Does your business send too many emails? Email overload is a common problem in many offices.

Inboxes get filled with duplicate content from email reply-all chains, and trying to find important emails in the middle of avertisements and spam can drain productivity. Email has gone from an effective form of communication in its earlier days, to now being cumbersome and time-consuming.

The average office worker receives 200 emails per day and spends 2.5 hours reading and responding to email daily.  

Over 30% of the average employee’s day is spent managing email. That includes the time to takes to sort through messages, find an important email or file attachment, and craft email responses.

This email inefficiency has caused a rise in a new form of office communication that’s powered by cloud services… structured real-time team chat. The #1 product in this market is Microsoft Teams.

How Does Team Chat Differ from Messaging Apps?

Anyone that’s used WhatsApp or Skype for messaging might wonder, how a program like Microsoft Teams differs from messaging apps.

With an app like WhatsApp, you’re just relegated to basically a version of text message, where you can contact a person and have an ongoing conversation in that window with that specific person or a group of people.

Structured chat in a program like Microsoft Teams is much different and is more like a team collaboration and productivity tool.

You can create chat channels based upon department, client, or any other topic you choose and invite the pertinent users to interact in that channel. In a team chat application you can:

• Send/receive real-time messages
• Use @mentions to alert people
• Share files
• Connect other programs to your workflow, like MS Office and 3^rd party software

Of course, one of the best benefits is that real-time chat programs greatly reduce the amount of emails that get sent back and forth.

Ways to Boost Efficiency Using Microsoft Teams

More than 85% of managers and employees point to lack of collaboration and poor communication as major reasons for workplace failures.

Microsoft Teams does more than just provide an alternate method of communication, it connects staff in a number of dynamic ways to streamline workflows and keep everyone on the same page.

Here are several of the ways that adopting Teams can boost your office productivity.

More Efficient Communications

If you have a sales team discussing a new sales presentation, it can result in multiple back and forth emails that contain duplicate information. Trying to locate one particular reply or the most updated version of an emailed file, can take forever if you have to look through multiple emails sitting in your inbox.

That same communication chain over Microsoft Teams could have its own channel dedicated to “sales presentations” so everyone knew just where to find it and there wouldn’t be other topics to sort through. Files revisions could be easily done via a connected OneDrive file, where everyone would get the most recent copy.

Another way that chat makes communication more efficient, is that people tend to be more succinct and to the point when communicating via chat than in email, where they feel they need an intro and sign off on the message.

Finding Files and Conversation Threads is Easy

Have you ever spent hours looking for one specific email with important information in it? Or tried to find a file attachment from a year ago, only to find it had been stripped from the message when you were trying to reduce the size of your inbox one day?

Teams has an excellent keyword search function that allows you to easily pull up conversations and file attachments via a search, reducing the time it takes searching for information.

Keep All Communications in One Place

The person on your accounting team did not know they needed to update the company account used for payroll before running it because the email was sent to someone else on their team that forgot to forward a copy.

Missed communications because they’re spread across various people’s email inboxes is a common problem in offices and results in miscommunication and mistakes.

When communication is handled in a single application, all pertinent team members have access to all the information they need. This also reduces the risk of losing valuable communications that were on an employee’s computer that was lost or stolen because they’re all contained in one place that company administrators can access.

Reduce Time Accessing Files/Apps

One way that Microsoft Team shines over other team chat programs is that it has the ability to be used as a central work hub from which you can access files, applications, websites, and other tools you use daily.

You can add Tabs that allow you to quickly access the items in your daily workflow to reduce the time it takes to open them all separately from different locations. Teams supports all the Microsoft products as well as multiple 3^rd party applications.

Connect Everywhere with One Platform

Some offices use different tools depending where their employees are. At the office? They use email. Working remotely? Text message. Traveling internationally? WhatsApp.

This leaves a complex web of data and communications spread out over multiple applications which is inefficient and basically guarantees that trying to pull a cohesive conversation from those multiple apps is going to be difficult.

Teams can be accessed via web browser, desktop app, or mobile app, so there’s no need to use different applications. No matter where a team member is, they can access Teams for their office communications.

Get Your Office Started on Microsoft Teams Today

Are you ready to ditch the email overload and streamline your office communications for better productivity? Enable Technology can get you set up on Microsoft Teams so you can enjoy all the benefits.

Book your 15-minute technology consultation today!