Article Create connected workplace experiences
By Insight Editor / 12 Nov 2019 / Topics: Microsoft 365
Workers today spend more time than ever collaborating. Yet the notion of teamwork has changed. Instead of scheduling an endless stream of meetings, the most effective teams are working smartly, strategically and often remotely. Let’s take a look at how they do it. But first, why bother?
Workers’ expectations have changed
Over the past two decades, the amount of time employees spend engaged in collaborative work has increased by about 50%. In fact, today, employees spend 80% of their time collaborating. Collaboration fosters the sharing of ideas and the pooling of skills to produce better outcomes for businesses of all shapes and sizes. It also boosts employee engagement – the holy grail that helps you hold onto your best people, gets them to do their best work, and avoids the costs of attrition.
Technology is now cited as one of the key ways to boost employee engagement, along with more traditional strategies like career development, recognition of great work and training. A massive 93% of millennial workers say that working for a company with updated technology, services and solutions is important to them.
Across generations and across the business, workers today expect the ability to use the latest technologies and tools to get their work done and to collaborate effectively. They also expect the ability to work remotely with flexibility – mobility is now a must for any forward-thinking business. If you don’t deliver on these expectations, then your employees are more likely to walk out the door.
So how is collaboration and flexible working done right? How can you leverage the collective brains of the business without compromising productivity or putting your data at risk? It’s all about taking control and empowering employees. This means migrating from a mix of on-premise productivity tools and ad-hoc collaboration platforms to one, cohesive solution that balances the expectations of employees against the security requirements of the business.
Office 365 ticks both boxes
Office 365 (O365) delivers on the needs of the modern workplace. It streamlines workflow, improves collaboration and productivity, and enables teams to work simultaneously on single documents. With O365, attachments become a thing of the past.
Prior to moving to O365, one client of ours was wasting significant time as employees struggled to keep track of projects across email and third-party (often unsanctioned) cloud storage systems. The team’s productivity was suffering, team members struggled to collaborate effectively. O365 has changed all of this.
Examples like this show just how empowering O365 can be. Plus, given that it can be installed on up to five PCs or Macs, five tablets and five smartphones per subscription, it provides a secure answer to the mobility problem – employees can access their files from anywhere on any device.
Microsoft Teams solves the collaboration conundrum
A key feature of O365 for the modern workplace is Microsoft Teams. Teams is the tool of choice for companies seeking a secure, cloud platform that workers can collaborate on from wherever they are – in fact, it’s the fastest growing business app in Microsoft history, with 19 million people using Teams weekly.
Teams brings everything together in a shared workspace where you can chat, meet, share files, and work with business apps. It helps your workers communicate more effectively and work better together; it’s completely customisable so you can add in your favourite Microsoft apps and third-party services; and it delivers end-to-end security, administrative control and compliance.
In short, Teams powers productivity. And it’s not just for big enterprises. Small and mid-sized businesses are perfectly placed to take advantage of Teams thanks to the affordable and scalable Office 365 platform.
Why Insight?
Insight is your trusted partner for Office 365
With Insight, you can pay the modern way – in a subscriber-based model for greater efficiency. We deliver an end-to-end ecosystem that’s tailored for your business and designed and managed by experts. And we help you harness the next generation of everything, with the most up-to-date devices, software and connectivity.
Find out how to get your employees using Microsoft Teams, and learn more about how features in Microsoft Teams can help your business collaborate effectively and securely.
Key takeaways
- Today employees spend 80% of their time collaborating.
- Office 365 delivers on the needs of the modern workplace. It streamlines workflow, improves collaboration and productivity, and enables teams to work simultaneously on single documents.
- A key feature of O365 for the modern workplace is Microsoft Teams - the tool of choice for companies seeking a secure, cloud collaboration platform.
- Insight offers a subscriber based model for greater efficiency.
