8 ways Office 365 boosts productivity
Keeping your employees productive used to mean having them sitting at their desks, where you could see them, from 9am to 5.30pm, Monday to Friday. But does a present workforce really mean a productive workforce? Increasingly, companies are realising that the answer is not always. For businesses where it makes sense to do so, embracing cloud platforms like Office 365 boosts productivity.
Here are 8 reasons why.
Better collaboration
Virtual teams are on the rise, as workplaces both expand their reach geographically and aim to provide employees with the flexible working conditions modern life demands. But what about when your team needs to be working together on projects and important documents?
This is where Office 365 shines. With collaboration built in, it’s easy to share files between employees (as well as external suppliers and partners) and co-work on documents together in real-time. The location of your team members increasingly doesn’t matter, as long as they have an internet connection.
Any place, any time
Do you remember sitting in the office, waiting for that important email to come through so that you could action it before going home? Just a few years ago, this was a reality for many people.
The growing adoption of mobile devices means that your employees can manage work, wherever they might be. And with Office 365 available on up to five devices per user, employees can control how they connect too. Your employees can use powerful desktop computers when they’re in the office, and the mobile device of their choosing when connecting from home, client sites, or travelling.
Less delays
One of the myths of virtual teams is that there are communication delays. Send an email, wait three hours for a response, see the response another hour after it was sent, reply, and on it goes (because no-one wants to make a phone call in case it is too intrusive!).
Office 365 provides a middle-ground. Real-time communications channels like instant messaging, video conferencing and Skype allow you and your team to interact quickly, without the delays associated with some other technologies.
Cloudy days make things clearer
Being able to access documents anywhere, anytime via the cloud reduces the need to download and save documents to various devices. This eliminates issues with version control problems, especially if you have multiple people working on a document at the same time.
Make work social
One of the biggest indicators of employee engagement is if employees have strong friendships at work. Office 365 provides a way to deepen the social connections between employees with its in-built workplace social network, Yammer.
Down, down, downtime is down
Do you remember when a power outage or a system upgrade rendered your entire workforce out of action? Using a cloud platform like Office 365 in conjunction with mobile devices mean that your team can power through, even when the power is out.
Same, same, but different
Another great aspect of Office 365 is that the tools in the suite are familiar to your employees. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and so on retain the same look and feel that your employees are used to, just available in a different way.
Streamlined updates
With incremental updates included in your Office 365 subscription, you no longer need to schedule outages for upgrades. Updates happen seamlessly in the background, freeing up your IT team for more important work and minimising disruptions to your workforce.
Are you ready to find out how Office 365 can boost productivity for your organisation?
GreenDot is a certified Microsoft partners, working with some of Australia’s largest organisations to get maximum value from Office 365 deployments. We’ll help you to define your business goals and determine how Office 365 can help your business to perform better. To find out how we can help you, call us today on 1300 80 11 88.
