Thanks to advanced communication and collaboration tools available in today’s digital workplace, people can now work anywhere they choose.

There is always communication between teams, but physical proximity is no longer necessary for them to function well.

Remote Employment is the Work of the Future

Even though it’s unlikely that brick-and-mortar workplaces will go away anytime soon, the rise of the telecommuting workforce is undeniable. Currently, 38% of American workers do some or all of their jobs from part. That number is only expected to grow as communication and collaboration technologies work to advance at a rapid time. Workers in remote locations may include: 

• Employees, either full-time or part-time, who perform periodic work away from the office 
• Workers that are entirely remote from their workplace environment, whether full-time or part-time 
• Freelancers, consultants, and contractors that work independently, either whole or part-time  

There are several reasons why companies that don’t offer flexible work choices struggle to compete. When companies aren’t limited by geography, they have more freedom to find and hire the greatest people. Companies are learning the hard way that giving workers more control over their schedules and working conditions results in happier, more productive workers, which positively affects the bottom line. 

There has been rapid development in the digital workplace, with sophisticated tools for communication and collaboration empowering employees to work in whichever manner and location they see fit. While it is still essential for teams to work together, physically being in the same place is no longer necessary, given the prevalence of constant connectivity.

Despite its many advantages, the remote workforce is still in its infancy, and many companies have yet to figure out how to maximize its potential for productivity and employee engagement. Collaboration software and practices that put teams in the same position to be productive and company-centric, whether at the office, at home in pajamas, or halfway around the world, are essential to the success of a remote workforce. 

This is where SharePoint comes in. SharePoint is one of the most successful enterprise-level collaboration platforms in the world. Over the past two decades, Microsoft saw SharePoint grow to over 100 million users around the world. 

Microsoft 365  SharePoint Intranet  has the tools your employees need to boost your productivity. Below we share how to get the most out of your Microsoft 365 license when you use a SharePoint-based intranet to improve productivity and communication among your remote team. 

7 Reasons why SharePoint Intranet is for Your Remote Teams

1. Clear Communication- Share news instantly and stay informed

Your corporate intranet can become a virtual hub where your team meets to communicate effectively. 

SharePoint has the features and flexibility to customize the platform to mold this to your business needs. You can choose among various plug-in and play add-ins, workflows, and other widgets for your corporate intranet page. These tools can help your remote teams instantly search, store, or secure key company data. The portal helps companies disseminate information across your organization. This helps you organize information, people, and projects. 

You can also use SharePoint Add-ins like the Employee Directory as a central directory for your organization. People can easily search for employees’ information and share their contact details, skill sets, and current project lists. You can embed the add-in on your corporate intranet to connect your staff. 

Other add-ins like News Ticker and RSS Viewer share the latest news and snippets related to your company or industry. This helps your remote teams stay informed about changes in your organization.

2. A Great Collaboration Tool

It is vital to ensure Your remote team works together as a group collaborating on projects. SharePoint helps collaborators change documents simultaneously without delay. Co-authoring is a great way to get real-time feedback on your work and ideas. 

Also, SharePoint lists serve as project management tools to help remote teams collaborate more effectively. Remote team members can review the list of outstanding tasks, check deadlines, and dependencies, and communicate accordingly with concerned team members. 

Furthermore, we developed advanced collaboration add-ins like the SharePoint Knowledge Management add-in. It is a digital repository that stores your key company information. You can use the Knowledge Management add-in to share:

• Policies and procedures
•  FAQs
• Best practices
• Document templates
• Project requirement data, etc. 

Finally, employees can ask questions in real-time. Employees who are authorized to answer get email notifications about a new question on the platform.  

Depending on the privacy of the question, the answer can be privately emailed as well as publicly published if you wish. This add-in can also be easily embedded on your corporate intranet as a widget. 

3. Central document repository

SharePoint is awesome when it comes to storing crucial documents. They have an advanced search feature to ensure users can find the data they uploaded.

With SharePoint, you can share documents and files with your remote team at any given time from wherever you are on any device you choose to use.

These documents can be in formats like Word, Excel, PDF, image, or videos. You can also set user permissions for accessing, downloading, or editing these documents thus also setting up a secured system for storage of the crucial company files.

4. Encourage ideas

Your remote team members may not be close physically,  but it is important to never underestimate their ability to work together when it comes to innovative ideas.

Your intranet is a central platform where team members can post their innovative ideas, chats, pictures and more. By sharing this information, they can build their relationship, and improve employee engagement.

5. Intranet in your pocket

As companies adopt a mobile work environment it’s increasingly important for employees to have access to business content, anywhere they work, no matter the time of day or device.

With SharePoint Mobile and SharePoint Online, you can use your device to access company data from anywhere in the world. This means you can open, review, and edit documents with colleagues even when you’re not in the office. Note: To keep this digital environment secure, it is only accessible with a specific login URL and the right credentials.

Conclusion

Remote working has become the new normal for many organizations. Because it is still new for many companies, they are learning how to master this new organizational setup.

A robust and intuitive SharePoint intranet can help your team ease into this type of work scenario. Let’s start building a connected workplace for our remote teams and boost their productivity and collaboration with the best-in-class Intranet. Check out our SharePoint Intranet Examples here or contact us today. We are here to answer any questions you have on how to set up your intranet.

1. Create private channel

Teams owner can create a private channel to collaborate with specific members. Because it is a private channel,  only owner and members can access and view the content.
A private channel is useful in following scenarios:

a. When you need a space to collaborate with specific team members on a specific project.

b. When you need to share sensitive information like budgets, resourcing, or strategic positioning to specific people.

Currently, private channels do not support Stream, Planner, Forms tabs, and connectors.

You can create up to 30 private channels in a team and each channel can have a maximum of 250 members.

2. Cross Channel Posting

Sometimes you might have some information you want to share in multiple teams, which is why Microsoft introduced cross-channel posting.

The great benefit is that each post will have a separate identity and any reply to this post stays within the channel, which means members of other channels cannot see replies posted in other channels.

Users can select the specific channels where they want to post. Multi-channel posts can be sent to any channel in any team in which user is an owner or member.

3. Pin Channel

Some channels are more important and used more frequently in comparison to other channels. Depending on the number of Teams and channels you are part of, sometimes it becomes ifficult to find your relevant channels quickly. This would be a great reason to use the Pin Channel feature to pin your favorite or most used channels on the top.

The name of the team will appear under each pinned channel, so you can easily find  new content from the channel.

4. Announcements

Sometimes you have some important announcements to share with your peers that you need to highlight. In Microsoft Teams you can share announcements as well the headlines.

You can even choose if you want to give a image background or a specific color background to your announcement.

5. Priority Notification

Sometimes we want to share messages with people on urgent basis nd also want them to immediately respond to them. Using priority notifications feature can be best in such a senario. Teams has two types of priority notifications: “Important” and “Urgent”. When we select either option, it adds the word “IMPORTANT!” or “URGENT!” to the message.

Note: Urgent message will notify the recipient or group in each 2 minutes up to 20 minutes until they read the message.

Final Thoughts

As we continue to explore how to work with each other remotely, it is important to know the best ways to connect and collaborate effectively. The features we discussed above in Microsoft Teams can help you accomplish these goals.
We help companies like you by setting up Teams in your environment or any type of custom development, microsoft teams integrations, deployment and adoption needs you have.
If you have any additional questions on how to use Microsoft Teams for your organization, contact us today.