The Red River Office 365 Guide to Improving How You Collaborate
Collaboration. It’s everything today; it’s how productive your office is and how satisfied your employees feel. Today’s collaborative tools need to be able to assist collaboration without getting in the way. But that also means that many collaboration tools are becoming increasingly more complex. How can you leverage them effectively without spending too much time in micro-management?
Here’s our Office 365 Guide on improving your collaboration.
Work Together with Office Online
Microsoft’s Office 365 collaboration tools are completely integrated into a singular ecosystem. Office Online provides Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more, in a seamless collaborative solution. You can work on your files simultaneously with coworkers without potentially losing your data. Leave notes for coworkers, revert to previous drafts, and compare changes side-by-side.
Increasingly, employees are working from home in addition to working onsite. Remote employees are being hired that are in another city or another country. Office Online allows everyone to work within the same environment, thereby significantly reducing the challenges involved.
Office 365 Planner Can Help Manage Projects
Many teams are content to use the basic Office 365 suite – Excel, Word, and the like – but don’t realize that Office 365 offers a robust project management solution as well. Microsoft Planner is launched from the Office 365 framework and lets you start organizing tasks, assigning them out to workers, and getting great visibility into your project health. Plans have their own boards, so you can always make sure you’re keeping your projects organized and not conflicting.
Video Conference with Remote Workers through Microsoft Teams
Want to connect to other employees? Microsoft Teams makes it easy for in-office workers to connect to remote workers. There’s nothing like video conferencing for a face-to-face conversation. Video conferencing helps remote workers and in-office workers build a camaraderie, and more easily express complex concepts to each other. Through a combination of screensharing and Teams, remote workers can work as though they’re in the office.
Yammer is another great tool to keep coworkers engaged and enjoying their work. An internal social network, it’s equally good for water-cooler conversations and chat that keeps morale up as it is live planning and collaboration.
Leverage Your SharePoint Environment
Too often, employees start to avoid their intranet documents. SharePoint is the perfect place for document storage and management as well as company content – but if it isn’t organized properly and maintained well, then employees won’t see its value. Leverage your SharePoint environment by keeping it updated, integrating it with your company culture, and creating an overall structure that’s easy to navigate. Integrate your SharePoint environment into other business process tasks, to encourage your employees to check their intranet more frequently.
Through things like SharePoint Hub Sites, Events, and News, there are plenty of ways to keep your teams and their work organized and collaborative – the intranet can become not just a simple series of files, folders, and documents, but a true network that improves the way your organization works together.
Office 365 is built to be user-friendly and intuitive, but there’s a lot going on below the surface. It can take some time to learn how to use Office 365 most effectively, especially when it comes to some of the more advanced features.
If you want to be sure that your business is using Office 365, optimally contact Red River today.
