Those of us who work in small and mid-sized organizations know that productivity is crucial to hitting our goals. Microsoft Teams has a slew of features to help you and your team be more productive, no matter what business you’re in. Here are a few of my favorites.
1) Share And Co-Edit Files
Effective communication and collaboration are vital to your organization. According to a 2023 study from Deloitte, “When workers collaborate, 73% do better work, 60% are more innovative, 56% feel more satisfied, and 15% work faster.”
Microsoft Teams understands this and has continued to develop its ability to share and co-edit files. With 10 GB of cloud storage per user, it gives you the ability to collaborate no matter where you are. Access and share files in Microsoft Teams by selecting “Files” from the left hand menu. You can also quickly share files by using the paperclip icon to attach them to a chat.
2) Chat With Your Team
One of the top features of Microsoft Teams is the unlimited chat, similar to Slack. This lets your team quickly have important conversations. You can easily add people to existing conversations.
Last fall, Microsoft Teams updated its system to allow users to see the entirety of previously sent message threads. Thus, fixing a bug many users complained about in rival platforms. Also new this year, Microsoft Teams allows you to delete chats on your end while leaving them open on the other end.
3) Search and Filter Messages
A downside of Chat is that it can be overwhelming when you have a sea of messages and you’re looking for something specific. To filter alerts and messages sent to you, simply hit “Filter” in the Chat or Activity feed. Or find exactly what you need using the search function. You can also use the search box to quickly start a chat by typing “@” in the search bar and entering a name.
4) Maintain your Focus with Do Not Disturb
This is one of my favorite features when I need to eliminate distractions. Just click on your picture icon in the top right and change your status to “Do not disturb”. You can set a duration so that Do not disturb automatically switches off when time is up.
If you still want receive notifications for chats, calls, and @mentions from designated individuals while Do not disturb is active, select “Manage priority access” within your Privacy settings.
5) Request Approvals
Approvals in Microsoft Teams is a way to streamline all of your requests and processes with your team or partners. You can create new approvals, view the ones sent your way, and see all of your previous approvals in one place. Create templates from the Approvals hub and define workflow settings to specify who needs to approve the request, and in what order.
6) Host Meetings
You probably already know that hosting meetings is another primary capability of Microsoft Teams, think Zoom. As an added bonus you can eliminate the drudgery of taking meeting notes by turning on transcription and generating a transcript to review later.
7) Schedule Virtual Appointments
You may not be aware that Teams integrates with Microsoft Bookings to offer an easy way for your customers to schedule virtual appointments, similar to Calendly. Some examples might be financial consultations, healthcare visits, or office hours. Attendees can join a booking with or without a Microsoft Teams account.
8) Translate Meetings with Live Captions
This is a great tip if you work with international customers or vendors. Teams can detect what is said in a meeting and show real-time captions in a language you select. No need for Google translate. The system will save your settings for every meeting, or you can simply toggle it off when you no longer need it.
9) Conduct Multi-Question Polls
Another new feature in 2023 is the ability to conduct multi-question polls within a meeting. This gives you more flexibility to ask the questions you need and gives you an easy place to collect the response data. Add polls via the Apps button to create choice polls, quizzes and word cloud polls before or during your meeting.
10) Multitask with Picture-In-Picture
Not every meeting needs your full attention. Teams has picture-in-picture functionality that allows you to play a meeting while you are doing other things – think NFL Sunday ticket multi-channel. That means you don’t have to put down other work while you’re on less important calls and can multitask. Picture-in-picture comes with adjustable windows that let you choose how much of the screen size you want to divide between your Teams meeting and other apps.
Whether you’re looking for a solution to messaging, collaborative working, video calls, document sharing or accessibility features within your organization, Microsoft Teams can help your organization accomplish exactly what you need. Most businesses already have Microsoft Teams. This means you can save money by eliminating redundant services. Paying for dozens (or hundreds) of employee licenses for Slack, Zoom, Monday, or Basecamp may be a thing of the past. Many companies we look at are needlessly spending thousands or more on these other services and that money goes straight to the bottom line.
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