Nearly every industry has relied on a communication tool to help their business and employees navigate the COVID-19 crisis. Due to the need for remote work, the market for collaboration platforms was flooded—but with nearly 115 million daily average users, Microsoft Teams beat out the competition.
This astronomical user count is due to how different Teams is from any other tool. Indeed, it is much more than meetings and chat—it represents an entirely new way of working. It is a hub for teamwork, conferencing, file and app sharing, and more. Teams is designed to increase productivity and improve communication by making everything available in a single interface—chat, conversation, meetings, files, and tasks.
But to realize the true potential of Teams, organizations and employees must prioritize learning and focus on building the skills they need to use it effectively. While your employer should provide you with training and support options (like our Adaptive Learning Platform), you can give yourself a head start in 2021 by learning a few basics.
Together mode is a meeting setting in Teams that places all participants in a shared, virtual space. This setting makes meetings more engaging “helping you focus on other people’s faces and body language and making it easier to pick up on the non-verbal cues that are so important to human interaction”.
Here is now to turn on Together mode in Teams:
Teams allows you to set a status, like Available, Be right back, or Busy, to let your colleagues know what you’re up to. To set your status in Teams, follow these simple steps:
Breakout rooms allow for attendees in large meetings to have more meaningful discussions by breaking out into smaller groups. Follow these steps to set up breakout rooms:
These features are just a tiny sample of Teams’ capabilities—and Microsoft will be adding more productivity and collaboration-focused functionality with each software update. To take advantage of these features, and to be able to keep up as new ones are rolled out, you must take a proactive approach to digital skilling.
Here are three suggestions to get started:
Don’t fall behind—get started on upskilling with Teams now.