According to an IBM Global CIO study, 49% of an employee's work is the result of ‘network contribution’ by colleagues and partners. However, a separate study by CEB found that 80% of employees lack the skills to effectively collaborate. This significant skills shortage represents a wake-up call for Australian organisations; there is a need to introduce better tools to help enable employee collaboration.
Microsoft’s Office 365 is one tool that offers a solution. Let’s look at four Office 365 features that can enhance employee collaboration.
1. Office 365 delivers an experience built for collaboration
Microsoft’s mission is to build products that connect millions of people. Office 365 offers a platform that leverages the rise of mobile technology and cloud computing to deliver a platform built for collaboration.
According to Arushi Agrawal, product manager at Microsoft, “Office 365 offers the ability to get the optimal experience regardless of your location or device by delivering improved productivity with low training costs.”
I agree with Arushi’s comments. Office 365 delivers a great experience and will transform the way you use and collaborate across Office products like Word, PowerPoint and Excel as well as Skype, Yammer and OneDrive.
Companies like the Carlsberg Group, a Danish brewing company with a GloCal (Glocalization) focus, are moving to Office 365 and instantly seeing the benefits of a “reliable collaboration platform.”
Etieene Dock, vice president of IT Architecture and Sourcing at Carlsberg, suggests their employees are “working and collaborating better together” since the implementation of Office 365. They are also satisfying customers at a reduced cost.
How? Etieene says, “We gain the efficiencies of business done on a global scale, while staying close to our local markets. Thanks to Office 365, we’re becoming a true GloCal organisation.”
2. Real-time co-authoring inside Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents
Real-time co-authoring enables your team to edit and contribute to the same document simultaneously. This feature lets your team work in Word Online, PowerPoint Online and Excel Online, with updates saved on the go.
Employees can access these documents across any device, anywhere. You could be working from home on your PC, out at a client’s site using your mobile or on the train via your tablet. This increased accessibility and real-time co-authoring provides your team with the tools needed to enhance office collaboration.
At R & G Technologies, I use Office 365 to collaborate with my colleagues on marketing documents and presentation slides. For example, I collaborate with our managing director to create our webinar presentations via PowerPoint Online. We can both add and edit the one file and work together to create the perfect presentation for our audience.
3. Discover relevant and useful content through Office Delve
Office Delve is a new collaboration feature that Microsoft says offers you “a new way to discover relevant information and connections from across your work life.” It uses Office Graph to map relationships between people and content. Essentially, it will display information only relevant to you, based on the work you are doing and the people you are engaging with. Check out the explainer video below to learn more:
4. Social integration with Yammer enhances cross-department communication
To enhance collaboration, Office 365 integrates with Microsoft’s business social network tool, Yammer. This integration enables powerful social engagement and interaction across all your favourite Office products and email.
For those unfamiliar with Yammer, picture a social network just for you and your department or for you and your company. Inside this social network, you can share Office files and comment, like, email and edit them - all using the familiar Office experience.
Now instead of sending hundreds of internal emails and getting distracted by those ‘reply all’ messages, you can use Yammer to quickly share and collaborate with colleagues on all your important documents.
For example, Trek Bicycles, a global leader in bicycles and related gear, needed a tool that could help their sales representatives communicate, collaborate and achieve their goals while using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. Daniel Roach-Rooke, IT infrastructure manager, used Yammer to enable people to collaborate inside the CRM. Yammer and its tight integration with CRM Online and other Office Online products replaced the need for a lot of internal emails and instant messaging.
Use Office 365 to empower your employees to collaborate more effectively
Microsoft is changing the way the world works, connecting millions of people through its Office 365 products. Through seamless integration across Word, email, CRM, Skype, Yammer and OneDrive, Microsoft is enabling employees to work more collaboratively together.
Remember, a whopping 49% of your work is the result of network contribution from your colleagues and partners. Office 365 offers a product suite that can enable more productive work collaboration.
I challenge you to ask your fellow colleagues how they currently collaborate with each other. If it seems inefficient or cumbersome, call us on 1300 562 886 to discuss whether Office 365 is a good fit for your organisation.