While 2020 changed many elements of the modern workplace, one of the areas most impacted was team collaboration. With so many businesses abandoning the traditional office environment and adopting a work-from-home solution, interaction changed drastically in a short amount of time. 

One of the most widely used tools for remote workplace interaction is Microsoft Teams. From April 2020-April 2021, the number of daily active users of Microsoft Teams almost doubled, increasing from 75 million users to 145 million users. This adoption came fast and left little time for planning and piloting programs leaving learning about the tool’s functionality to the end-user.   

Microsoft Teams has many functions that make interoffice communication and collaboration simple, no matter where you’re working.

Some of the most commonly used Microsoft Teams features include:  

  • Instant messaging: Have a one-on-one conversation to obtain answers to questions quickly 
  • Virtual meetings: Use video, computer audio, screen sharing, and custom backgrounds to make a virtual meeting feel more personal 
  • Phone functionality: A centralized way to call someone, manage your voice mail, and maintain your contacts 
  • Calendar and scheduling: Manage your calendar, or set up a meeting with someone else by accessing their availability in Microsoft Teams 
  • Workflows: Streamline and improve processes like employee onboarding, contract lifecycles, and incident management by automating repeated workflows  
  • Projects: Optimize ongoing projects by creating a project workspace for file sharing, recurring meetings, create channels (example: Finance Reviews, RFPs/Proposals, Event Planning), and pin top applications or documents to channels for easy access 

Microsoft Teams doesn’t just work within your own business, either. You can also collaborate with people outside your organization who use Teams, allowing you to manage vendor, client, or other third-party interactions through the cloud-based system.   

Improve Microsoft Teams Adoption 

These top six functionalities serve as a starting point to gauge if your employees are using Microsoft Teams today to help them collaborate and work better together. Now would be a good time to review the tool usage among departments, identify champions who want to learn more about the tool, take their use to the next level, and create pilot programs if tool usage is low.   

And don’t forget to share the results of departments using Microsoft Teams across your company to help other users see new ways of working together and completing tasks. Communicate with employees to know what capabilities lie within Microsoft Teams to help them collaborate and do their daily job tasks.  

To better understand how your staff can use the platform, this example highlights how one remote worker uses Microsoft Teams throughout the day.  

If you haven’t tried Microsoft Teams, want to upgrade from the free version, or are interested in exploring the functionality of the collaboration platform, contact one of our Microsoft Teams experts and help you get started with this powerful tool.  Or if you want to learn about the newest features of Microsoft Team, watch our on-demand webinar.