Make the most of Teams

With most of the country moving to home-working, businesses are exploring ways to improve connectedness and collaboration in their teams despite people working spread-out, in their homes or offices.

As our team work for clients all over the country, this is an issue we have faced in the past. Working across the country in separate teams can make it difficult to stay informed and up to date without the right tools and habits. For us, the right tool has been Microsoft Teams.

Now, we use Teams not just for conference calls but for workshops, design groups and even job interviews. Our clients are always impressed by what can be achieved through Teams. The combination of high quality video, audio and telephone conferencing, screen sharing, whiteboards, customisable team channels, cloud stored files and inclusion of a Kanban-style task tracker (called “Planner”) gives you a one-stop-shop for chatting, sharing, collaborating, working and tracking your teams progress. Teams even has a function to blur out backgrounds – to avoid any distractions or embarrassing moments.

Here are our Teams top tips:

Say “Hi” face-to-face – so much of how we communicate is through facial expressions and body language. Teams has a function to blur out backgrounds – so there’s no distraction!
Full-screen your video calls if you can – there’s nothing worse than someone on emails, social media, or reading the news whilst on a 1:1 video call.
Create a remote community – be it an anything-but-work chat channel; water cooler channel, or coffee club to take 5 minutes to catch up over coffee remotely

Microsoft have just made full-feature Microsoft Teams free to all for six months – so it’s a great time to try it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/e1-trial-license

This article was written by Tom Wheeler