Take daily communication out of the inbox and into Microsoft Teams

Not everyone has to answer everything

One of the reasons why email communication often lacks relevance to the recipient is all the mass emails sent - often out of concern that someone who should see the information might miss it. The risk is that many people get tired of receiving emails about things that do not concern them, so much so that they simply choose not to read them. Or too many people get involved in responding to the message, which means that too much time is spent on a question that an individual could easily have answered.

In Microsoft Teams, you can instead send messages to an entire group where participants can see if anyone else has responded, meaning no one else has to spend time on it. There is no limit to the number of teams you can join and the different teams can be made either public or private. A public team is accessible to everyone in your organization, while in a private team you have to be invited to access the content.

Everyone can follow the conversation, so the conversations in the different groups can quickly build up into a knowledge bank. All conversations and channels are also searchable. This makes it easy to find older conversations with answers to previously asked questions.

You can also tag people in a conversation if you want all team members to be able to see the content, but at the same time you want to bring it to the attention of one or more individuals. These participants will receive a special notification.

With Microsoft Teams - avoid mass emails and keep track of ongoing conversations

You can never "unfollow" a mass email - unless you choose to block a specific email address, which is rarely a good option in work-related contexts. However, if you are not interested in taking part in an ongoing Microsoft Teams conversation in a particular channel, it is easy to unfollow the channel. By doing so, you will not receive any more notifications but can still go in and read the content of the channel if necessary.

By creating different channels within each team, you can divide the conversations based on, for example, specific projects, working groups within your team and so on. This way, you can easily create a clear structure for different ongoing discussions.

You can also invite external users, outside your organization, to a team. For example, if you have daily contact with a supplier or customer during a project, you can invite them as a guest user to a team and then remove their access to the team after the project is finished. This way, you can reduce not only the internal email usage, but also the external one. The person you invite doesn't even have to be a Microsoft Teams user - if you send an invitation, they can join the conversation by opening the link in a browser.

Integrate all of Office 365 into Microsoft Teams

All Office 365 apps are built into Microsoft Teams, so you can use any feature you want without leaving your Teams view. In principle, you can rely entirely on Microsoft Teams in the parts of your work that are covered by Office 365 and there are already companies that work that way. You control which application you want to integrate into Teams and you can also link to external programs.

You rarely start on a large scale, but lay a foundation where you initially use Microsoft Teams for internal communication. Then you can gradually build on the functionality and expand the use of Teams as you and your colleagues learn how the application works and how your needs change. In this way, Teams is highly scalable.

At WeSafe, we help our customers connect Microsoft Teams with the other Office 365 features they use in their daily work so they can start using it as a common communication space. The benefit is that the daily communication is largely lifted out of the email inbox, structured in a more efficient way and becomes more relevant to you.

Want to know more? Contact us and we will help you take the next step!

We regularly hold free webinars on Microsoft Teams - Read more and register here>>.