Enabling Remote Work

According to INE - Instituto Nacional de Estatística, last year there were 120.000 portuguese employees working remotely all or some of the time. A number that almost doubled in the span of only 4 years.

Remote work has been discussed in businesses for years. With a lot of conducted studies on the topic, the great majority concludes that most employees thrive when given the ability to work from home.

With new confirmed cases of Coronavirus increasing worldwide, organizations are stepping up efforts to help with containment by asking employees to work from home.

Forbes reports that some companies are getting out in front of the impending pandemic by promoting remote work. The multinational technological company IBM has asked workers in Coronavirus-affected areas to work from home ‘whenever possible’. Dentsu, a japanese ad agency told all its workers in its Tokyo headquarters to work from home. Other organizations, such as Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft have followed suit, and many more will certainly do too.

If having your entire team work remotely from home seems like a drastic measure for your organization, it shouldn’t be. The reality is that remote work culture is growing in popularity, as more individuals and team leadership have come to understand the value and advantages of this work structure.

With the highly developed apps in the market that allow collaboration and communication from anywhere at any time - be it for better productivity or by necessity.

Enable remote work with Microsoft Teams

Ever since its launch in 2017, Microsoft Teams has been one of the fastest-growing apps in Microsoft's history. In order to face the current Coronavirus outbreak, Microsoft is offering a free 6-month license of Office 365 E1 to all companies that aren’t currently licensing it. This initiative aims to help the workplace adapt to the current reality organizations are facing worldwide.

Office 365 E1 includes Microsoft Teams, the tool that enables collaboration when working remotely. If you’re not familiar with Teams, it is a collaboration app that helps teams stay organized and have conversations — all in one place. It simplifies teamwork, meeting with customers or suppliers, as it allows collaborate, share and develop content through one platform.

Credit: Microsoft UK

There are now more than 500.000 companies using Microsoft Teams all around the globe. Get to know how this collaboration app can enable remote work in your organization.

Hold meetings from home as if you were in the office

The Meetings component in Teams is like teleporting to meet with your colleagues, clients, suppliers face-to-face. Wherever you are, Teams replicates the experience of being in the meeting room. So, even if everyone is in different places, you can still hold meetings, and talk as if you were back in the office.

Organize and manage projects with communication Channels

In a team, we know there’s never only one project happening at once, so Teams allows you to create different “Teams” for different projects and within each team you can create different channels. For example, in your team can have a channel for each subject’s category, making it easier for all the members of the team to find updates within the context of the category and see what's going on in each of them.

Communicate with all colleagues using the Chat feature

Microsoft Teams allows seamless communication from any place, as it can work as a messaging platform for businesses. This feature provides a central place for various working groups to collaborate. All message threads are saved, allowing you to dive in and out of conversations whenever you need to.

By default, conversations are visible to the whole team, however, private one-to-one or one-to-many chats with colleagues are also available. If there are more than a few recipients in the chat, you can notify a person by simply using the ‘@’ symbol, just like you would on Twitter, Whatsapp or other social media and messaging platforms.

Integration with Office 365 and external apps

In Microsoft Teams, users can open and edit Word, Powerpoint, Excel documents, and many more without the need to download the document, edit and upload it again.

Besides Office 365’s apps, you can connect hundreds of apps and services that you already use. This way, you can customize your experience and assure that your team's current workflow is optimized and not disrupted.

Security and Compliance

Finally, Teams does all this in a secure way. It encrypts all data, all the time, with a transparent operational model with no standing access to customer data. You can learn more about Microsoft Teams' security and compliance here.

Talk to us so we can help you jump start Microsoft Teams in your organization. We can not only help you setup the technical integration and define a set of security and usage policies, but also in terms of people knowledge and ability in the new way of working that Teams enables.

Contact us:

contact@unipartner.com

+351 210 171 610