But how can Microsoft Teams make the most of your employees’ time and increase your organization’s productivity?

Attracting and Keeping Better Employees

A strong digital culture is paramount to attracting new employees. Having the freedom to work remotely without losing effectiveness makes your business an attractive workplace. Whether they are looking to work from home or on the go, Microsoft Teams allow for the kind of digital work environment that attracts the best of the best. A remote work solution that allows for instant, secure idea-sharing also makes location less of a hurdle for potential new employees. It also improves the morale of current employees as well as reduce turnover rates.

Keeping Everything in One Place

Microsoft Teams has everything your team needs for successful remote collaborations in one place. Meetings, chats, files, calls, and tools, all in one convenient package will revolutionize your company’s digital workplace. Keeping everything your team needs in one single and secure location, Microsoft Teams is simply an essential tool for productivity.

Bettering Day-to-day Productivity

Microsoft Teams makes it possible to keep conversations going in real-time regardless of where employees are located. Microsoft Teams can be accessed on mobile devices as well as PCs and laptops, making it possible to keep a conversation going while traveling and to continue without hitch in a new location.

It is easy for all team members to review drawings or emails, share files, and to use chat and video calls. Seamlessly integrated with Office 365, Microsoft Teams is a fully functional system for any workplace that wants to go digital.

Easier Collaborations

Giving your employees the tools to work together digitally automatically results in higher productivity, more mobility, and better communication between teams. It is also easier to keep all your team members up to date on your organization and industry.

Ready to increase your team’s productivity? Contact 6th Street Consulting for a free virtual consultation!

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According to Forrester Research, the amount of time Microsoft Teams saves businesses has a direct correlation to how much money Microsoft Teams saves businesses.

First, let’s look at time.

• Workers save 4 hours/week because of Microsoft Teams’ improved collaboration and information sharing platform.
• Employees sit in meetings 18.9 percent less of the time because of Microsoft Teams.
• Microsoft teams replaced 150 trips with just-as-successful online meetings.
• Decision makers made choices 17.7 percent more quickly with the help of Microsoft Teams.

Here’s how that translates into money saved

Based on a study of businesses over three years – Forrester found a $30.3 million impact.

Companies saved:

• $6.9 million being more effective in meetings.
• $451,300 making faster decisions
• $4.8 million not having to consistently switch and cater to different applications with remote workers

“Teams is a cohesive environment where a user has access to everything in one place,” GM, telecoms.

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Stress doesn’t always need a negative connotation. Think about it – if we were never stressed about anything… we’d never get anything done. But it’s all about leverage the right stress to maximize the quality of work out of your employees. It’s important that balance is struck, though, because while good stress can scientifically boost creativity – bad stress can reduce both creativity and engagement.

Here are some ways employers can find that middle ground.

• Dole out sizeable, yet challenging workloads
• Give employees a variety of responsibility (helps with engagement levels and nixing monotony)
• Make sure each role/person has a clean job description at the start of every project
• Make sure your teams have the tools to share information in real-time

2: Bridge the introvert-extrovert gap

You’re bound to have a spectrum of these personality types in any workplace. They both respond differently, proactively act differently and think differently. And what sparks their workflow differs greatly, too – right on down to aesthetics.

So how do you uniformly address everyone from side to the other?

• Introverts like their own space. While it’s not realistic to cater to every introvert with a private, corner office – you can provide them with digital autonomy they need to foster an environment that makes them comfortable
• If your introvert employees truly get overwhelmed in large in-person meetings – perhaps some of them can attend via video or phone conference. According to psychologists, that barrier does just enough to make them feel comfortable, while still getting the most out of them on the creative end.
• On the other side, extroverts love the buzz. They feed off crowds and high energy – so let them fly. Give them the digital tools to collaborate in real time, and let them work places other than their desks.

3: Adjusting feedback

Feedback is imperative for growth. But the templated annual-review format is stale, and doesn’t foster true improvement. Increasing the frequency in which employers offer feedback is huge, whether it’s positive or critical.

And not every piece of feedback has to be face-to-face or extremely formal. Today’s more lax social media area allows for a synonymous way of offering critique. With so many chat platforms available within Microsoft, if a piece of feedback does not need to be done face-to-face, it’s easy to reach out with praise or criticism through an online platform. And any feedback – good or bad – lets employees know their employer takes a care and interest in them.

4: Let your employees’ minds roam

“The best things happen when you least expect them,” … or something like that. But it can really ring true in the workplace!

If it’s constantly go-go-go, the brain can’t enter the “default network,” which is defined as a wakeful processing that happens when the mind is engaged – yet not focused on a specific task. When the brain is in this state, complex cognitive activities are supported and a person can tap into imagining the future, strongly recalling memories, taking in information better and developing a stronger level of empathy.

So how can employers allow for this time? Building in unstructured time. Wait, oxymoron? Almost. It’s not a break. It’s not free time. It’s a time slot dedicated to getting your team together in a chill way to look at ways to solve certain problems, or create things.

The post Microsoft’s 4 secrets to employee motivation appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

And companies may not be using remote workers as the key tool to success that they are.

So what makes work-from-home types so special? Studies show one, they’re happier. Two, they deepen the talent pool. And three, get this – they actually get more done, and take fewer sick days!

So how can businesses optimize the full potential of energized remote workforce?

Putting in extra effort to communicate with remote workers

It’s a two-way street. Managers need to be in touch with the remote workforce – not just to keep tabs on employee activity, but to boost morale as well. Employees who aren’t physically in the office need to feel important. Direct communication from managers greatly helps with that.

On the end of the remote worker, they need to make communication a priority.

Video conferencing helps on both fronts, giving everyone the “you are there” feeling, where participants can pick up visual cues they wouldn’t get otherwise.

Another tip! Quick check-ins are KEY. There needs to be a proactive effort by both managers and remote workers to send brief messages or make brief phone calls throughout the day. That takes the place of the essentially subconscious check-ins in-house workers may get.

Embrace Individualism

While uniformity is necessary to an extent, often – the most effective teams are made up of people with *different* strengths. And remote workers usually bring a slightly different perspective from the outside.

So with remote workers, managers should place more emphasis on their output than their process. Set goals for your remote employees, and let them set out the plan of attack when it comes to how they achieve those goals.

Remote workers also often have an inherent understanding of both when and where they work best, so they’re the most productive when given the freedom to work under those terms (as long as they’re still making deadline, of course). Within reason, giving remote workers flexibility optimizes their contribution.

When remote workers do succeed, they often don’t get the same recognition as in-house employees. So extra effort in positive affirmation can go a long way.

Implement the right tech to make remote workers the most productive

This is where the Microsoft ecosystem comes in. It can be a great tool to ensure the success of the previous two points.

Microsoft 365 as a whole allows the remote worker to physically work on the same system and access the same files in the same manner as all other employees.

Teams, a part of 365, is there to make sure that one-on-one communication is crisp.

Yammer, another part of 365, helps remote workers engage through a social-media type of platform.

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Now, we’re not going to go ahead and tell you any one of these products will suddenly sooth clashing personalities – BUT, with features in Teams an SharePoint, we’ll open up all lines of communication and get the ball rolling – so you can focus on any personal fouls.

Interface problems that can inhibit teamwork are:

• using too many contrasting tools,
• inefficient meetings
• inconsistent apps

To the first and third points, uniformity is key. If team members are using different interfaces for email, phone calls, file-sharing, calendar setups… anything, you’ll easily hit a road block. SharePoint’s biggest key is creating a hub that ensures everyone is using the same app or model to do something. And when it upgrades – it upgrades company-wide. So you don’t have someone working on model 4, while someone else is plugging away on 6.5.

How can you work as a team if you’re not even in the same game?

Now combine Microsoft Teams on top of that. You already have a uniform workflow, and now with Teams, you can reach a bigger audience, and bring in that interpersonal and interactive side of things.

Now, to meetings. Don’t make them something for people to groan about.

Managers – if you’re in a meeting and find yourself otherwise occupied on your phone or laptop with other things – re-evaluate the purpose of that meeting, and the purpose of you being there. The same could be said for all other employees, if you’re questioning how essential your presence is, maybe it’s time to regroup the meeting set-up. A great tool to help you track meeting productivity is the SharePoint Analytics tool.

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Calling in Microsoft Teams!

Work from anywhere

The single-office concept is becoming obsolete. Sixty-three percent of companies have remote workers, and 55 percent of hiring managers expect that number to grow.

Microsoft Teams puts you all face-to-face in one room with its seamless videoconferencing features. While email and other programs can keep you connected on the housekeeping side, the face-to-face — albeit virtual — interaction is key for morale, interpersonal workplace connectivity and productive discussions.

With multiple dial-in options, Microsoft Teams videoconferencing reduces communication and geographical barriers.

Enable multi-generational collaboration

Get this – by 2020, people from FIVE different generations will make up the workforce. While having each one represented within your own business can give you a competitive edge, it doesn’t come without challenges.

But Microsoft Teams can simultaneously cater to each generation, by providing a hub to let employees work the way they want. The biggest difference among generations is communication preference and expectations, so Teams makes it easy to foster all forms – phone, face-to-face, email, video conference, or collaborative document sharing.

Maximize mobile work

We don’t need to tell you the office space has transcended the desktop. But what’s happening now – is that mobile work is becoming much more of a priority, than something extra.

As this continues, employees will need a familiar, connected experience across their mobile devices. Microsoft Teams brings all that together by extending the collaboration and communication experiences from the office naturally to those mobile devices. So teams can still work together on-the-go, and while miles apart. The Teams mobile up lets you join calls and meetings, share content, control presentations, reply to chats and conversations and transfer calls and check remote voicemail.

Communicate effectively with outside partners/contractors

Another number for you. Freelancers are expected to make up the majority of the workforce within the next ten years.

So you’ll need Microsoft Teams to keep them active members of your own team.

But there’s an extra step with freelancers – while they are on your team, there’s still a boundary that needs to be set, for cyber security purposes. Teams takes care of that behind the scenes, though, with the guest access feature.  So working across corporate boundaries – both for the freelancer and your full-time employees – is easy and highly secure.
And if there’s a problem – IT can quickly remove guest access.

Engage with a larger team

High engagement = high productivity. BUT – 87 percent of employees are NOT engaged at work? That’s essentially an untapped market for potential growth.
Morale is huge. And yes, that’s something that needs to be fostered outside of the digital world, but Microsoft Teams can help remind you how important that is. Teams has features that keeps workers engaged, but also gives them the flexibility to collaborate the way they want.

As you can imagine, this gets trickier the bigger the company is. One-to-many communications are a breeze with Teams “Live Events.” It takes top-down communication out of the stiff and stale corporate video conference. There are engagement opportunities before, during, and after the event – so everyone is involved.

The post Why the modern workforce needs Microsoft Teams appeared first on 6th Street Consulting.

Set daily goals

We’re in the era of a constant to-do list. Long term. Short term. At work. At home. But staring at 87 bullet points of things you need to accomplish isn’t going to give you anything more than a headache. But if you prioritize those 87 things, you’ll be in much better shape.

Find out what can wait – but don’t be lazy about it! If you can get it done within 20 minutes, do it that day. Long term project? Find a PIECE that can get done today. Lots to do at home? Again – the 20 minute goal is a good one. Often times we don’t realize a lot of the things we have to do may only actually take 10 minutes.

If you map things out this way, you’ll actually be able to cross things off your list, instead of having them hang over your head.

Set deadlines and hold yourself accountable

This goes hand-in-hand with point one. This one focuses more on the execution of conquering your to-do list – and it’s a bit more solely work-related.

Microsoft has a tool to be your built-in-accountability holder:  Microsoft Project. It allows you to maintain a calendar with multiple moving parts. It also lets you assign deadlines to projects, meetings and tasks – so you’re notified when you’re getting off track.

View Microsoft Project

Take time to save time

Data entry. Standardized emails. Both essentially synonyms for “tedious” and “*groans*” for those who do this manually. But you can actually streamline this process. It’ll take time to set up initially – but it will save you time in the future.

If you’re entering data into multiple spreadsheets, set up macros that can do that work for you. Macros can also help automate email responses.

Create or Run Macros

Batch your small tasks

This one is great when it comes to making sure your day has a productive flow. Think about the things you do throughout your work day – i.e. sending emails, scheduling meeting, updating your website, etc. These things inherently don’t take a lot of time, but if you stretch them out while doing more long-winded products, they might. So instead, set aside a chunk of time to get them all done at once.

Separation of home and office

Nowadays, far easier said than done. But it’s essential. And it prevents burnout. According to multiple studies, you need some sort of down time every day to keep your mind right. Work will likely take up most of your day (especially for those of you reading this), and that’s OK. And it’s great that you’re so connected to what you do. But give that connectivity a time limit. When you’re home with your family, be with your family. Working out before work? Be present in your workout. On vacation? Put all your devices on “Do Not Disturb.” Giving your mind a clear break = more clarity when you get back into work mode.

Only say “yes” to meetings that matter

Aiii, what? Don’t all meetings matter? No. If it’s not organized well or does not have a clear purpose – you don’t have time for it! Make sure you know exactly why you’re included in a meeting before you attend, so you can ensure you’re not wasting your time.

Regarding meetings in general, best practices say make sure there’s a “hard” stop time, and ensure everyone is prepared with a specific agenda before you get started.

Take workout breaks

Physical activity = more productivity! It doesn’t have to be crazy, we know you don’t have time to go take a spin class/shower/change your clothes during your lunch break. But if your office is flexible enough and you have the resources, take a short run or get some cardio in during the day. Still unrealistic? A walk outside. Live somewhere to cold? Be sure to get up and walk around the office.

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