5 Main Benefits of Microsoft Teams for SMBs

In the past year, the adoption of Microsoft Teams has seen exponential growth. The growth was driven for the need to adopt communication and collaboration tools that facilitated online meetings and chat. With that said, there is a lot more to Microsoft Teams other than chat and meetings. The real power of the application is when you start building teams where work gets done.  

First, it’s important to understand that succeeding with a team in Microsoft Teams takes a little bit of effort. We are all used to sending emails to one another, sharing documents through attachments, and creating documents in a linear fashion. Changing to a collaborative team in Teams where emails are replaced with channel posts, documents are shared automatically and where documents are created and co-authored in parallel with collaborators can be quite the transition. Everyone in your organization needs to understand why this is a better option.  

Here are 5 benefits that explain why Microsoft Teams is a better option when it comes to collaboration and communication for SMBs.   

1. Enhanced communication and increased productivity 

The breadth of collaboration tools offered in Microsoft 365 can often be confusing. Teams increases productivity by making all your collaboration– conversations, chats, online meetings, shared files, tasks, etc. available in a single application and a single interface. In addition to the widely used Microsoft applications, there are a wide range of third party apps that integrate into Teams so that your employees never have to leave Teams to get their work done. 

2. Focus on the work 

With Teams, it’s easier to focus on work-related topics and prioritize time better. Instead of spending time going through an inbox that contains messages from everyone about everything, Teams compartmentalizes information into channels and puts information in context. The channel only contains conversations, meetings and documents related to the topic of that specific channel. So instead of getting side-tracked with random email or get stuck trying to clean up an ever overflowing inbox, your people can focus their valuable attention and spend their limited time on the channels where they actually do their work. 

3. Transparency 

A big challenge for many organizations is keeping everyone updated and ensuring that everyone knows what is going on. With Teams, this becomes so much easier. Worrying about who to put on cc in an email or who to invite to a meeting is a thing of the past. With Teams, a message is posted in the relevant channel, @-mention the people that need to be notified and leave it for everyone else to read the post. By having meetings visible to everyone in the channel transparency is increased by enabling everyone in the channel to “pop-in”. 

4. Move to a digital workplace is seamless 

There are many business benefits to moving to a digital workplace in the cloud. Since Teams is a fully cloud-based solution, the move to the cloud is seamless. Being able to access information from anywhere on any device is a huge business benefit. Never more so than in today’s hybrid workplace environment. In addition, with having the workplace in the cloud, businesses, no matter their size, can reap the benefits of big data processing and artificial intelligence to work smarter. 

5. Integrate new team members quickly 

In today’s workplace where employees can be anywhere in the city, country, or world, getting people integrated quickly and easily is imperative. With Teams, new team members can quickly get up to speed and engaged in the teamwork – no matter where they are working. 

The benefits of Microsoft Teams are many but that’s not to say that changing people’s habits and behaviours is not a challenge. However, once they see and understand why Teams can be of value to them, they and the business will reap the benefits. 

At MicroAge we know that Microsoft Teams can benefit many SMBs. Contact us to find out how we can help you reap the benefits.