How to manage remote employees effectively with Microsoft Teams

Introduction

In the latest paradigm shift in the digital workplace, Microsoft Teams enabled organizations to connect their dispersed workforce and continue their business operations uninterrupted, online. Today, the main goal is to make remote collaboration a success. However, ensuring the emotional and practical needs of employees remains doubtful.

Secondly, productivity and security are the two major considerations in cloud collaboration. Recently a huge upswing in Teams usage by 500% since January along with a 200% rise in Teams utilization on mobile devices as well has been observed. Hence, exchange of information through insecure endpoints while managing distributed workforce, once again raises concerns about security.

So in summary, for businesses, it is more important than ever to adopt robust ways to manage the remote workforce to retain them and make them work confidently in a secure environment.

Moving ahead, some considerations for business leaders to ensure remote teams achieve business goals without any hurdles are:

• Set clear goals, expectations, and deadlines
• Provide supervision to employees
• Strategize how teams can access and share documents
• Organize meetings, standups, and briefings
• Protect sensitive information

For organizations that use Teams as their dedicated workspace, let us learn some useful ways to ensure seamless communication, efficiency, creativity and security.

Important steps to manage remote workforce

1. Manage user identities

Microsoft 365 supports a composite virtual collaboration environment with Azure services and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) apps. They are used to manage user identities and provide secure access to resources, applications, and networks. Using these solutions, you can create and manage single identity for each individual for both on-prem and cloud apps. Additionally, you can provide single sign-on access to your applications and enforce multi-factor authentication across your hybrid enterprise.

2. Access management

Azure multi-factor authentication (MFA) is used to prevent unauthorized access and thereby protects corporate sensitive data. With Azure MFA, an organization can detect inconsistent login patterns and protect its business with security monitoring, AI-based reports, and alerts. Also, Azure MFA provides an added layer of security for administrator accounts and is used to enable employee self-service such as resetting passwords, creating groups etc.

3. Enable security standards

To keep away from security vulnerabilities and secure the company’s assets from malicious attacks, organizations must develop compliant solutions. For this, Azure security services are used to enable advanced threat protection across hybrid cloud workloads and set a compliant environment following internal policies and regulations.

4. Document collaboration

While working remotely, it is important for employees to be able to express themselves in every possible way. Let your employees explore and exploit Teams to communicate and exchange ideas via chat, calls, meetings, etc. and get answers to their questions quickly. Gather a team around a task, add tabs for files, apps, and services and let them collaborate in real-time. Drive conversations and interact with your employees more often to connect with them on a human level.

5. Task management

Managing tasks effectively is vital to improving productivity. Microsoft 365 provides various task management apps such as Planner to schedule tasks and track progress. Using a Planner, you can easily allocate tasks to each individual in a team using the bucket feature and follow along with the completion. This ensures an organized and efficient way of completing a project.

6. Build your intranet

An intranet is a sign of modern digital workspace and collaboration. To boost business agility and level up employee engagement, it is essential for a business to adopt a dynamic intranet.

You can deliver an unparalleled user experience and engage your employees to create better business outcomes by using Intranet on Teams offered by TeamsHub by Cyclotron. Intranet on Teams creates an ambiance of socialization and fun and equips your employees with all business tools at one single place to build transparency. This ensures continued focus and active participation of employees for high performance and productivity.

7. Monitor remote users and activities

Eventually, after all the good work is done, it is important to know how your employees are using Teams and whether they are finding any value out of it to evaluate results of the collaboration. Microsoft Teams offers different analytics and usage reports for employee monitoring and tracking to understand usage patterns and levels of employee engagement.

Furthermore, businesses need to glean over real-time teams’ performance routinely and react to clients quickly. Using a third-party tool that offers automated reporting such as TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can grab granular details of your Office 365 tenant in just a click. To know more, please click here.

Conclusion

Microsoft Teams is a powerpack solution offering major benefits with the most advanced productivity and security tools built-in. Evidently, by implementing the above steps, you can manage your remote team effortlessly in a secure environment.

However, if you want to simplify the ways you work and amplify the productivity rate without wasting time and energy, then you must use a third-party tool such as TeamsHub by Cyclotron. Using TeamsHub by Cyclotron, you can manage guest access on various levels, automate self-service and enforce policies for teams creation, effectively track user activities in real-time and bring other Microsoft or Office 365 workloads together in a unified platform that employees can’t resist.

In a nutshell, TeamsHub by Cyclotron weaponizes Microsoft Teams to offer advanced collaboration and unbreakable security while providing an awesome employee engagement.

To know more about TeamsHub by Cyclotron visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com