How Office 365 Enables Employees to Work from Home

Working from home has become the new reality for millions of people worldwide as a result of the recent COVID-19 outbreak. Many organizations have implemented or are considering policies to allow their employees to work from home. This can be intimidating for management teams concerned that productivity might decrease when employees work outside of the office.

Regardless of where staff work, they need to communicate and collaborate to complete tasks and projects. You may worry that the distance will cause interruption in business processes. Office 365 provides organizations a way to strengthen their team communication and collaboration while also giving employees flexibility during these uncertain times.

Communication with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is the premiere communication application in Office 365. Teams has replaced Skype for Business, Office 365’s previous calling/chat application, and improved on it in every way. Teams not only facilitates remote communication between employees and teams, it encourages it by including chat conversations, video calls, and team management in one location.

For a team working from home, Microsoft Teams can become the hub for all communication and collaboration. This includes hosting video calls with screen sharing and annotation, working on an Office file with team members in real-time without leaving the Teams interface, and sharing posts on the team home page to keep other team members up to date on recent tasks or projects.

Microsoft is heavily invested in making Teams the go-to communication application for all organizations. They continue to release new features monthly. Some recent features that help users who are working from home include an option to blur the background of video in a meeting, live captioning in meetings, and the ability to send automatic responses when messaged in Teams. Microsoft Teams comes with most Office 365 licenses. In fact, Microsoft has announced they will be providing free Teams licensing for the next 6 months to organizations who haven’t implemented Office 365 yet. If you are interested in this offer, contact us and we will procure these licenses for you.

Online storage with OneDrive/SharePoint

Most Office 365 plans come with access to two cloud document storage applications: OneDrive and SharePoint. OneDrive is used for individual file management and basic file sharing while SharePoint provides an organizational level cloud storage site with additional security and customized structure. You can learn about the differences in our breakdown guide.

Cloud storage applications like SharePoint and OneDrive make it possible to open, edit, and share files from any location with an internet connection. This means employees can work on their Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint presentations from anywhere and have them be accessible to other team members instantly. Multiple employees can even edit the same file in real time from separate locations, which I’ll go into further detail on below.

Enforcing a policy to have files always saved to the cloud is smart even if there isn’t a global pandemic happening. If an employee has an emergency or their computer crashes without being backed up, valuable data can be lost. Storing files in cloud storage applications like SharePoint and OneDrive ensure files will never be lost and all users are using the same version.

Collaboration in Office Desktop applications

As mentioned above, the tried and true office applications like Word, PowerPoint, and Excel are built with collaboration in mind when it comes to Office 365. Office 365 plans that include desktop applications allow users to download Office applications on up to 5 devices. This means that employees who may be using secondary PCs or mobile devices at home can download Office without an additional purchase.

Even if users can’t download Office applications, the online versions accessible via a web browser provide necessary abilities to get basic work done. All updates made to a file in the web version of Office applications are automatically saved, ensuring all changes are kept. If a file needs to be reverted to a previous version, Office keeps multiple previous versions of the file and allows users to revert them.

Perhaps the most important tool for employees working from home is collaboration on a single file. Office applications allow multiple Office 365 users to edit a file at the same time while showing changes made by both users at the same time. Anytime another user is in the same file, their profile picture will appear in the top right corner of the application. Changes made by a co-author can be tracked with a different color to ensure both authors understand what the are editing. A chat box within the file can be used to discuss each other’s work as well.

Task management with Microsoft Planner

All organizations approach task management differently. If your organization isn’t using some form of task management software while implementing a work from home strategy, it can be hard for managers to keep track of their team’s productivity. Microsoft Planner is simple task management application that works very well out-of-the-box and can be implemented quickly with little training.

With Planner, managers can create planning boards based on teams or projects and add individual tasks to be assigned to team members. Managers have flexibility in what type of tasks they create. For example, tasks can include due dates or checklists of smaller tasks that must be checked off to complete the task. Users that are assigned a task can add attachments, start conversations and mark off checklists within the task. If a user is tagged in a comment, they will receive an email notification with a link to the task.

Additionally, Power Automate can be used to automatically create tasks when certain actions are taken. For example, a Power Automate flow could be created to create a task to create a contract when an opportunity is closed as won in Dynamics 365. Check out our blog that walks through building a similar flow here.  

How to get started

If you think Office 365 may be the right move for your organization, the first step will be determining the appropriate licenses for your users. Office 365 is not one-size-fits-all. You can mix and match licenses to fit the unique users in your organization.

Not sure where to start? We can help. We’ll get you recommendations on the right licenses, and help migrate any email/documents/etc. that you need to keep your team up and running during this pandemic.