More businesses are using remote work than ever before. While it opens up a lot of opportunities for both managers and employees, remote work does come with its challenges.
First and foremost, you have to rely on technology to get things done. If you choose the wrong solutions or fail to use the tools to their full potential, it can cost you in productivity. Microsoft happens to offer two solutions that are showing up big for remote work: Teams and SharePoint.
While many businesses have already adopted these tools, some organisations are not realising the full benefit. The following are a few tips to help you maximize the use of SharePoint and Teams.
Manage Your Status
There is no doubt that Teams is a great collaboration hub. That said, there may be times when you don’t want every notification coming through. Whether you are working on a project that requires 100% focus or giving a presentation, you might want to keep those notifications from popping up on your screen for a time.
This is where changing your status can come in handy. Just click on your profile picture in the top right and then click on “Available” from the menu. From there, you can then set your status to “Do not disturb”. This will put notifications on hold and then you can check your messages whenever you are ready. You can even set a custom status message to let people know why you are unreachable for a time.
Set Up Teams Meetings in Outlook
Program switching can be a real productivity killer. To reduce the amount of time that gets eaten up by program switching, you should look for every opportunity to integrate programs to make them work together.
One way you could do this is by using the “Teams Meeting” button from Outlook. This will automatically create a link for the meeting in the invitation. This way, people don’t need to leave Outlook to join. They can just right click on the event in their calendar and select “Join in Teams”.
Use Virtual Backgrounds in Teams
Video calls and conferences always come with the potential for things being in the background that you would rather have left unseen by others. Maybe your dog wanders into the room or maybe your office is a mess, whatever it may be, it is better to prevent these issues by using a virtual background.
With Microsoft Teams, it is easy to set a virtual background. Just click on the three dots in the settings bar and then select “Show background effects” from the menu. From there, you can choose different backgrounds to use during the Teams meeting. You can also add custom backgrounds by uploading an image file from your computer.
Easy Collaboration with SharePoint and Teams
Whether you are collaborating in Word, PowerPoint or Excel, you want the process to be as smooth as possible. You want everyone to know what is going on with the project and you don’t want any team members to miss a beat. Instead of emailing new versions of a document back and forth and sending comments, share the document in Teams and handle the collaboration there. You can make comments and edits, mention team members to make sure they get notifications and you can have a running chat as you work on the project together. It offers a more streamlined way to work on documents together.
Set Up Document Alerts
Ever miss an important change that was made to a document? Maybe you were away from a project for a little and come back only to find that team members have gotten way out in front of where you expected them to be. You can prevent these issues by setting up alerts in SharePoint. This will ensure that you get a notification any time the document changes.
Just go to the list or library and select the file or folder you wish to have notifications for. From there you can click on the ellipses and select “Alert me” from the available options. Once you have it set up, you will get notifications whenever a change is made.
View Tasks From Multiple Boards
It isn’t always easy to keep all of your tasks straight when you are working in multiple Planner boards. This can be simplified by selecting the Planner icon from Teams. From there, you will be able to see all of the tasks you have from all of the different teams.
Set Up Contacts
The Calls feature in Teams can be great for internal communications or it can replace your business phones entirely with a system that works over the cloud. If you want to streamline communications with this feature, you should set up a contacts list with the people you call the most. Instead of having to call them manually, you can just select the person from the list to create a speed dial effect.
SharePoint and Teams offer some of the best features for making remote work more manageable. With the tips in this article, you can boost productivity and be more efficient when using these tools.