5 Reasons to Switch to Microsoft Teams

In our last article we discussed how Microsoft Teams has skyrocketed to 44 million active daily users. In this post we will outline some the key benefits your company can realize when leveraging Teams. Due to work from home restrictions organizations are now looking to ramp up their adoption of collaboration platforms as fast as possible. Here are five reasons why you should consider Teams.

1. Real Time Communication: Microsoft has stated they have over 1.2 billion users using a Microsoft product today and over 60 million enterprise customers. One of Teams’ greatest assets is the platform does not just limit you to the chat or communication functionality – you can bring any Office 365 application into the mix for increased productivity. You can all view the same Word document, Excel spreadsheet, PowerPoint presentation, or OneNote document as you communicate around the content. No more having to go back and forth between applications and miss portions of the discussion – your team can review and change documents quickly and efficiently while logging persistent chat.

2. Time Prioritization: With Teams, users can focus their attention on work-related topics and prioritize their time better. Teams compartmentalizes relevant information based on channels. Each channel can contain conversations, meetings, documents and other relevant information related to that specific channel. Here’s the benefit: instead of wasting time by searching through random emails or losing track of your documents , you now have designated areas specific to certain channels. During the day, efficiency is key and Teams can help shorten wasted cycles so you can accomplish projects faster.

3. Digital Transformation: Today’s industry buzzword is “Digital Transformation” which essentially means organizations want to enable users to work from anywhere, any time, with any device. With Microsoft Teams your employees now have access 24x7x365 which results in increased productivity, seamless project engagements and the ability for your users to work the way they want to work. Although Covid-19 helped drive the recent adoption of Teams, experts believe this "work from home” trend will continue based on it’s current success. Disruption drives change and leaders now have confidence “business can continue” if their users work from places outside their four walls..

4. Increased Transparency: One of the biggest challenges for organizations today (regardless of Covid) is keeping their employees up to date on company goals, projects and day to day items. With Teams, communication across business units becomes much easier. Instead of management drafting up various emails which get lost in your inbox, or selectively calling department leaders to deliver messages, they can now create “all-hands” company video meetings or create channels within the Teams platform to deliver information across the company or directly to employee itself.

5. Employee Engagement: With the duration of our work from home orders not yet defined, leaders are looking for ways to keep their employees motivated and engaged. With chat and video messaging capabilities within Teams, studies have shown employees have more informal, lighthearted conversations with their colleagues about everything from their families, pets, challenges or achievements. This provides some level of normalcy, but also presents an opportunity to get to know their colleagues in new and different ways.

In closing, Microsoft has positioned Teams incredibly well for users to collaborate effectively, regardless of location or device. As Covid restrictions continue to change the way we work, look for more organizations to ramp up their adoption of the platform. For organizations who have not yet adopted Teams, please reach out to Opkalla at support@opkalla.com to learn how we can help.