We live in an age of collaboration. An age where the exchange of ideas no longer has any boundaries, and where technology has made teamwork possible on a previously unimaginable scale.
The old ways of working – daily commutes, brick and mortar offices, regular hours – are being replaced by a more fluid, collaborative environment that encourages freedom of expression and creativity. Most recently, the digital transformation of the workplace has been accelerated. We’ve seen a decade of innovation compressed into a few months. Not only relating to how we work and communicate, but how we shop, use financial services and entertain ourselves.
Harnessing employee ingenuity has become critical to the overall success and relevance of brands, with teamwork key to organisational success. By working closer and closer together, people are generating ideas that can make a genuine difference to businesses and to society. As companies move towards more project-based teams, communal spaces and freedom of location, employees expect to be able to collaborate in real time, with video calls, texting and co-authoring necessities, not luxuries.
Ensuring employees can collaborate without friction is therefore a priority. That means humans and machines working seamlessly together, fostering a culture of co-operation, and investing time and resources into training and upskilling. Businesses that get these elements right will be able to boost employee satisfaction and attract the best talent.
Making collaboration easy and frictionless is what Microsoft Teams was designed for. It provides streamlined communication with chat and video calls, and improved productivity in a modern, collaborative workspace. In short, Microsoft Teams provides a hub for collaboration.
For marketing departments, the day-to-day challenge is not only to coordinate with team members, but to efficiently and effectively collaborate with your agency partners. That means everything from holding virtual pitches and tweaking and updating briefs, to fine-tuning content.
With Microsoft Teams, as a marketer you can bring your teams together for real-time collaboration through chat, meetings and calls. You can also create, share and find content with SharePoint and OneDrive and connect hundreds of apps and services you already use and love, including Microsoft 365 Apps.
You can use tabs, connectors, bots and more to integrate them directly into your Microsoft Teams experience and you can also add your favourite workflow apps. Bring the apps and services you love into Microsoft Teams to create your organisation’s hub for teamwork. Develop apps, automated workflows, and dashboards with Power Platform to use in Teams. The look and feel of these functions are fast, fluid and instantly familiar.
As your team works together more and more, you’ll have files that you want to share and collaborate on. Microsoft Teams makes it easy to share documents and co-author, enabling more than one person to work on the same file at the same time. Work on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Visio files with your colleagues right within Microsoft Teams. Never do that frantic, searching-for-files thing ever again. In Microsoft Teams you can access, share and edit documents in real time. You can also have instant conversations with members of your staff or guests outside your organisation.
Most importantly, you can collaborate with confidence without compromising privacy and security. Now more than ever, people need to know their virtual conversations are private and secure. At Microsoft, privacy and security are never an afterthought.
All of which means you can plan campaigns remotely, improve efficiency, and effectively collaborate from anywhere. After all, technology has allowed organisations to become more virtual, allowing team members to not only be more creative, but more mobile and geographically distributed. The end result? Creatives are drawn to companies that have wholeheartedly embraced this spirit of collaboration. And that can only be good for business.
