As Vice President of Operations, my team was probably one the most impacted as far as not just having the ability to work from home, but having the comfort level in doing so.  When you’re based in the corporate headquarters of any business, it’s easy to get accustomed to walking over to someone’s office or talking over the office cubes.  But when all of that goes away, you have to rely on all of the technologies available to you – like Microsoft Teams. 

More Visibility in the Training Needs of the Team

The 365 Productivity Insights platform gave me the visibility I needed to quickly recognize that not all of my team had a good working knowledge of this powerful communication and collaboration tool.  After working with my direct reports to better understand where they needed additional education, I quickly directed them to the online Teams courses in office365training.com to help them learn and become comfortable with such functions as chats, meetings, and file collaboration. After a few weeks, I saw the overall usage of Microsoft Teams and their overall productivity increase dramatically.

When the Team uses Different Devices

One of the major advantages to Microsoft O365 and Microsoft Teams is that you are not bound to a single device.  With 365 Productivity Insights, I was able to quickly see that only 50% of my team was using another device or alternative to the desktop version of Microsoft Teams.  For a Project Management team, they need to have quick and easy access to their teammates, their clients, and their project plans and files.  I was able to quickly identify and educate the team members that did not have the Microsoft Teams application installed on their phone.  They quickly found that the quality of their calls via their cell phone was the same high quality they wanted to ensure for their clients.  We also ensured that they were educated that by using both the desktop and web version of Teams simultaneously, they could easily alternate between internal company and external client chats and channels – improving the overall responsiveness and productivity of all parties involved.

Managing the Team

Email is still the go-to for communication overall, although I am seeing more and more usage in Teams and in some cases outpacing Outlook, especially with this shift to remote work. With 365 Productivity Insights, I am able to view email usage for my departments (Project Managers and Microsoft Operations), and at the individual level.

The dashboard shows me who is using their Outlook email and the date of the last activity from each inbox, along with the:

  • # of emails sent
  • # of emails received
  • # of emails read

If there is no activity, I am able to dig in deeper to determine if the email license is going unused or if there is simply no email activity from that user.

The 365 Productivity Insights advanced reporting and analytics takes visibility even further, providing all the information I need to identify each employee’s level of engagement and effectiveness. I can compare the productivity for all of my director reports fast and identify what the:

  • Trended Mail Traffic looks like for my team
  • Trended Microsoft Teams summary for my team
  • And which at a glance reports of which productivity Tools are being used vs. others

All in all, I definitely recommend this quick and easy tool for any manager at a company where you have remote workers.

Sign in with Microsoft 365 and take the first step to quickly and easily getting remote worker productivity metrics.

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