The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the world into suspension. It has obliged us to stay at home and mostly disconnected us from the outer world. For corporates, it has slowed down the pace at which employees, all over the world, worked every day to achieve their targets and accomplish their goals. Though this has happened due to a very disastrous reason, by adopting the right tools and technologies, remote working can be a great way to work. These tools support employees to work efficiently when they work from home. Office 365 offers businesses multiple ways to manage employees who work from home or from remote offices. When properly implemented, it helps establish a strong sense of teamwork and offers everyone the flexibility that comes when you remove the need to commute to an office building. 

How does office 365 help to stay productive when working remotely? 

At a basic level, to bring your colleagues together and guide their activities, you need to share documents (information), exchange ideas (communication) and manage tasks (production). To do this, make use of SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams and ToDo. Set up the applications on mobile devices as well so that everyone can stay connected to the team anywhere, anytime.  

Stay connected on Teams when work remotely 

 Microsoft Teams is a great Office 365 suite app that can be your main tool when you work remotely by helping your team to communicate effortlessly, no matter where in the world they are.  

• Your team can meet from anywhere, via voice or video, while it also helps them to screenshare easily. 
•  Teams allows your team to access, share, and collaborate on Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files in real time. 
• It’s a reservoir where you can keep all important files and documents which can be accessed by a team working in coordination.   

• Teams also has a calendar functionality, so you can book a meeting there and you can chat with individuals, create group chats as well as extend it with different applications. All in all, MS Teams is a really powerful solution for team communication. 

The Solution for Remote Team Collaboration: SharePoint Online 

SharePoint is one of the most important Office 365 apps in your stack if you manage remote teams. 

SharePoint serves as a central hub for your remote team’s documents. 

Every team has their secure site – a virtual workspace where their documents, files, and notes live. 

If your team members are looking for something specific, they can easily use the search & filter function. 

Communicate easily with the Outlook 

Emailing is one of the main requirements of any business. Generally everyone is familiar with MS Outlook, which is also accessible via web and you can also download its mobile application. It is a very useful tool for email management and comes with a built-in calendar that helps you to schedule meetings and send invites to your colleagues whom you want to include in the meeting. It even sends meetings reminders to the invitees. These are basic features of Outlook, but as part of the Office 365 suite, its cloud accessibility is its best feature. 

Resources with Word/Excel/PowerPoint in the cloud 

Word, Excel and PowerPoint are the traditional tools of Office 365. You can use them with the option of co-authoring and supplement some useful tools for remotely working team members. Say, for example, you can create one Word document or Excel sheet that can be accessed by all the team members simultaneously and they can make edits and save changes as well. This reduces the task of emailing the same file again and again while OneDrive maintains a massive version history of each change made. 

Manage tasks with ToDo 

ToDo is a very easy to use task management system and can be integrated with outlook tasks. It synchronizes throughout all devices and allows your team to create various task lists and share it with their colleagues. It helps them to manage their day-to-day tasks. You can make a task list, take notes, record collections, plan an event, or set reminders on ToDo. This helps you to prioritize your tasks and increase your productivity. It also gives a little buzzer when you finish a task and mark it as complete. You can combine this with Teams and efficiently manage all the steps in a project. It’s mobile app allow you to add or update tasks while you are on the go. 

Wrapping up 

Preparing a team to work remotely is a bit challenging, especially when we have not practiced it much before. Every organization has its own distinctive processes and hence this challenge is different for every organization. The tools mentioned above are just a few that can help you to work efficiently when you work remotely. They give you the flexibility to work wherever you wish, may it be a desktop, laptop, or mobile app. Get in touch with us to know more about how Microsoft 365 and migration to office 365 has significant impact on managing the remote workplace.