Leadership skills are not always innate to leaders. In fact, effective leadership roots in inspiring and motivating action toward achieving a team or organization’s goals. To do that, leaders must have communication skills to connect with their audience. Company leaders or executives are the de facto “face” of the team or the company. They are the ones who face the internal and external stakeholders.
Different areas in the business have to keep a watchful eye on their respective transactions, processes, and documents, as these are crucial to the business performance. However, keeping track of important activities is one challenge most departments in the business share. Having a complete record where all actions are logged can help the business with auditing, making sure that there is no room for fraud and other unnecessary activities.
Businesses nowadays are operating at different heights of hybrid work environments. This setup offers flexibility to workers with over 70% wishing remote work options to continue. With business operations and employee expectations changing by the Covid-19 pandemic, technology becomes more essential for bringing collaboration and connectivity together. Microsoft Teams, in particular, is one of the tools designed with virtual and hybrid work environments in mind.
Most administrators use Microsoft tools, especially Teams, to aid them in managing meetings. In fact, 91% of Fortune 500 companies use it to develop an effective communication strategy. But there are still loose ends within the app, letting other parties carry out malicious activities at any stage of the meeting process. Teams is no exception to vulnerabilities. From time to time, there have been several reports of security threats in Teams leading to data leaks.
Organizations have no way to go but forward. Teams, both high and low, are now turning to digital solutions to manage workplace challenges. The COVID-19 pandemic has expedited digitalization for organizations worldwide. However, despite the unforeseen challenges, digital transformation in the workplace has proven to improve administration, governance, and even workplace culture. Shifting to technology has been a learning curve for most companies.
Virtual meetings have undeniably improved workplace communications. With so many remote team communication tools with advanced features like Q&A, breakout rooms, chat, reaction icons, virtual whiteboards, and so on, it has never been easier to ask questions and seek ideas from meeting attendees. But, think back to your virtual meetings this week. How many of them were successful? Are awkward silences the norm in your meetings?
In today’s business climate, workflows should start transitioning to digital. It’s because change is demanding immediacy — in plans, processes, actions, and results. With complex business information, tight deadlines, and the pursuit to remain competitive, businesses need reliable telecommunication technology. Various electronic conferencing services are now available for team meetings, structured meetings, events, and even document collaboration or document conferencing.
Collaboration and communication in many workplaces post-pandemic have been made possible by productivity tools and software that connect individuals who are otherwise physically apart. One such tool is Microsoft Teams, which is a cloud-based tool that empowers its users to collaborate on a department- and project-basis. Its steady increase in active users since the pandemic speaks of the tool’s efficacy in streamlining all workflows of an organization, especially collaboration and communication.
The emergence of virtual meetings as a prevailing business norm brings forth an indispensable value. In 2022, the value of the global video conferencing market reaches up to $7.02 billion, which serves as compelling evidence of their lasting impact. While they may not entirely resolve the challenges of meeting culture, they do offer numerous advantages surpassing traditional in-office gatherings.
With the introduction of new technology, companies are meticulously handpicking the best applications that could offer the most convenience as they fully embrace digitalization. When it comes to meetings, a leader naturally is Microsoft’s Office suite.
By the start of 2022, Microsoft Teams officially declared that it has topped 270 million active users in its collaboration platform. With such meteoric growth, MS Teams is now the most popular business collaboration and communication platform, outperforming Slack and Zoom. Microsoft’s business messaging tool prides itself on its smart and team collaboration capabilities, such as integrations with other Office 365 applications like Outlook and SharePoint.
Meeting preparation is a tedious task. Administrators and secretaries alike have to use multiple applications to ensure successful structured meetings. Currently, several meeting platforms aid in meeting preparation, such as Microsoft Teams, which enables you to easily schedule meetings. However, meeting preparation also demands long hours of document consolidation and participants’ coordination.
Work meetings can be indeed very taxing to prepare and run. Despite this, they provide opportunities to collaborate, generate new and creative insights, and even add value to the entire company. With strong leadership and careful planning, ensuring every meeting is purposeful or productive is simple. To make your life easier, let’s take a deep dive into some essential meeting facts.
With its features that allow bringing together ideas and individuals, Teams has been regarded as a staple for organizations in the Microsoft ecosystem. As more businesses are relying on the functionalities of such an application, how secure is Teams for your teams? Organizing structured meetings in Teams may be vulnerable to some security hiccups, such as unwanted meeting access and information breakout with unorganized access controls.
Formal meetings in Teams become unproductive in the absence of ample preparation. Companies sometimes neglect the idea of meeting preparation and proceed with informal discussions instead, as it’s easier to just click the call button, compared to elaborate coordination and planning. As a result, follow-up meetings increase, which burns out the meeting participants.
Action items are one of the most crucial pieces of information that teams can generate from a meeting. It elevates meeting productivity in MS Teams as it translates the discussion items into achievable tasks. However, the simple to-do lists may be insufficient to track everything, from assignment to completion. Meeting organizers may need a meeting solution that can record and trace action items from meetings.
Ordinarily, the word “audit” can be unnerving, but it has a much more beneficial definition in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft audit logs capture data about any changes, such as when, where, and by whom activity took place, as well as the results of such activity. This helps ensure companies are doing everything they can in the event of a security breach, data loss, or simply during routine operations. Essential parts of the process are auditing and meeting trails.
In a corporate world increasingly dependent on teamwork, perhaps no innovation is as simple or valuable as document collaboration. With several people working on a single file, all without being in the same room, you can compose, modify, refine, and approve documents of all types rapidly and with as little risk of errors as possible.
It’s widely recognized that the future of work does not involve in-person office work or traditional nine-to-five working days. Instead, studies have shown that the options are limitless when building a working culture around individual needs, strengths, and preferences. But how can you build a successful team with a unique culture across time zones and locations?
Along with a wealth of technologies and products, Amazon has given the modern business world a range of innovative solutions to age-old problems. In the digital workspace, perhaps none better encapsulates this inventiveness than the Amazon 6-pager. This modern reimagining of traditional memos constitutes one of the best practices for hybrid meetings.
Effective meetings can be challenging to achieve, but highly rewarding when the time and effort are taken to make them impactful. These days, an increasing number of professionals are engaging in virtual and hybrid meetings through platforms like Microsoft Teams, which come with their own sets of challenges.
Since debuting in 2017, Microsoft Teams has taken the lead as a collaborative work platform for professionals. It covers a wide array of industries and occupations, with over 270 million active daily users as of 2022. Aside from its function as an easy-to-use communications platform, one of the most notable features driving its success is the option to share and edit files quickly and easily.
Whether you hold a meeting in person or online, it’s easy to forget items discussed with the deluge of information that’s usually presented. Fortunately, taking meeting minutes is an excellent way to increase productivity and generate a precise record for later use as a reference point. On platforms like MS Teams, minute-taking is no longer done manually but through software such as Convene in Teams (CiT).
What does it mean to go “paperless”? Most organizations imagine a paperless setup as the outright removal of pulp and paper from their day-to-day processes. However, this can also refer to a great reduction, rather than the absolute removal, of paper use.
