If you are among the 115 million people using Teams right now, the chances are that you are doing it from your home, as part of your organisation’s WFH strategy.
Microsoft Teams is one of the essential pillars of collaboration that has become almost synonymous with remote working in the past year, similar to Zoom. And with good reason. Teams has incredible capabilities to support remote working use cases and is constantly adding to them – like updating productivity analytics for WFH and even a virtual commute.
Let us look at five tips that can help you develop (or sharpen) your Microsoft Teams strategy for WFH in 2021.
1 – Plan for gradual implementation and don’t go down the shadow route
It is easy to fall into the shadow IT trap with Microsoft Teams, as it is freely available as part of your Microsoft 365 business plan. Implementation is quick via SaaS, without any special technical expertise, and most business users are already familiar with the 365/Teams UI. However, unplanned Microsoft Teams implementation can lead to a number of risks:
- A sprawling IT footprint with unmapped processes
- Data exchange outside of your standard infosec measures
- Employees adding on licenses out of their pocket
No matter how simple or straightforward, the transition to Microsoft Teams for WFH has to be planned by IT. In case of large deployments, you might even want to partner with a reseller or systems integrator, depending on your existing UC infrastructure.
For example, Accenture was able to help a company with 20,000+ employees switch to remote work on Teams in just two weeks.
2 – Expect changes in collaboration patterns and Teams usage
The application of Microsoft Teams will be different in a WFH environment than in a typical office that engages in digital collaboration, with occasional remote work.
Microsoft’s research reveals that meetings during the WFH era have become significantly shorter, and the number of long meetings dipped. Employees are conducting 11% fewer meetings that last for over one hour, while the number of 30-minute or shorter meetings has increased.
Also, video will become far more popular than when people were working together in-person. During the initial switch to WFH, Microsoft reported a massive 1000% spike in video calling traffic, which is something organisations must factor into their WFH strategy. Employees could require additional hardware peripherals (sophisticated webcams, noise cancellation headphones, etc.), stronger home internet infrastructure, and reimagined workflows, where frequent short meetings don’t interrupt productivity.
On the IT side, your Teams adoption strategy should incorporate new KPIs aligned with these refreshed modalities of engagement and collaboration.
3 – Provide training on how to use Microsoft Teams for work from home
Teams has launched a spate of new features over the last few months, designed specifically with the WFH worker in mind. Some of these include:
- Microsoft Teams Together Mode – a feature that embeds video feeds from different cameras during a conference call into a shared environment
- MyAnalytics – a personal dashboard that lets you assess your work and productivity patterns, their impact on your well-being, the balance between meetings vs independent work, and how efficiently you are managing your collaborator network
- All-day video calling – a free-for-a-limited time feature that lets you stay connected with meeting participants for 24 hours at a stretch, useful when working collaboratively as in a pair programming project
- Approvals app – an app in Teams that streamlines requests, collecting all active and closed requests in one place so that you can view/approve processes easily
That last feature was launched in mid-January 2021, which tells you about Microsoft’s pace and frequency of updates. It is a good idea to conduct monthly refresher training on Teams for WFH so that employees are always equipped to maximise the platform’s ever-increasing capabilities.
4 – Utilise Microsoft Teams for live events
When working from home, company events inevitably take a backseat, which can be damaging to your culture, the employee experience, and how quickly new employees can feel a sense of belonging. Live events on Microsoft Teams helps recreate the immediacy of an in-person session in a remote working-friendly environment.
Teams live events are sort of like a middle ground between Teams meetings and Skype Meeting Broadcast, letting you broadcast video and content to a large online audience. Make use of Teams’ built-in production tools, where presenters can use their webcams or Teams room systems’ AV inputs to generate a live video stream. If you already have studio-quality equipment, Teams also lets you route the video through external encoders for a superior viewing experience.
Teams even generates real-time usage analytics so that you can check on participation levels, as well as live captions in multiple languages, including Hindi, French, and Korean.
Live events are a good way to extract maximum ROI from your investment in Teams. It directly replaces more costly, time and effort-intensive physical events while encouraging wider participation, greater accessibility, and ready information on engagement.
5 – Actively encourage work-life balance using Teams tools
There is a risk that employees will face pressures to stay connected and participate in an “always-on” culture of presenteeism, further enabled by technologies like Teams. Therefore, as part of your WFH strategy, proactively encourage work-life balance.
The first step is to destigmatise breaks and time off. Teams offer several ways to do this, such as the Appear Offline status and the Do not disturb until <duration> status. Teams meetings will automatically alert participants five minutes before the scheduled end time so that the meeting duration doesn’t exceed the expected limits. Managers can view overtime hours for employees through Teams Analytics – but at the crux of it all is the philosophy of work-life balance, where personal obligations are deemed just as important if not more so.
Team leaders should set the example on this, valuing work instead of availability and calling out instances of unhealthy overtime.
These five measures can help you make the most of your Microsoft Teams implementation when working from home. Given that WFH will remain a business staple for the near future, organisations must formalise their remote work strategy using Teams so that it is sustainable in the long-term.
