Managing a Remote Workforce Through a Crisis with Microsoft 365

Chat

Chat is really the foundation of MS Teams. You can message, call, screen share, and add other people to the conversation all from a one-on-one chat. It allows you to have private conversations with one or many people, as well as public conversations with any Team that you are a member of. MS Teams chat allows for responses, replies, reactions, sharing of files and links, and other features. Conversations in chats, either with one person or a group, are all linear. They’re not broken up into smaller conversations, but instead, flow one after another. That makes it a richer, more real-time experience than using email.

Status Updates

With your team’s daily routines likely adjusted by the fact that they are now working from home, status updates are a great way to display your current status so that other users know when they should or shouldn’t reach out to you. Plus, using a status message means that you’ll know when you should or shouldn’t expect a quick response from your team members. This is an easy way to foster transparency and improve communication between team members, and a practice that you should institute for your organization.

Virtual Meetings

Meetings are a vital part of collaboration and something that can seem hard to replicate when operating with a remote workforce. Keeping your normal schedule of meetings, huddles, and check-ins helps to make working remotely still feel like working. Plus, adding video is super helpful as it allows teams to feel connected to one another and read each other’s body language.

MS Teams has a number of features that make scheduling, holding and reviewing video meetings so easy. Your calendar is available directly in Microsoft Teams so you don’t need to go to MS Outlook to check availability and schedule meetings. You can instantly launch a virtual meeting from a chat with audio and video. It also makes the sharing of content quick and easy.

Activity Feed

Think of the MS Teams Activity Feed as your new inbox. It aggregates your team’s activities in a single location and is a summary of everything that’s happened in all different channels that are on your team’s list.

If you feel like you’re getting spammed with MS Teams notifications now that everyone is relying on it so heavily, this can really help. You can use the activities feed to filter your activities by type – for example, unread messages, @mentions, or replies. When a red circle appears next to ‘“activity”, that means you have a notification in your feed. A notification will remain in your feed for 14 days and then expire.

If you’d like to learn more about Microsoft Teams and how to best leverage it with your team, check out our Microsoft Teams Top 10 productivity tips and tricks!

Microsoft 365 for a Remote Workforce: SharePoint Online

For efficient collaboration, and to store important information on the cloud, a robust intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft Office 365 is key. With SharePoint, your employees are able to efficiently communicate and collaborate virtually on a global scale.

For example, SharePoint Online helps remote team members working together on a project stay on the same page. Create a collaborative project site in SharePoint, outlining the project statement, individual roles and responsibilities of team members involved, a document library, and a task list. This way your team will have a focus point to connect them to each other and their work, making it easy to have alignment around the project, along with its progress and objectives.

Your team can also use SharePoint to connect to all their projects and tasks using ‘My Work’ reports, project dashboards, and the document library.

Microsoft 365 for a Remote Workforce: OneDrive for Business

OneDrive is a cloud-based file sharing service that is essentially Microsoft’s version of DropBox or Google Drive. Using OneDrive for Business allows you to share almost anything with your team, be it a document, video, project, spreadsheet, or more. It gives your 1 TB of space, which should be ample for any project.

Need to collaborate on a Word document or Excel Spreadsheet? All individual documents and drafts are saved in OneDrive where files are private by default, but can be shared with others. Users can then save shared documents to the Teams or SharePoint sites where their group works.

You can also share documents in OneDrive with external stakeholders.

Microsoft 365 for a Remote Workforce: Outlook and Calendar

If your organization uses Microsoft 365, you will already be familiar with MS Outlook as an extremely powerful email management tool. The built-in calendar is great for setting virtual meetings and seeing when your colleagues are busy or free. As we previously mentioned, you can do these things in MS Teams too.

If you are confused as to when to use MS Outlook and when to use MS Teams, we recommend as a general rule to use email for the more formal things and Teams for more task-based communications that would otherwise clutter your inbox.

Microsoft 365 for a Remote Workforce: Yammer

When working remotely, especially when your team is used to working in the same space, keeping your team connected on a social level can be the most challenging thing. That is where Yammer comes in.

Yammer is essentially Office 365’s answer to Facebook. It’s a social network for co-workers, a common space where they can feel like they are together, even when they are not, allowing them to maintain the bonds they developed working together in the first place.

Yammer allows them to just say hi, laugh at jokes together, share important updates – all of which are important parts of the social life of an organization that employees need to feel connected, informed, and bonded. These are the less measurable things the COVID-19 pandemic will take away from our teams, making them all the more important to protect.