With many of us continuing to work from home, and the likelihood of this carrying on into the future, the use of video conferencing software such as Microsoft Teams has become a daily occurrence. Also, for people who are going back to the office and having to follow social distancing regulations, using Teams really helps departments across companies to continue to successfully collaborate and continue working effectively. If you have never used Teams before or have perhaps only used the chat facility, it can feel overwhelming to make the transition to using all the different parts of the software.
Let’s have a look at how Microsoft Teams can help each department individually and improve team collaboration:
Marketing
Marketing teams need to create and collaborate with many groups of people both within the company and outside of it. Teams provides a shared workspace for all conversations, files and third-party services. Teams makes it very easy to manage marketing campaigns, social channels, collaborate on content creation and plan events.
Top Tip: Add Adobe Creative Cloud Directly into Teams: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/WA104381222?tab=Overview
Sales
Teams can help sales teams to deal with enquiries and quickly build quotations and proposals with input from different stakeholders. Collaboration, reporting, and knowledge sharing can happen in one place, helping sales professionals everywhere – in the home office and the field – work together to meet sales objectives.
Top Tip: Use with PowerBI to create a dashboard for data relating to forecast and actual sales https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/
Finance
Finance teams need to collaborate on aggregating and reporting on data while conducting business reviews on a regular basis. Teams provides a central hub in which all files, data, conversations and meetings can happen in a single place, safely and securely.
Top Tip: Use file sharing to share monthly or quarterly reports with management or company owners.
Human Resources
Teams can help the HR team to manage recruitment and employee onboarding activities, including sharing CVs and interview notes, keeping track of candidate information, communicating employment decisions, and sharing new employee documents.
Top Tip: https://www.simpleinout.com/ and https://www.attendancebot.com/ are great addons to Teams that help keep track of your team.
IT
Teams provides the IT team with a single hub to collaborate, plan, execute, and manage all phases of infrastructure deployments and rollouts. It is a very useful tool to help drive transformation and change management across the organisation.
Top Tip: Utilise the chat feature to answer questions your team may have about new systems.
Engineering
Engineers move quickly between ideas, development and deployment of a concept when delivering new features. Teams is integrated with developer tools, enabling continuous discussion across a distributed team to keep projects on track.
Top Tip: Utilise Planner to manage projects and OneNote to organised notes.
Project Management
Project managers often use a myriad of planning, meeting, and communication tools and services. Teams enables collaboration in one central hub with all the tools to organise and share project files, manage stakeholder meetings, and track progress for multiple projects.
Top Tip: Use Microsoft Planner to better manage projects within your team https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/business/task-management-software
If you would like more information about how Teams can be used within your business, download this helpful guide.
It can all seem a bit overwhelming making sure Microsoft Teams is set up correctly, but Ilkley IT know all the tips and tricks to help you to set up Teams so that you can use it effectively. They will take you through each step to ensure that everything is configured correctly so that you use Teams to its full potential.
Contact us today, we would love to have a chat about how we can help!
