Boosting Team Collaboration with Microsoft 365: Best Practices

One of the critical components of any workplace is collaboration. Being able to work together to deliver exception customer experiences is one of the driving factors of progression for businesses worldwide, and ensuring that your workforce has the tools to do so is vital.

Being a staple of offices worldwide, Microsoft 365 is filled with tools to help your organisation’s collaborative capabilities thrive. Using collaboration-focused tools such as Microsoft Teams and the many collaborative workspace tools within the Microsoft 365 application suite will help your organisation unlock its full potential.

In this article, we’re going to go over the best practices for utilising Microsoft Teams for collaboration, as well as the many features that are available within Microsoft 365 to help your organisation thrive.

Microsoft Teams Collaboration Best Practices

Create Teams for Departments and Groups

When working within a whole organisation, it’s important to ensure that your communication is focused and organised within departments and groups.  There’s no point in having two different departments far apart within your organisation within the same communication channels — this will just get messy and will prevent focused work.

Microsoft Teams lets you create specific teams for separate departments and work groups. This will allow you to keep teams separate and keep your communication channels organised, leading to more productivity.

Create Channels for Projects and Ideas

Working on a project also requires organisation. Even at the conceptual level, making sure that your work on specific projects is accessible in an organised manner will be the difference between productive work and a mess.

Creating separate channels for different projects and ideas will ensure that you can stay organised and keep your employees’ work and ideas accessible, to ensure that nothing is lost and that you can keep working productively in an organised manner.

Share and Present

To move forward with ideas and projects, presenting and pitching is the best way to ensure that everyone is informed about what’s happening within their team. With more teams moving to a hybrid/remote working environment, Microsoft Teams is the epicentre of meetings within most organisations worldwide.

To be able to help you present and share as you would in a physical presentation, Microsoft Teams can let you present and share PowerPoint and even your screen during calls and meetings, meaning that you can easily share and present your work.

Microsoft Whiteboard

What was once the process of brainstorming on a physical whiteboard has now become obsolete with the online remote workplace. Microsoft Whiteboard essentially is the same thing, but fully online.

With Microsoft Whiteboard, you can canvas and ideate collaboratively online, allowing your team to fully express themselves wherever they are. This will drive forward collaboration and help your organisation prosper while enabling your workplace to fully take advantage of the benefits of remote working.

Inclusive Meetings with Live Captions

In any workplace, different people will have different needs regarding accessibility. Meetings are a huge barrier for some people, as they come with a lot of accessibility difficulties that need working around.

Microsoft Teams helps with creating more inclusive meetings by using live captions to instantly share what’s being said within a meeting, meaning that it’s easier for everyone to understand the meeting and keep track of everything happening.

Microsoft 365 Applications

Real-time Co-authoring

Working together in real-time is a collaboration dream. Microsoft 365’s co-authoring capabilities fully enable collaboration like nothing else — allowing multiple people to work on a single document at the same time.

This is useable within all Microsoft 365 applications — meaning that you can work together in Word, Excel, and other applications within the Microsoft ecosystem. 

Sharing via OneDrive

OneDrive allows you to utilise the cloud to store your documents, making them fully accessible and sharable no matter where you are. This fully drives forward collaboration and efficient working capabilities in the remote future.

Sharing within OneDrive is a matter of a few clicks, and can be done easily from anywhere.

Save Files to OneDrive & SharePoint

SharePoint is the best way to ensure that your organisation’s files and important information are accessible from anywhere. Organisations worldwide use SharePoint to manage and organise files and create intranets to boost collaboration. 

Using SharePoint and OneDrive, you can save files from Word, Excel, and other native Microsoft applications and ensure that anyone who needs to access them and work on them can do so without having to physically send them over.

Share Calendars on Outlook

Microsoft Outlook is a cornerstone of the modern office environment — one of the major reasons being its calendar capabilities.

You can share calendars within Outlook, allowing others to be able to see when you’re free and when you’re not. This will let anyone within your organisation know when they can book meetings or sessions with you, and even when you can meet up for a lunch break.

Improve the Employee Experience with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that lets you empower your organisation’s employees by boosting employee engagement and productivity and allowing them to nurture their skills.

Fully optimised for work-from-home, Microsoft Viva will let your employees take advantage of an employee portal that works with Microsoft Teams and other Microsoft platforms. This will let your employees truly take advantage of the benefits of a remote workplace.

Want to find out more?

Microsoft 365 has many tools and features that are made to boost productivity and collaboration. Using the tools that are available within the Microsoft 365 platform to let your employees work together constructively and productively will help your workplace push forward to be more innovative and on the cutting edge of the business world.

If you’re looking to get started with Microsoft 365 or even simply want to create more opportunities for collaboration within your organisation, reach out to us today. Our experts will be able to help you through the whole process and figure out what’s best for your business.

Get in touch with us now and see how we can help.