Boosting Team Collaboration with Microsoft 365: Best Practices

One of the most critical components of any workplace is collaboration. Being able to work together to create new innovations and solutions is one of the driving factors of progression for businesses worldwide. Thus, ensuring that your workforce has the tools to do so is vital.

Being a staple of offices worldwide, Microsoft 365 is filled with tools to help your organisation’s collaborative capabilities thrive. Using collaboration-focused tools such as Microsoft Teams and the many additional workspace tools within the Microsoft 365 application suite will help your organisation unlock its full potential.

In this article, we’ll discuss the best practices for utilising Microsoft Teams for collaboration, as well as the many features that are available within Microsoft 365.

Microsoft Teams Collaboration Best Practices

Create Teams for Departments and Groups

It’s important to ensure that communication in your business is focused and organised between departments and groups. There’s simply no point in having two different departments far apart within your organisation within the same communication channels — this will just get messy and will prevent focused work.

Microsoft Teams lets you create specific teams for separate departments and work groups. This will allow you to keep teams separate and keep your communication channels organised, leading to more productivity.

Create Channels for Projects and Ideas

Working on a project also requires organisation. Even at the conceptual level, making sure that your work on specific projects is accessible in an organised manner will be the difference between productivity and potential workday disruption.

Establishing distinct channels for various projects and concepts will guarantee your ability to maintain order and enable easy access to your employees’ tasks. This practice ensures nothing gets misplaced, allowing you to sustain productive work within a structured framework.

Share and Present

To move forward with ideas and projects, presenting and pitching is the best way to ensure that everyone is informed about what is happening within their team. With more teams moving to a hybrid/remote working environment, Microsoft Teams is the epicentre of meetings within most organisations worldwide.

To be able to help you present and share as you would in a physical presentation, Microsoft Teams can let you present and share PowerPoint and even your screen during online calls and meetings.

Microsoft Whiteboard

What was once the process of brainstorming on a physical whiteboard has now become obsolete in the online remote workplace with Microsoft Whiteboard.

With Microsoft Whiteboard, you can canvas and ideate collaboratively online, allowing your team to contribute from wherever they are in the world. This will drive forward collaboration and help your organisation prosper while enabling your workplace to take advantage of the benefits of remote working.

Inclusive Meetings with Live Captions

In any workplace, different people will have unique needs regarding accessibility. Meetings can be a huge barrier for some people, as they come with a lot of accessibility difficulties that need to be worked around.

Microsoft Teams helps with creating more inclusive meetings by using live captions to instantly share what is being said within a meeting, making it easier for everyone to stay in-the-loop as the meeting progresses.

Microsoft 365 Applications

Real-time Co-authoring

Working together in real-time is a collaboration dream. Microsoft 365’s co-authoring capabilities enable full team collaboration by allowing multiple people to work on a single document at the same time.

This is useable within all Microsoft 365 applications — meaning that you can work together in Word, Excel, and more within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Sharing via OneDrive

OneDrive allows you to utilise the cloud to store your documents, making them fully accessible and sharable no matter where you are. This drives collaboration forward and efficient working capabilities in the remote future.

Save Files to OneDrive & SharePoint

SharePoint is the best way to ensure that your organisation’s files and important information are easily accessible. Organisations worldwide use SharePoint to manage and organise files and create intranets to boost collaboration.

By using SharePoint and OneDrive, you can save files from Word, Excel, and other native Microsoft applications and ensure that anyone who needs to access, edit and amend them can do so without having the requirement for files to be manually sent transferred.

Share Calendars on Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a cornerstone of the modern office environment — one of the major reasons being its calendar capabilities.

You can share calendars within Outlook, allowing others to be able to see when you’re available and when you’re not. This will let anyone within your organisation know when they can book meetings or sessions with you, and even when you can meet up for a lunch break.

Improve the Employee Experience with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that lets you empower your organisation’s employees by boosting employee engagement and productivity and allowing them to nurture their skills.

Fully optimised for work-from-home, Microsoft Viva will let your employees take advantage of an employee portal that works with Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft platforms.

Want to find out more?

Microsoft 365 has many tools and features that are made specifically to boost productivity and collaboration. Using the tools that are available within the 365 platform to let your employees work together constructively and productively will help your workplace push forward to be more innovative and on the cutting edge of the business world.

If you’re looking to get started with Microsoft 365 or even simply want to create more opportunities for collaboration within your organisation in Burgess Hill, Crawley, Brighton, or anywhere across Sussex and the Southeast, reach out to us today. The experts at Extech Cloud will be able to help you through the whole process and work out what’s best for your business.