As a result of the global pandemic, many companies have been pushed to operate at a scale they certainly never have before. It presents multiple difficulties from both a business and a team perspective.
Many of us, particularly those who have not mobilized the remote job, face the difficulties of working. However, it offers the opportunity to unlock the advantages of remote work and to improve business resilience.
Office 365 has proved to be one of the most popular offers for remote workers, with several features that promote optimal productivity and reliability when away from the office. The essence of Microsoft 365 Business as a unique and seamless stable and cloud-based productive application experience makes it a universal remote work toolkit. Here are real-world scenarios of how your company can boost your employees’ remote work.
Empower Remote Working with Office 365
Office 365 is a versatile platform that can help the business work collaboratively, efficiently, and eventually to its full potential out of a remote viewpoint. A cloud-based solution that can access its full-featured experience from anywhere, as long as you’re online.
Microsoft’s productivity suite has tools like Word, Exchange, Excel, SharePoint, Teams, and more. They compliment each other and work together seamlessly—a must-have for any business.
Nowadays, remote working needs to form a part of your long-term strategy to evolve both within and outside the organization. It is also an essential aspect of resilience. With advanced technology, remote workers can now work with their colleagues, speak to their customers, and reach out to partners and vendors.
Microsoft 365 Collaboration
Collaboration is essential to all businesses. To overcome challenges, complete tasks, and unleash new growth ideas, all teamwork is necessary. When remote work is enabled, collaboration is much better, and interactions with persons never occur.
As a power user, you demand simplicity and the ability to collaborate without deep technical expertise. SharePoint and Office 365 are excellent productivity tools widely used for enterprise collaboration, content management, and searches.
If you are managing a remote team, you will want to direct your employees to the most appropriate collaboration tools available in Office 365.
Let’s take a look at the available tools and applications within and how you can leverage them for collaboration.
Office 365 Collaboration Tools and Applications
Office 365 is designed to work together with a variety of solid tools in your license. From sharing file links in OneDrive and SharePoint rather than sending emails with attachments to collaborating in real-time on the same Office documents, Microsoft 365 has excellent tools for working together effectively.
Microsoft Teams
It is one of the most potent collaboration tools offered by Office 365. Microsoft Teams is a chat-based collaboration platform. It brings together all people, content, and tools that a team needs to stay more engaged and effective. For a typical project, the entire team needs to be on the same page.
They must be able to chat whenever they need, tag or update actions, share files from any location and in real-time. In such a scenario, empower your employees with Microsoft Teams.
If you are considering collaboration using the following use cases, I recommend using Microsoft Teams.
OneDrive for Business
OneDrive For Business is not designed as a collaboration tool, but it does allow you to share documents with others and co-author them, making it a collaboration enabler. An easy way to store your documents in the Cloud and share them with relevant people.
This cloud service will let you save files and documents securely and sync documents to any device. You can easily upload a document in OneDrive and give other people access to it. You can also give permissions at a granular level to allow read-only or edit access.
OneDrive for Business ensures employees don’t use unapproved, potentially insecure tools that compromise business security. It can consider as a personal file sorting and sharing system in the Cloud.
SharePoint Online
SharePoint has a significant role to play. It enables workers to collaborate effectively with Sites. It allows you to focus on a single document/presentation while helping you work further to provide visibility to the approach taken by others.
You can grant access to Team spaces or share individual files with time limits both internally and externally. Sharing files externally with specific restrictions is highly important for building business resilience, enabling collaboration with external partners.
- SharePoint Project Site: assigns people specific tasks and responsibilities, handles project-related documents, and monitors team activities on a standard calendar.
- SharePoint PerformancePoint: provides insights into the company’s performance.
- Workflows on SharePoint: creates an automated process for tasks and focuses on more integral things throughout the day.
Moreover, Microsoft has turned SharePoint into a backend repository and container with front-end apps like Exchange and Teams. Some organizations may not want to invest in Microsoft Teams. For them, it is better to continue with SharePoint for collaboration purposes.
Yammer
Teams are ideal for communicating with smaller, organized groups, but if you want to communicate efficiently across an entire organization, Yammer is the tool. Designed for large businesses, Yammer makes those company-wide updates easy.
Word
Microsoft Word is a word-processing program for creating and editing letters, documents, brochures, learning activities. There are many valuable and simple features available in Microsoft Word to make it easier for your work and study.
Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager. Although often used mainly as an email application, it also includes a calendar, task manager, contact manager, note-taking, journal, and web browsing.
Power Business Intelligence (BI)
A business analytics cloud-based suite. It allows users to interact, visualize and analyze information more quickly, efficiently, and easily. A wide range of live data through simple dashboards is connected. Users can submit and view compelling data visualization and interactive reports. Data can turn into insights and actions.
Microsoft Forms
This tool enables users to create simple quizzes, surveys, questionnaires, and articles. Data can conveniently transfer to excellent or integrated data analysis such as Power BI to visualize more actions.
OneNote
OneNote is a free form information collection and multi-user collaboration application. It includes user guides, drawings, screensavers, and audio commentaries, both handwritten and printed.
Notes can exchange across the Internet or a network with other OneNote users.
7 Benefits of Using Office 365 for Remote Work
Staying Productive
Whatever your position is, it’s essential always to be aware of the changes in your company. It is also essential to be able to receive information in real-time. Office 365 will give remote workers the ability to work working from home on different daily tasks.
Employees who are now working from home spend part of the morning catching up with conversations with their colleagues that occurred in Microsoft Teams. Next, scheduled online meetings will occur to discuss new ideas or current issues with projects. When anyone has opinions or suggestions to share, a Microsoft Team Conference channel should ensure that no one is out of the loop.
Work-life Balance
A happy workforce is a productive workforce. Allowing workers to benefit from remote work can improve the efficiency and success of your company. “A recent study by economists at Warwick University showed satisfaction leads to a 12% productivity rise and unfortunate jobs have proven 10% less productive. Another report on FastCompany.com stated.
Project Management and Planning
Application has a lot to offer in planning projects, assigning and escalating tasks, and tracking progress for project managers. You can handle and schedule your tasks remotely online between features, including To Do and Planner, by creating a high-functional control center to run large and small projects quickly.
Security
One of the biggest challenges and risks of remote working is the use of personal devices for work. Personal devices are usually not as secure as devices on the office network. If they are stolen, or the employee leaves that job, sensitive information can be lost or compromised.
Microsoft 365 centralizes data control—whether stored in the Cloud, in a working computer, or mobile device such as a notebook by an employee.
This risk is handled efficiently by the Mobile Device Manager of the app, so you can erase all data remotely if the device is destroyed. It enables the IT service provider or IT team.
Improved customer service
Working remotely with Office 365, it’s possible to improve your customer service levels significantly. It can respond to queries when away from the office environment and possibly provide customer services 24/7, without hiring more staff. When used efficiently, you can improve your competitiveness, meet consumer needs, and improve customer content to maintain and attract customers.
Access Files Anywhere
Office 365 allows your organization to store all the files in the Cloud. It means they can be accessed on any device, from any location with an internet connection. For organizations where mobile working is essential, access to all the apps and files you need when out of the office is invaluable.
Centralized Collaboration
Office 365 lets you share mailboxes, calendars, contacts and edit documents in real-time through collaborative tools. Sharing calendars in Exchange means you can see who in your organization is available when, so you can schedule meetings that work for everyone, first time round. Shared mailboxes mean multiple people can access the same mailbox, so messages can be filtered to land in the shared mailbox and won’t be missed. SharePoint is another integral tool for enabling collaboration. Documents saved here can be accessed and worked on by any staff member and shared as a link in the email.
Conclusion: Remote Work Made Easy with Office 365
Today, organizations are looking for fast and easy ways to support their employees and maintain their business operations in this pandemic, and many of them are transitioning into remote work.
Microsoft 365 designed to help businesses build and operate complex teams worldwide. Even if you’re a small group of tens of thousands of teams, collaborative tools from Microsoft make you work together. It can reduce matchless productivity with excellent security to your organization’s resources to your remote workforce.
To be precise, Microsoft 365 can support your remote work teams or give shape to them better than every other.
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