Is your organization expanding, or does it simply need a better communication tool? Here are seven benefits of Microsoft Teams.
Are you trying to figure out the best way to run your business’s communications? We share many benefits of Microsoft Teams in this blog.
As more companies expand and their teams become more distributed — whether in an office environment or not — many leaders are working to both prepare technologically and ensure governance is in place for an effective work environment.
With Microsoft Teams, a communication and collaboration platform, your organization can keep running securely whether everyone is in the same office or located around the world.
Teams provides team members with the following functionalities:
- Voice or video calls and meetings among your organization and external contacts,
- Chat messaging between groups of people within your organization, and
- Secure document collaboration.
Before you get started, learn the benefits of using Teams, how it’s improved our work experience, and how quickly you can deploy the tool so your employees can work together no matter where they are.
Benefits of Microsoft Teams for Business
Microsoft Teams offers many benefits for businesses, including the ability to keep communication and collaboration as effective as traditional methods while also meeting your security and compliance needs.
Here are some of the advantages Teams provides. You can:
1. Keep people connected with video.
As employees and even customers work in different offices and as fewer organizations travel to meet in person, many will miss out on the face-to-face interaction that occurs when everyone is in one location. Providing high-quality video and audio capabilities can go a long way in helping reduce the impact. Whether it’s a one-on-one video call with a customer or a video meeting with several people in your workplace, Teams can support it.
2. Keep employees engaged with Chat.
Offering virtual capabilities like Teams’ chat messaging will help improve morale and keep your team engaged with work and those around them. To stay connected, employees tend to have informal, lighthearted conversations with their colleagues on everything from families and pets to challenges or achievements. Teams gives your employees the ability to keep up with the latest on their colleagues.
3. Support secure document collaboration.
Using Teams’ secure coauthoring capabilities takes the frustration out of sharing files through email or an unsecured network. Other advantages include the ability to quickly find documents within Teams, easily revert to previous versions, and have documented conversations to understand context. Now, these practices are all securely self-contained and discoverable within Teams.
4. Centralize communication.
Since team members might work across time zones or have different working hours, providing a “one-stop shop” for communication with Microsoft Teams is appealing. Employees will have less of a need to check multiple communications (for example, personal text messages on a phone, unapproved or insecure third-party texting applications, phone messages, work email, personal email, and more) since these are all self-contained within Microsoft Teams.
5. Support collaboration through Teams and Channels.
Your need to quickly form a committee or formal team to collaborate on a special topic won’t go away. If anything, that need may grow as your team grows across geographies, given the increased likelihood of communication needs — like collaborating on unique employee health or personal challenges, providing additional human resources guidance, and easily tracking needs across locations. It also helps that you can secure sensitive information and limit access to only those authorized.
6. Record meetings and events.
Your organization can support extracurricular activities. For example, you can host and record special events such as sponsoring health seminars, book clubs, or educational opportunities in Microsoft Teams for absent team members, those in different offices, and more. The tool allows you to combine virtual meetings and in-person gatherings — and record them using Stream so anyone can access them at any time.
7. Improve speed and efficiency with Microsoft Copilot integration.
With the new Microsoft 365 Copilot integration, Microsoft Teams has become an even better tool for productivity. It can take notes and create next steps for meetings, help team members draft messages, search through and distill information from previous conversations, can summarize conversations in group chats that employees may have missed while out of the office and more. By providing your teams with a way to quickly access information and next steps, they’ll be able to focus on the task at hand rather than sifting through data to find the information they need.
Several indirect advantages of using Microsoft Teams for business also exist. According to a study by Forrester, there was a 291 percent ROI and net benefit value of over $35m dollars using Microsoft Teams for business. In one example, Forrester found that employee efficiency — without Copilot — saved companies $19.6m in three years.
How Microsoft Teams Improved Our Organization’s Experience
We are quick to tout the benefits of Microsoft Teams because Centric Consulting has experienced it firsthand since migrating to Microsoft 365 several years ago. We conduct over 95 percent of our meetings and calls remotely, both within our company as well as with our clients.
We can quantify the magnitude of our collaboration across hundreds of groups of people through statistics gathered on Teams usage at our company. In just one 30-day stint, we participated in over 320,000 private chat messages, 11,000 group chat messages, 6,000 calls, and 6,000 audio and video meetings.
During an internal survey conducted of our employees, 75 percent stated that Teams improved their collaboration, 87 percent said they use Teams almost daily, and 63 percent are much more productive.
Anecdotally, we received frequent positive feedback from our employees that it has significantly reduced the time to collaborate on and finalize statements of work for our clients, improved and sped up the creation of client deliverables, and has significantly improved collaboration on projects with our external clients.
These statistics are a direct result of our company being almost completely remote — whether because our teams work from home, have an office, or work at a client site — having over 1400 employees located across the United States and in India. We’ve found using Microsoft Teams for business to be a game-changer, helping our employees better connect with each other and the hundreds of clients we provide services to across the nation.
Microsoft Teams: Tips for Quick Deployment
It’s important to highlight that we have worked in a remote environment since our inception 20 years ago and have used Teams for several years.
Needless to say, we didn’t gain these efficiencies on day one. It has been a journey, and we continue to increase Teams adoption over time as we discover more ways to leverage its capabilities. We could say the same about any new large-scale IT application.
The good news is that it’s possible to quickly deploy a “bare-bones” implementation that provides basic chat and meeting capabilities. Getting a Microsoft 365 tenant in place, accounts created and people licensed for Teams could take less than a week.
One Microsoft Teams tip we have is that providing more advanced capabilities to support a larger-scale use of its collaboration capabilities, along with some basic training, adoption, change management, and governance, could take between two to four weeks.
How quickly your company can use the capabilities of Microsoft Teams will depend on how you plan to use it, how much time and money you want to invest in the plan, and how committed you are to promoting its use across your workforce.
Microsoft Teams is a valuable tool that can only help solidify your position in a competitive environment. Showcasing your company as a modernized workforce could lead directly to attracting and retaining employees drawn to companies using the most modern tools.
Think you’ve exhausted Microsoft Teams? Get ready for its second wind! Our webinar will walk you through everything you need to know.
