How to Leverage Microsoft Teams For Your Remote Workforce

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Empower Your Employees to Stay Protected & Engaged While Working From Home

The COVID-19 (novel coronavirus) outbreak has organizations rapidly ramping up to operate remotely and asking their employees to work from home.

However, many organizations are faced with a sudden challenge — do they have the right systems in place to make this happen?

If that challenge sounds familiar, you aren’t alone. But providing your remote workers with the right tools and resources is key to helping them stay connected, productive, and secure — no matter their location or device.

So where do you start?

Consider Microsoft Teams as Your Virtual Office for Remote Workers

Even before the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve been helping our clients roll out Microsoft Teams to increase collaboration and teamwork across their global workforce.

Microsoft Teams is a widely used platform that you can deploy to keep your organization running safely and securely in a virtual environment. It provides a single workplace where people can actively connect, meet, and collaborate in real-time – all in one place. With this solution, your employees can remain productive while maintaining the necessary level of security and control over your organization’s resources. For your remote workers, it can provide functionality including:

  • Voice calls, video calls, and online meetings between your organization and external contacts.
  • Chat and instant messaging between either groups or individuals in your organization.
  • Secure document collaboration, sharing, and storage.

Additional advantages for remote working include:

Centralized Communication & Collaboration
Microsoft Teams functions as a self-contained and virtual, secure workplace. It eliminates the need to switch between applications and devices for collaboration, email, text messages, and phone calls throughout the day. By using one connected platform, you can avoid the risk of shadow IT, unsecured file sharing, and loss of organizational intellectual property.

Online Meetings with Anyone Inside or Outside Your Organization
Your workforce can hold online meetings with audio, video, and web conferences with anyone inside or outside your organization. Even while working remotely, employees can run effective meetings and have the ability to blur backgrounds, use live captioning, and control meeting roles and permissions. Meetings can be recorded in case people are unable to attend so they can catch up later and not feel left out.

Staying Connected with Video
Employees can meet face-to-face even if they aren’t in the same location via one-on-one or group video chats and meetings. Face to face interaction goes a long way to help everyone feel more connected.

Keeping Employees Engaged with Chat
Online chats keep employees engaged with casual conversations. Emojis, Gifs, and stickers can help keep chatter fun and light.

Securely Collaborate & Co-Author Documents
Employees and teams can securely coauthor documents, share a screen for fast-paced decision making, collaborate on shared deliverables, and share documents without using email.

Easy IT Administration
Microsoft Teams is designed with IT in mind and provides management capabilities for collaboration, meetings, callings, and apps in one place with simple administration.

Check out this video to see many of these functionalities in action »

How Quickly Can Microsoft Teams Be Deployed?

The short answer is  – it depends. But don’t let that answer dismay you. Determining how to deploy it and how long it will take several factors.

Here are three common scenarios:

  • You have Office 365 but haven’t turned on Microsoft Teams.
  • You have Office 365 and have turned on Microsoft Teams, but it isn’t widely used.
  • You do not have Office 365 but want to roll out Teams.

For more advanced capabilities to support large-scale use of all the collaboration, meetings, and document collaboration functionalities, it would take longer to deploy.

If you are considering deploying Microsoft Teams, here are some resources for guidance to start planning:

Support Remote Workers Using Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams FAQ: Support Your Remote Workforce

Welcome to Microsoft Teams: For Microsoft Teams Admins

Microsoft Teams IT Architecture Poster [PDF]

Privacy & Security in Microsoft Teams

Our Team is Here to Help

At Xgility, we know what it takes to get Microsoft Teams quickly set up and deployed to your workforce.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, our team has been helping our clients of all sizes successfully roll out Microsoft Teams with unprecedented adoption rates. Let’s talk to learn how our team get can help you started with Microsoft Teams. Contact Us Now »