Unlocking Efficiency: Maximising Productivity with Microsoft 365

We all know and love the fantastic apps we use every working day including Word, Excel and Outlook; however Microsoft 365 has a lot more to offer. Collaborative apps like Teams, task management apps like To Do and form building apps like Forms to help you streamline workflow and boost productivity across the business, no matter where the workforce.

By leveraging some of these underutilised apps offered as part of your Microsoft 365 package, businesses can streamline workflows, enhance team collaboration, drive productivity and propel growth. There are many to choose from including apps that create interactive reports, video sharing, planners and project management, however today we’re going to cover just three.

So how can 3 apps empower your businesses to drive efficiency and supercharge productivity across every aspect of your operations? By focusing on collaboration, task management and process management.

Teams: Driving Collaboration and Engagement

Microsoft Teams has truly revolutionised teamwork efficiency by providing a unified platform for chat, video conferencing, file sharing, and project management. How can your employees harness Teams to supercharge team collaboration?

Teams is a brilliant tool that allows real-time, centralised collaboration, enhanced document sharing and project organising from one place, no matter where they are.

Virtual Collaboration: Teams facilitates virtual collaboration through chat, video calls, and screen sharing, enabling teams to connect and collaborate in real time. It offers features like File Storage, Whiteboards and Note Taking. This is particularly valuable for remote or distributed teams.

Document Sharing: Teams integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft 365 apps, allowing for easy sharing and collaboration on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets to help streamline workflows. Co-authoring features ensure that everyone stays on the same page.

Analytics and Reporting: See how your colleagues are using Teams, how are they engaging with the app and what improvements could be made. Teams offers integrated insights that will help in understanding and improving team collaboration patterns to drive productivity.

To Do: Elevating and prioritising task management

Microsoft To Do is a powerful and user-friendly task list that brings your calendar, emails and tasks together, so you don’t miss a thing. But how could using To Do help your team operate more efficiently?

It can help your team to efficiently manage activities, goals and tasks across their emails, projects, events and calendars by creating a smart daily planner giving them visibility on what’s upcoming and enable them to get those tasks done. It can even break down big tasks, like projects or events, in to manageable bitesize tasks for continuous progression.

Task from Emails: You can easily create tasks from emails. Simply drop and drag the email you want to create a task out of onto the To Do section, located under the My Day button in the ribbon. Add due dates, set reminders and even allocate tasks to colleagues.

Track in Teams: You can also keep track of tasks in Teams by simply adding To Do in the Teams app. You can share tasks more easily and assign them to more than one member of the team. This can build team collaboration and when one member of the team completes the task, it is completed for all members. Subtasks, details notes and attachments can also be added to a task, along with due dates and reminders.

Prioritising features: With features such as starring a task to an Important list to highlight its urgency, adding tasks to you Planned list to easily see upcoming deadlines and finding tasks using Hashtags where you have many tasks in one project, your day just got a whole lot easier.

Forms: Unleash Efficiency

Microsoft Forms is an easy-to-use tool to create surveys, quizzes, polls and, of course, forms. However, this tool is an incredibly versatile and powerful app to have in your arsenal to help streamline workflows. So how can Forms create efficiency?

For essential process mapping, gathering insights and controlling quality and compliance, Forms can help across every facet of your business from internal facing processes such as HR, Finance and Administration through to customer facing, for feedback, onboarding and customer experience.

Process mapping: Map your processes and procedures so expectations are set as to process requirements. Whether it is onboarding new colleagues or customers, project planning and execution through to event planning and implementation

Data gathering: Create surveys to understand more about a specific area of your business. Find the gaps in your training, understand the satisfaction of your customers, collect feedback to mitigate risks to the business. Whatever data you need, you can create a survey to gain insights.

Control and Compliance: You can use forms to for quality control through a quality procedure. You  can also conduct assessments and surveys to offer feedback for improvement and create forms for reporting any quality issues or non-conformities.

By mobilising these under utilised Microsoft 365 tools and apps, businesses can unlock unprecedented levels of productivity and efficiency across the organisation, whilst gaining valuable insights and ensuring that procedures and processes are being followed. Whether it's collaborating in Teams, getting tasks done with To Do or even managing processes with Forms, Microsoft 365 provides the tools and capabilities needed to outpace your competitors and thrive.

ITDS Managed Services focus on helping businesses drive productivity and make efficiencies to streamline workflows and add value to get the most out of your technology.

We can help develop a flexible strategic roadmap that aligns technology initiatives with business goals, optimises resource allocation, and ensures a clear path for innovation and growth. To find out how, have a look at our website.

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