HOW TO BOOST PRODUCTIVITY WITH OFFICE 365 WHILE REMOTE WORKING

Remote workers have always played an important role in business, with many companies making use of freelance graphic designers, external IT departments and other suppliers and staff outside of the office setting to achieve their goals.

Over the past 18 months, remote working has now become the norm, with many reports suggesting that working from home will now become a permanent fixture in how businesses are run in the future. Considering this, it’s becoming increasingly essential for businesses to understand exactly how they can streamline their remote working processes to improve productivity for remote workers. The solution can be found in Office 365, which is a cloud-based productivity hub, purpose-built to provide a myriad of remote working productivity solutions under one umbrella. Here are just some of the ways Office 365 boosts productivity.

Collaborate on documents in real time
Office 365 keeps all of your files and documents in one central location within your Teams hub. Spreadsheets, documents and any important files are easily accessible by all staff and can be edited directly from Teams, without the need to open separate Word or Excel documents. Team members are able to make edits to documents simultaneously, with each member’s contribution colour coded to distinguish them.

Editors of the file can also make use of a range of tools to communicate their thoughts, such as adding comments to a file, mentioning a certain team member by using the @ key, or the option to “Start Conversation” about a certain file.

Set up resources tabs in Teams channels
If there’s some key resources your staff rely on regularly to do their jobs, then making these quicker and easier to find will decrease the time wasted trawling through different folders and increase speed and productivity. In Teams, you can add tabs to channels and drop important files into these for all of your team to access.

For example, if you have a Sales Team channel, you could add the company CRM system, price sheet, brochures, booking forms and FAQs into this tab to ensure even the newest member of the team knows exactly what documents they need to provide great service to your customers.

Status messages
In the office environment, it’s plainly visible who is available at certain times based on if they are at their desk, taking a call, gone for lunch etc. From behind our screens this is a different story, and people can easily assume that somebody may be ignoring their calls. The uncertainty can cause a feeling of disconnection within a team who rely on communication to thrive.

With status messages, you can make it clear to other team members when they can and can’t reach you with simple notes such as “Out for lunch until 2pm” or “On a conference call with a client from 3-4pm”.

These are a selection of many features Microsoft have developed to improve productivity in Office 365, evolving over years of understanding how businesses and teams work together digitally. There are new features on Office 365 emerging constantly as they strive to provide the best business collaboration tool on the market.

To learn more about how your business could be advanced by making a switch to Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, contact SA1 solutions on 01792 439087 or email info@sa1solutions.com today to learn more from our expert team.