Blog: Workforce Productivity

Teamwork as a Service: Communicating with Remote Teams in the COVID-19 Era

March 27, 2020 - by Synoptek

Driving Workforce Collaboration in the COVID-19 Era

As the global COVID-19 pandemic forces the global workforce to work from home, the need for effective team communication across different locations, time zones, and languages has become a pressing issue. Ensuring employee productivity, enabling teamwork across the geographically dispersed workforce and enabling innovation requires organizations to adopt modern collaboration tools. Microsoft Teams, with features across chat, video and file collaboration, has always enabled the workforce to make faster, more informed decisions. Learn how Microsoft Teams is catering to millions of employees working from their respective homes and how Synoptek can help meet remote team communication needs in the COVID-19 era.

New Features from Microsoft Teams

Millions of people across the world have been impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak, affecting their family and social life as well as how they work. In these trying times, Microsoft Teams is enabling organizations from all sectors to improve communication and collaboration: from Universities moving courses online to Teams to hospitals videoconferencing with vulnerable patients. According to a report by Forrester, Microsoft Teams allows employees to save 4 hours every week through improved collaboration while improving time-to-decision by 17%. Here’s a list of new capabilities that aim to overcome the challenges people might face while working at home while reeling with COVID-19:

  • Real-time noise suppression that minimize background noise: loud keyboard clicks, a crying baby, a news update, or a running vacuum.
  • AR-enabled raise-your-hand feature that enable remote participants to send visual signals when they have to say something during a meeting.
  • Bookings app that makes it easy to schedule, manage, and conduct B2C virtual appointments for job interviews, healthcare patient visits or client meetings.
  • Pop-out chat feature that allows employees to move chats to a separate window, streamline workflow and switch between ongoing conversations.
  • Support for offline and low-bandwidth situations to allow employees to read and respond to chat messages – even without an internet connection.

The Need for TWaaS

As more and more employees are forced to stay at home, the number of teams working remotely has surged. In such times, Teamwork as a Service or TWaaS aims can help organizations fully capitalize on the ROI of a properly managed Microsoft Teams instance and effectively overcome challenges that come with remote working. From disjointed collaboration and file sharing, to lack of a centralized information hub, inconsistency in tools being used to unsecured chat applications – TwaaS can enable efficient collaboration, timely document management, and seamless user access and control while greatly minimizing time-to-decision.

Microsoft Team Features

Given the sudden transformation in the workforce model, Synoptek’s TWaaS offering can streamline the management of O365/Teams environment and its adoption. Provided as a standalone or complimentary service to Synoptek’s End User Management services, the offering can enable organizations to deliver high-quality business results by empowering the employees to effectively collaborate with their teammates. Top features include:

  • Discovery, evaluation and assessment
  • User access control and provisioning
  • Document management
  • Call, voice, and video monitoring and quality of case resolution
  • Tailored governance and policy management
  • End user adoption reporting

How Synoptek Optimizes Collaboration

Being a Microsoft-certified Gold Partner, Synoptek has long-standing experience and expertise in implementing, managing, and supporting Microsoft Teams. Over the years, we’ve undertaken several IT Consulting projects to enable real-time collaboration for improved business outcomes.

For instance, for a client that meets every year to past year’s performance and plan business strategies for the upcoming year, Synoptek implemented Microsoft Teams extensively as a content repository as well as a communication channel. The implementation enabled every participant to collaborate over Teams and create, share, review, and update all event-related collateral.

For another client who experienced a major fault in their network that disabled most of its employees from accessing their systems, Synoptek used Microsoft Teams as a powerful tool for large-scale communication within and outside the organization. The implementation paved the way for accelerated collaboration with tailored governance and access policies that resulted in immediate turnover

Transform Remote Working Forever

As the percentage of remote working sees a surge in COVID-19 times, organizations across the world are realizing the significance of real-time collaboration. With Microsoft Teams passing the 44 million daily active users mark in these times, making it a hub for teamwork is one of the best ways to meet, chat, call, and collaborate using a single platform. Synoptek’s TWaaS offering aims to improve and expand this collaboration experience for workers across the world, allowing them to be as productive and connected as possible – even long after the world springs back to normalcy.

Interested in remote communication through Microsoft Teams? Contact a Synoptek expert today.

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