Microsoft Teams is a go-to platform for communication, but for many small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) in the UK, its full potential often goes untapped. Maximising business productivity isn’t just about holding video calls or sending quick messages across locations; it’s about using Teams as a hub to streamline your operations, manage tasks, and boost collaboration across departments.
Today, we’ll lay out some Microsoft Teams productivity tips that will help your business get more out of the tools you already have, saving time, money, and ultimately improving your Teams return on investment (ROI).
Teams’ True Capabilities
At its core, Microsoft Teams serves as a powerful communication tool, but its true value goes beyond chat, video calls, and file sharing. SMEs often underutilise Teams, only scratching the surface of its capabilities—because they simply don’t know how much more it could offer.
Once you learn how to fully leverage this one platform, you’ll be able to:
- Consolidate workflows.
- Integrate project management.
- Reduce the number of tools your team uses.
- Avoid the productivity drain of application-jumping.
As you’ll soon see, maximising business productivity with Teams means unlocking efficiency gains and cost savings. After all, the less time your team spends juggling different apps, the more time they can spend on what really matters—finishing tasks to a high degree and ensuring you retain your penchant for quality service.
Ready to find out how to do more with Teams? Here are our top tips…
Phone a Friend
An assistant who can transcribe meetings, summarise key points, and suggest follow-up actions after every discussion—who doesn’t need a salary? It may sound too good to be true, but with Microsoft Copilot (integrated into Teams), it could be your new reality.
Microsoft’s AI-driven tool can automatically summarise conversations from meetings or channels and highlight the key action points your team needs to address.
If you’re running late or catching up after an absence, Copilot can also send out a heads-up to the other attendees and suggest follow-up questions based on previous meetings.
On those especially hectic days, you could even use Copilot to craft responses to Teams messages, saving you the time and effort of typing out the same standard replies over and over.
Copilot integration works on mobile devices, too, enabling your team to stay in the loop while on the go. It’s a perfect example of how improving productivity with Teams is possible by making the tools at your disposal work smarter, not harder.
Meet: Your New Productivity Hero
Often, meetings eat up time before they even occur. When used wisely, the ‘Meet’ tab in Teams can help make the most of every minute you dedicate to a call.
Teams’ Meet functionality allows you to prepare and share documents ahead of time, so neither your team nor your clients… waste… valuable… time… searching… for… a… fil—oh, there it is! By sharing resources directly through Meet, you ensure that everyone has easy access to what they need without having to sift through their inbox mid-meeting.
As well as making you appear more professional, this is a great way to ensure accountability. No more pointing fingers trying to find the culprit when someone claims that a critical document hasn’t been sent over.
And, doing all you can to ensure everyone’s equipped with the same information reduces the back-and-forth that can derail meetings. Harnessing the ‘Meet’ tab is an underutilised productivity tip for businesses that has serious value when it comes to keeping your conversations on track.
Make Time to Focus
One of the bigger internal challenges you’ll face when trying to improve business productivity is balancing collaboration with focused work time. Both are integral in maximising output, but it’s easy for the scale to tip.
Fortunately, Teams’ calendar feature makes it simple to schedule dedicated focus time, free from interruptions. You can set aside slots or let your team pick their own, ensuring they have undisturbed blocks of time to concentrate fully on tasks.
Ensuring your employees know how to use calendar in Teams properly—and are aware that they can see everyone’s availability within—also prevents double-booking and the time-wasting task of last-minute meeting rescheduling.
It’s not always about reinventing the wheel—sometimes, maximising business productivity just means giving your team the tools they need to plan their time effectively.
Integrate as App-ropriate
Teams offers vast integration capabilities, some of which—like the wider Microsoft 365 suite—you might be familiar with and some of which you’ll have never even heard of. In fact, many of you have probably never clicked on the ‘Apps’ tab in Teams before (or even noticed it was there!).
But, by bringing in the right apps, you can further enhance Microsoft Teams to take your SME’s efficiency to the next level. Adding these tools directly into Teams reduces time spent switching between apps and ensures smoother workflows. Consider the following integrations:
- For Elevating Onboarding: Use Microsoft Viva to deliver tailored onboarding experiences within Teams, ensuring new hires are brought up to speed quickly, contributing to higher productivity levels from day one.
- For Monitoring Productivity: Power BI can be integrated into Teams to track metrics and embed interactive reports into your channels, giving your team up-to-date insights on project progress.
- For Boosting Motivation: Integrate Bonusly, an employee recognition app that allows staff to reward each other for a job well done. A motivated team is a productive one!
- For Enhancing Collaboration: SharePoint is another excellent integration that streamlines collaboration by offering real-time document sharing and editing. Teams and SharePoint work hand-in-hand to enhance collaboration across departments.
- For Eliminating Tedious Tasks: Zapier offers automation within Teams, allowing you to automate repetitive tasks, from updating your CRM to sending reminders.
- For Perfecting Project Management: Viva Goals, another Microsoft Viva component, is great for setting, tracking, and achieving business objectives within Teams, creating a goal-orientated environment that keeps your team focused.
Through these integrations, you’ll be improving productivity within Microsoft Teams by tailoring your experience on the platform to better suit your specific business needs.
Microsoft Teams: Not Just a Tool for Video Calls
Teams already acts as a central hub for many of your daily activities, and maximising business productivity becomes much easier when you know how to unleash the full power of your existing tools. Not only will these productivity tips for businesses help you save time—they’ll also improve ROI by increasing what you get from a platform you probably already pay for.
As you now know, there are a multitude of ways to squeeze more out of Teams, and the potential in this one tool echoes that of your wider IT environment. There are many hidden ways to optimise your systems and see tangible productivity improvements across your business—you just have to know where to look.
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They’ll work diligently to understand your business’s unique needs and seamlessly integrate suitable solutions into your existing infrastructure. By providing all our clients with the same core IT foundation, we ensure exceptional quality, reliability, efficiency, and reduced risk.
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