Microsoft Teams adoption over the last two years has been astronomical. With usage reaching 250 million daily active users in mid 2021 (up from 20 million in November ’19) it’s clear that businesses across the globe have realised the benefit of this unique collaboration platform. But there’s so much more to enjoy from the entire M365 family and some striking benefits for businesses adopting the full suite – part and parcel – to support a hybrid working practice.
1. M365 gives you everything you need to engage a remote team
The M365 ecosystem is just that, a suite of platforms, tools and apps that have evolved over time to support employee wellbeing, collaboration and learning regardless of where they are working. Microsoft Viva, launched in 2021, underpins it all with a set of tools that support the end-to-end employee experience. The future of work has changed, and employees are calling for more flexibility and balance in working practices. M365 is perfectly placed to support companies looking to create an environment that caters to these changing needs. As an employee-focused platform, Viva helps companies better connect across distributed teams with its tools for employee engagement, learning and wellbeing integrated into the collaboration stalwart Microsoft Teams. Whether office-based or remote, employees can access Yammer town halls, company news, and project updates through Viva Connections promotions, as well as accessing Viva Insights for a view of their own working practices and recommendations such as best times to break, or potential connections to get in touch with.
2. The Microsoft modern workplace is built for productive collaboration
The fear of many leaders moving into a hybrid working model is how they can maintain or even improve productivity, and how can they measure it when running a remote workforce? The Microsoft modern workplace model is – at its core – focused on improving productivity by enabling collaboration, making it seamless, flexible, and engaging – and connecting employees and their projects across both locations and platforms. Because M365 apps and services, inducing Viva and Teams, are seamlessly integrated, users can move easily between tasks and projects, between teams and locations, without friction. Teams is the best example of this, and its huge popularity is testament to that. As well as the now world-renowned video meeting features, Teams provides shareable calendars and streamlined file sharing.
Its most powerful feature though is its integration across the M365 toolkit. Employees in a business that is ‘all in’ with M365 will have a significantly reduced need to context switch – which is famously a productivity killer – while working in Teams. Instead they can work on Excel, Word or PowerPoint in the context of the team and the project they are focused on, collaborating with colleagues, chatting through Yammer, and maintaining a view on their own productivity levels through Viva.
3. The Microsoft Power Platform delivers improved efficiency for predictable tasks
The M365 modern workplace is designed to help you work smarter and, since the dawn of the industrial age, this is about cutting down effort for repeatable or predictable tasks. M365’s Power Platform is designed to do just that as it enables users to create, analyse and automate business processes – streamlining your workflows and increasing your efficiency. Across Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Power Virtual Agents your business has the tools to pull together data, functions, and execution capabilities to create your own bespoke automated processes, data driven activities, chatbots, apps and so much more. You don’t even have to be an IT expert to use it.
4. M365 is scalable for remote and hybrid teams
Hybrid working needs employers and tools to be flexible and that means systems, too, need to be scalable to meet the needs of different employees working in different locations at different times and in different ways. M365 provides a self-service system that is excellently placed to provide businesses with low cost, low impact methods to extend functionality or access to content with little to no IT requirement. Business users can create groups and set permissions, give guest access to certain projects and limit function within the group. This opens the choice for business operations and provides the flexibility to work securely with both internal and external partners without risk or financial impact.
There are so many reasons why going ‘all in’ with Microsoft 365 would benefit your business, and these are just the top four. We can’t help but sneak in just a few more but, if you don’t think M365 is for you and want to challenge us, please get in touch as we love a healthy debate.
It’s intuitive and easy to use. Did you need to go on a Teams course before you started using it during lockdown? No? Didn’t think so.
It’s efficient. It’s constantly connected to the cloud, so you don’t have to keep moving between local and shared versions, or checking which is the ‘right file’. You are also able to write and ‘send’ messages while offline and as soon as you have a connection they will automatically send.
It’s collaborative. Yes, we’ve said that, but you can also collaborate outside of Teams if you’d rather. You have a ‘share’ option for all files across M365 apps. Also, SharePoint. Hello!
All apps, any device, anywhere. All M365 apps can be used on web, desktop, mobile app and within Teams.
