed after a simple verification process.
   
   This way, your IT professionals can focus on the more important processes for the organization, leading to an increase in their engagement.
   
   

The Final Word 

Microsoft Teams provides users with a range of benefits and features. The collaborative platform can be effectively used to increase employee productivity in your organization by integrating a modern service desk. This will help you streamline your employee support processes and provide personalized attention to all your team members using a centralized platform.