We’ve all had our fair share of workplace communication gaps. Maybe a coworker who private messages you project questions, when you need group feedback to respond. Or a manager who emails her team for status updates.

Microsoft Teams eliminates barriers in teamwork, allowing you to securely communicate and collaborate with your team in real-time. The best part about it? If you have a Microsoft subscription, you most likely already have the tools. If you’re interested in enhancing efficiency in your organization with Microsoft Teams, read these 5 quick tips below.

1.Have Conversations in Channels

How can you enhance collaboration and eliminate room for miscommunication? Bring your chats into the conversation tab of your channels. Channels are where collaboration happens. In Microsoft Teams, teams are groups of people brought together for work, projects, or common interests. Teams are made up of channels. Each channel is built around a topic, like project, a department name, or just for fun. Channels are where you hold meetings, have conversations and work on files together. You will be amazed at how redundant emails and chats decrease as you drive conversations into channels.

2. Create an Interactive Agenda

Whenever you schedule a meeting in Microsoft Teams, you populate a “Meeting Notes” tab. This tab can be accessed before, during and after a meeting takes place. In order to maximize time, provide an agenda in your teams environment. You can even @mention coworkers to draw their attention to specific tasks, and hyperlink tabs. In turn, allowing attendees to join a meeting prepared and leave with meeting minutes in hand.

3. Meet in Channels

We told you how chatting in channels can optimize communication, but how about hosting meetings in channels? By hosting meetings in channels, you get all of the great features of a Teams meeting but the meeting notes, whiteboard, chat, and even recording are persistent in the channel. Meaning once the meeting ends, your meeting content is still easily accessible in your channel.

4. Create an Org-Wide Team for Announcements

By creating an org-wide team for company announcements, you continue to drive communication into your teams environment, and eliminate the cringe-worthy ‘reply all’ responses from coworkers.

5. Treat your Activity Feed as your Internal Inbox

Managing an inbox can be overwhelming. When you drive internal communication into Teams, your inbox will be much quieter. Think of your Teams activity feed as your internal inbox. Use the filter feature to easily view what is important to you.

There you have it. Our top 5 tips for driving communication in Microsoft Teams.

At Capitol Presence, we specialize in O365 implementation and adoption. Want to know how we can make your environment work for you? Contact us today! From creating bots to take the grunt work out of administrative tasks, to end user training – our Microsoft experts will allow you to work less and do more.

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Author: Halie Edwards

Source: Capitol Presence