Q: It’s pretty obvious that even once the pandemic is behind us, a lot of our employees are going to want to remain working from home at least part of the time. What is your company using to keep everyone connected and working together and what are you suggesting for other companies?
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I agree! One thing that the pandemic has absolutely done for many companies shows them that their people can work outside of the traditional office setting and remain productive – and the reality is that many employees who had never before considered “telecommuting” are now firmly committed to wanting to spend at least part of their workweek from home. This can actually be a wonderful benefit for the company, making you more resilient to everything from power outages, to the seasonal flu, to another pandemic! Of course, it can also be great for employee satisfaction, which is always a positive for your company.
At Envision, we’ve been using Microsoft Teams for all of our communication and collaboration for well over 2 years (meaning well before COVID-19). In fact, we actually stopped using email for internal communication and moved all of it to Teams in early 2019! That’s right – NO internal email. Can you imagine what a time-saver that is?
Teams is also where all of our file sharing and collaboration on those files happens. For example, our marketing team often works together on presentation materials. They can now have multiple contributors all logged into the same document at once while they are on a video call. They can be working on different aspects of the document simultaneously, or they can see what one of their colleagues is doing in real time.
Now, we had these tools and processes in place before the pandemic forced everyone to work from home, so there was very little adjustment our people needed to do to remain productive, but we can absolutely attest to the truth that we could not have done this without Teams and the rest of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. As such, this is what we are recommending to other companies looking to better support a Distributed Workforce today and into the future.
Of course, there is more to the equation than simply installing Teams, which many companies who rolled it out under duress during the early days of the pandemic learned. Whether your company is struggling to remain productive using a mix of various tools from different providers, or if you are using Teams but believe you aren’t getting the full benefit of the platform, the Envision team can help. Click here to schedule some time to talk to me today and I can focus more on your company’s specific needs.
