Microsoft Teams for Business – Here’s How Leaders Can Use Microsoft Teams to Rebuild Businesses?

How do you ensure that everyone feels like being part of the one team? How do you all feel connected to the larger purpose your business supports? And most importantly, how do you operate fast, as if everyone were sitting in the same space? Your answer to all these questions is Microsoft Teams for Business.

COVID-19 crisis and nationwide lock-down has made CEOs and CXOs comfortable with using collaboration tools for virtual meetings, conferences, and calls. Microsoft Teams  for business is more than just meeting or calling tool, it allows actual collaborations and integrating business processes within the solution.

It is about sharing crucial knowledge quickly to keep the work moving forward while also keeping everyone up to speed. Microsoft Teams serves as the common platform where you, your teams, customers, vendors, etc. can call, meet, chat, and collaborate all in one place—so that teams always have the critical context they need to work together, even while working apart.

Here are some of the challenges faced by leadership in an organization: –

CEO & COO

I need more visibility into performance across all our locations to reduce the impact of quality issues.

CMO

Differentiation is my top priority, but I don’t have the adequate knowledge or tools to find out about what will make us stand out.

CFO

I have to manage company wide and/or departmental budgets along with managing quarterly and annual closings.

Chief Innovation Officer

I’m worried if we don’t increase the pace of innovation and new product introduction, we won’t be able to compete.

VP of supply chain

I’m under pressure to optimize an increasingly complex supply chain without new resources.

CTO

Entire IT runs under my organization and any failure may result in potential loss of business.

Here’s how CEOs can benefit from Microsoft Teams for Business

Together we are stronger

Leaders can leverage Microsoft Teams to achieve greater transparency and accelerate communication, leading to better/democratic decision making and tighter alignment. Use the tool to leverage employees to reach goals and grow business and tap into the collective wisdom of your workforce.

Foster the spirit of innovation

To come up with the best ideas, turn to an efficient source of innovation: your own employees. Use Teams to connect employees, ideas, and information without regard to time zones, geographies, or hierarchies.

Sharing best practices around production & process quality improvements

Many new ideas generated in one production area remains unknown to others. Leverage TEAMS to make is possible to convert this scattered know-how into global, established practices.

Here’s how COOs can benefit from Microsoft Teams for Business

Mergers and acquisitions handled right

Effectively manage integration of acquired companies and streamline your organization’s change management strategy by merging corporate cultures on Teams.

Identifying expertise and harness talent within the organization

Teams can help an organization solve remote business challenges by identifying hidden expertise across departments & silos. Also, harness the collective knowledge of employees to build an accessible knowledge base.

Enable health & safety improvement programs

Teams can help drive a behavior change initiative. When people start connecting across silos, it develops a culture of activism and care for each other and the number of injuries would go down.

Here’s how CFOs can benefit from Microsoft Teams for Business

Easily manage company wide or departmental budgets

Creating organization wide budgets and/or departmental budgets requires multiple people to collaboration and exchange quick information. Teams can help finance teams easily prepare org budgets.

Manage monthly, quarterly, or annual closings

Performing monthly, quarterly and/or annual closings requires following multiple processes and steps including cross-teams collaboration. TEAMS can help as an underlying collaboration platform facilitating such closings.

Got questions around Microsoft Teams? Here’s the free eBook for you to explore the capabilities of Microsoft Teams. In this eBook we have shared in detail:

• What Microsoft Teams is and how is it best for your remote workforce?
• Solving real remote work problems with Microsoft Teams
• How CEOs and other business leaders can benefit from Microsoft Teams?
• How to conduct modern workplace meetings?
• Integrating AI and chatbots
• How Embee can get you help started with Microsoft Teams?

Download Microsoft Teams Playbook Now

Here’s how VP of supply chain can benefit from Microsoft Teams for Business

Collaborate with supply chain partners

1. Use Teams can collaborate more efficiently with partners in the supply chain to reduce plant downtime & travel costs and improve on-time shipments to customers.
2. All supplier representatives can be given guest access to the ‘Operations Team’ channel for securely sharing and discussing any supply chain issues.
3. Using ‘Meet Now’ feature in Teams, the plant manager can initiate a video chat with the supplier representatives. They can also connect with a design engineer in the same video conference.

Getting more insights into supply chain efficiency

1. Teams can help your supply chain / operations organization get real-time insights into channel efficiencies, inventory levels, inventory turnover, demand forecast, etc.
2. The Teams channel integrates third party tools/ ISV solutions to receive notifications as well as has a pinned Power BI dashboard to view and compare critical operational supply chain KPIs.
3. Teams can ensure enhanced visibility of operational insights ahead of time to increase predictability and thus helps the supply chain team plan well ahead of time. It is also a secured and reliable communication channel to involve external stakeholders in such decision making.

Here’s how CMO can benefit from Microsoft Teams for Business

1. Teams can help streamline event management (both internal and external events) across the organization by ensuring planning and execution more effectively.
2. They can also leverage ‘Planner’ to organize various tasks of the event in an efficient manner through which the team can track the event planning information from their phone/tablet.
3. Post the event, marketing team can solicit feedback from customers through one of the platforms: Polly, Forms and/or SurveyMonkey.

Enhanced visibility into campaign performance

Teams can help gauge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign or external/internal event by accessing various metrics over an interactive dashboard that fetches data from multiple databases.

Here’s how CIO can benefit from Microsoft Teams for Business

Leverage feedback from customers in product design

1. Teams platform can help an organization gather and incorporate real-time feedback from customers into their product design and feature improvements.
2. The Product Manager can open ‘Customer Support Team’ channel within the ‘Product Team’ to collect accurate, timely input from the customer support teams, as Customer Support representatives contribute real-time insights with the Teams mobile app.
3. They can also gather news about competitor’s activities by adding and opening the RSS connector (connector to competitor’s website) that’s added to the ‘Customer Feedback’ channel.
4. The team can gain insight into trends and preferences of customers directly. So, they can open Sentiment Analysis dashboard that was pinned to a tab in ‘Customer Feedback’ channel. Based on the feedback, they capture ideas for design improvements.
5. Leverage Teams to engage all facets of the business in idea development phase to widen the ideation pipeline and accelerate time to market.

Here’s how CTO can benefit from Microsoft Teams for Business

Building a virtual IT Help Desk

1. Teams can help create an IT Helpdesk for employees to deliver issues, requests, and questions to the IT department in real-time as well as leverage self-help and access to peer expertise.
2. Create a public IT Helpdesk team channel and invite all organization employees (or department employees if it’s a dedicated channel).
3. The channel can be used to manage issues, requests, and questions from employees in real-time. IT team experts will be the admins and will moderate all the conversations while answering the posted queries.
4. A dedicated channel ‘Self-Help’ (accessible and searchable for all enterprise employees) can also create to host the IT Knowledge Base comprising of articles, FAQs, self-help tools, enterprise app store and DIY diagnoses. This can convert the IT HelpDesk from a high-touch function to a more automated, self-service system.
5. The IT Helpdesk channel may also be used to deliver broadcast messages to employees with status updates when experiencing downtime or technical difficulties.

Remote working will continue to have lasting value even beyond the COVID-19 outbreak. We, at Embee as a Microsoft Gold partner, are committed to enabling your business with the tools, technologies, and strategic level partnership that will help you, your teams, and individuals stay productive and connected even when they need to work apart.

Over the last three years, thousands of organizations, small and large—including 93 of the Fortune 100—have discovered how Teams can be their hub for teamwork, helping them to stay connected and engaged. You can contact us at connect@embee.co.in or just drop a comment below. Our Microsoft experts will connect with you asap.