Featured contributor: Seth Malize, West Region Sales Manager at Vitalyst

The world anxiously awaits the return of normalcy. From gathering with family and friends without concern, to traveling or dining out, we are all ready to leave behind our fears of COVID-19.

Perhaps the event we are most looking forward to in our professional lives is going back to the office. But the move to in office work is no small feat—leaders need to consider employee’s comfort levels, vaccination status, among other logistics. They will also need to invest in technologies that can support a stratified workforce—like Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft Teams is designed for modern work

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Microsoft has been building solutions to bolster remote workers. From Together mode and live transcripts to interactive meetings for over 1,000 people, Teams has paved the way for remote collaboration for over 115 million daily average users.

And the innovations have not stopped there. Microsoft Teams has evolved to be the meetings platform designed for flexible work, as 80% of leaders say they expect to provide hybrid work options for their employees.

Teams’ meetings features and capabilities will bridge the gap between the office and the home. Some of the most powerful features for hybrid work in Teams meetings include:

• Together mode, a video setting that leverages AI to place participants in a shared background, like they’re sitting in the same room.
• Microsoft PowerPoint Live which allows ‘notes, slides, meeting chat, and participants to be in the same view’, while also allowing participants to navigate through the content at their own pace.
• Dynamic view, which arranges meeting components intelligently, as people join, speak, present, and more.

Each of these features, as well as newly announced Teams Meetings Rooms in offices, are created to ‘offer a first-rate experience to every participant whether they’re in the room, remote, or on the go.’

Adaptive Learning—the perfect tool for Teams Meetings

One of the most critical ‘return to work’ questions leaders need to ask themselves is– “How can my workforce collaborate effectively, whether we’re all in the office, at home or a mixture of both?”

One part of that answer is the right technology, like Teams Meetings. But the other, is the right resources to help employees better leverage their toolset. As our customers have planned their transition to the office, they have shared with us what they need: A single place to get live learning, support, and training.

Our organization has spent the past 25 years creating learning tools and services to help enterprises across all industries better leverage and understand their technology tool set—one of these services is our Adaptive Learning Platform.

Adaptive Learning offers employees 24x7 access to a variety of different learning mediums through our Learn Now app in Teams, including:  

• Chat, click-to-call or email an expert
• Schedule and attend a live, instructor-led learning session
• Search for the solution yourself – on your own pace and at your convenience

As we go back to the office, an empathetic approach to learning will allow for a smoother transition; Vitalyst has applied the maxim that ‘inclusivity yields positive results’ to our delivery model: Immediate, live, omni-channel solutions provided right within the Microsoft Teams Platform itself, through the Adaptive Learning Teams App.

With Adaptive Learning, no worker, irrespective of their challenges, learning needs or preferred style of delivery, is left behind. Accessibility features, like Microsoft 365’s Immersive Reader or Live Closed Captioning for Meetings are available, helping our valued customer’s diverse end-user community benefit from these incredible capabilities

The organizations Vitalyst has had the pleasure of working with which were most successful are those that realized their approach to digital skilling needed to adapt to the needs of their workers.  This means allowing employees to become effective and efficient by leveraging Microsoft Teams Meetings and Adaptive Learning. With Vitalyst, our customers have empowered their workforce to minimize disruptions, maximize value from meetings, and perhaps most importantly; attain a more balanced approach to life and the thing which occupies at least 40 hours of most of their lives every week: Work.