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Feature Flashlight – Microsoft Teams features to improve remote working

The world is in the midst of the worst health epidemic in a generation and businesses have been forced to adapt the way they work in order to continue trading. This adaptation has often come in the form of a partial remote working team.

Microsoft has made this transition possible with the introduction of tools which have been designed and adapted with the sole purpose of improving the ease and quality of remote working.

Microsoft Teams (as mentioned in previous blogs) has many features designed around making your workday run smoother, more collaboratively, with better levels of communication and advanced levels of productivity.

We will now take an in-depth look at some individual features of Teams that will give you peace of mind about the effectiveness of your remote working team.

 

Bookmarking content

Teams uses persistent chat when having conversations or online discussion, constantly saving messages in succession over an indefinite period of time. It is a concern of many that they will not be able to find the items they are looking for when potentially deep in the system history – Teams allows you to ‘flag’ (save) posts, conversations, or chats that you think will be of use at a later date.

 

How to bookmark

  1. Hover over the item you wish to save and select the flag.
  2. Once having clicked the flag, navigate to your profile icon and choose ‘saved’ to bring up your saved items.

 

The remote working advantage – Bookmarking content

Bookmarking content is beneficial when remote working as it can facilitate better levels of the organisation. It also minimises the unnecessary back and forth between you and employees or them with each other, which can prove time-consuming when people are working in different locations and on different tasks.

 

Email forwarding

Teams offers many unique ways of communicating – so many, in fact, it can make you wonder how we ever survived with just emailing alone. Since Microsoft Outlook and Teams integrate so well together, you can create or forward emails that will post in the Teams environment for your entire team to view.

 

The remote working advantage – Email forwarding

Email forwarding is particularly good for a remote work setting as it consolidates everything into one place, and it allows you to know who has seen what and when too. This gives you ultimate power and an overview to monitor staff at all times. On a less megalomaniac note, it also gives you the platform to offer your expertise when needed.

 

Recording transcripts

If you are familiar with Teams you will have probably already used its Meetings feature and perhaps recorded your meeting at the same time. However, not many know that Teams offers yet more features within Meetings that make it even better – one of which is the ability to transcribe the meeting automatically.

 

How to Record transcripts

Once having finished recording your meeting open up the recording.

  1. Go to the ‘edit’ option.
  2. Under ‘video language’ update it to English (or Spanish).
  3. Select ‘auto-generate a caption file’.
  4. Choose ‘apply’.

Once having followed these steps, next time you open the video you can see the transcript created from the dialogue of the meeting. If the transcript doesn’t appear automatically select ‘settings’ followed by ‘show transcript’.

 

The remote working advantage – Email forwarding

Recording transcripts has advantages to remote working. From an employee perspective, it can be beneficial if a certain part of the meeting were directed at a particular sector of your business, they can easily look back and read any details that may have been missed, or it could be used to get a member of staff that wasn’t present up to speed on the subject matter of the meeting. For management, it can be a quick and easy way of checking the itinerary was met and projected correctly.

Microsoft Teams has many tools in its arsenal capable of revolutionising the way you work both on-premise and when working remotely. Teams has the power to limit the change to work functions when making that crucial modern transition to an at least partial remote working infrastructure.

 

Your Microsoft 365 gurus

At Grapevine we have the skills to help you. Our team of dedicated engineers can meet any technical challenge you may come across. We take the time to learn about you and your business, discover what you envision for the company, and offer our expertise to ensure you are more than equipped to take the correct tech into the future and help you to achieve your business goals. Contact our team and let us start our journey together today.

 

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