Microsoft Teams for frontline workers ensures that team members away from the desk environment can still access a high level of collaboration and communication excellence. It’s not just administrators and knowledge workers in need of an aligned digital workspace today. Frontline workers also need to keep their finger on the pulse of business evolution.
78% of executives say that to be successful in the years to come, companies need to connect and empower their frontline workers with the right information and technology. For years now, Microsoft Teams has invested in a dedicated Teams experience specifically for frontline workers in search of better business alignment.
With Teams for frontline workers, you can create a single environment for teamwork, featuring deeper connections across the organisation. Teams is also agile and flexible enough to meet with business needs as they evolve.
Implementing Teams for Frontline Workers
Microsoft Teams makes it quick and easy to issue an excellent collaboration experience to your team at speed. You can use GitHub PowerShell scripts to configure a local environment in Teams and create and provision users at scale throughout the frontline landscape. Microsoft recommends creating Teams linked to specific locations, like a store, manufacturing plant, hospital, or distribution centre.
Each team created with Microsoft can have its own series of channels. In Healthcare, you might have channels for doctors, nurses, critical care, and administration. In retail, you may have channels for front and back of store, training, and corporate communications.
Once you have your teams set up:
- Create policies: Creating policies allows administrators to control what users can do in a Teams environment. Policies should be in place for both frontline workers and managers, to improve compliance, enhance governance, and reduce the risk of issues. Remember, your policies should cover everything from how to send messages and set up meetings, to who can download certain apps and apply them to the service
- Implement users and security groups: Adding a large number of users to Teams means creating the users first in Azure AD. You can find tutorials within the Microsoft ecosystem to help with this. Once you have your users in the PowerShell environment and added to Teams, you can begin to assign licensing to users in group format. Next, assign users to individual teams, and make sure that each user has the right policies in place to ensure compliance
- Add crucial features and tabs: Microsoft Teams allows you to customize your UCaaS experience based on the kind of business you need to run. In a frontline working environment, you may need access to things like Shift management, push-to-talk voice, and direct routing. It’s also worth looking into things like bots and connectors to boost the efficiency of your team and help with sharing information
One good way to simplify and enhance your Teams setup experience, is to use the Team templates already available from Microsoft. With Teams templates, you can create effective teams with speed, choosing from common business scenarios like employee onboarding and management, with industry-specific templates for retail, healthcare, and even government environments.
The templates available from Microsoft help to show what kind of channels and solutions you might need in place for your ecosystem, and each template can be customized.
Addressing Frontline Worker Needs
Setting up your Teams environment for frontline workers is only the first step. After that, you’ll need to start exploring the features available on Teams just for frontline staff. For instance, the task publishing service in Teams is excellent with the frontline workforce. Task publishing allows companies to create tasks at a corporate level in a central environment, and publish those tasks to different locations, and specific store layouts.
Leadership teams for nationwide retailers can create tasks for when a store is launching a reopening day and send a list of tasks only to the stores most affected by the situation. The managers for each location can assign tasks to individual employees, while frontline workers see prioritized lists of tasks on their personal mobile devices.
Other tools ideal for addressing frontline worker needs include:
- SMS sign-in: Employees can sign into their Azure AD account using one-time SMS codes. Once enrolled in this service, users will need to add a number, which generates a one-time password via SMS. This solution can be enabled for select groups and configured at the user level in the My Staff portal
- @Mention by shift group: You can tag employees by shift to connect to the right people faster. For instance, you can @mention who’s on shift with a dedicated Teams tag, so you know you’re going to get through to someone who’s actively available
- Digitize processes with apps: Power Apps within the Microsoft Teams environment allow you to create amazing low-code applications specifically for your frontline workers. Through Power Apps and Power Automate, you can easily transform a customer service process, or help frontline workers to handle repetitive administrative tasks
- Delegated user management: Frontline managers can use the Staff Portal in Microsoft Teams to access various tools for managing their employees. This makes it easier to deal with things like shift changes or assigning tasks to specific employees
Microsoft now has policy packages in place to help ensure that everyone stays compliant and secure too. IT administrators can easily provision Microsoft Teams instances to new team members remotely from all over the world, complete with dedicated policy packages. These policy packages simplify the way you manage your frontline workers, even as your business continues to scale.
For frontline workers in need of physical tools for productivity, Microsoft also has its own Endpoint Manager, so you can keep track of valuable endpoints within the digital environment. This should help to reduce the risk of lost devices and ensure that team members can stay tuned into the workplace wherever they are.
With so many features already available for frontline workers, and new solutions rolling out all the time, it’s easy to win with frontline workers in Teams.
