12 Ways Microsoft Teams Supports Frontline Workers

Frontline workers play a vital role in the health and success of our communities and economy. Their unique position in the workforce warrants supportive technologies, and Microsoft Teams has stepped in to ease many of the technical challenges frontline workers face. Teams makes it easier for frontline workers to connect with their customers, schedule meetings, and keep track of tasks in a streamlined way. By leveraging a more centralized and collaborative platform, frontline workers can take better care of their clients, teams, and selves. 

Here Are 12 Ways Frontline Workers Benefit from Teams:

Connecting Teams and Communities

One of the main challenges remote companies face is that employees are stationed across the country. But this doesn't have to hinder growth. Your team just has to make company culture and community a central feature of your application stack. For organic connections to happen, you want to make collaboration as easy as possible. Microsoft Teams helps teams and organizations to connect by:

• Sharing information for real-time communication - Through the Smart Camera feature, users can annotate and send pictures to one another. Teams has in-line translators so that employees can communicate across languages and cultures. Lastly, you can alert team members with priority notifications to ensure that they don't miss important information. 

• Effectively communicating with specific audiences - You can reach people in Teams by tagging the team members based on categories such as role or department. This makes it easy to share department specific updates, news, policies, and events. Compartmentalizing groups can also align with your security and IT governance initiatives - particularly those concerning data access and management. 

• Supporting hands-free and heads-up talk features - Users can enjoy a seamless push-to-talk experience by turning tablets and phones into walkie-talkies. This allows members to speak with their co-workers in real-time. The push-to-talk feature is convenient and secure, and works through WiFi or cellular data. 

• Discovering and connecting experts - RealWear video headsets allow employees to speak hands-free with experts from anywhere within their organization. This is particularly helpful for mechanical or manual work processes. 

Scheduling and Attendance 

Outdated scheduling processes make it difficult to coordinate shifts, time, and attendance. Constantly updating schedules and clocking in and out is a poor use of employer bandwidth and can easily result in inconsistencies. Teams helps alleviate these challenges by:

• Supporting digital and mobile scheduling tools - The Shifts scheduling application allows managers to plan schedules by either making one from scratch or importing one from Excel. With Shifts, employees can easily track their work schedules, request time off, and plan ahead. 

• Tracking time and attendance - Managers can set up Time Clock to ensure that members clock in from a designated worksite, and at their scheduled times. By automating this process, managers have a clearer view into their employees workflows, locations, and progress. 

Task Management 

Managers are responsible for managing multiple shifts, site locations, and staff teams with limited visibility into what their team is doing. Often times this leads to managers having difficulty tracking task status and completion. Microsoft Teams can help your team with task management by: 

• Distributing tasks from corporate workers to frontline workers - With Teams, corporate can create a task list, publish it to different locations, and then assign it to a manager, who can distribute the task to their employees with clear and detailed instructions. Everyone tagged on the task can monitor progress in real-time as corporate headquarters and managers get instant visibility of the task status.

• Centralizing project approvals - This allows frontline workers to collaborate, create, manage, and share approvals directly from a chat. Doing so will provide meaningful historical data and context to existing projects. 

• Making tasks straightforward - Employers can make tracking easy by having all tasks in one place in Teams. Once the task is completed, the frontline workers can attach a photo to show their completed work. Any other relevant completion requirements, such as additional documentation, is readily accessible.  

Community Engagement 

Organizations have been facing high levels of frontline employee burnout and turnover. As a business owner, you want to support your staff, company culture, and ongoing employee development initiatives. Creating a positive community can help with some of these challenges. Teams encourages employees to engage with one another and their organization by: 

• Allowing employees to build new skills faster - Through SharePoint, Stream, and Yammer, employees can gain access to easy content and communities for job-related learning. Not only is employee development key to retention, investment in learning can create opportunities for collaboration across different departments. 

• Virtual Town Hall meetings - Employees can meet one another through Town Hall meetings hosted through Teams Live Events. These meetings are a great place for business owners to share company-wide goals, policies, and news. Employees can network with one another, ask questions, and provide feedback in real-time.  

• Rewards - Recognition goes a long way in boosting team morale. Celebrate team members' accomplishments with customizable praise badges. These badges highlight exceptional leadership, team work, inclusivity, creativity, optimism, and more. 

If you want to learn more about how Microsoft Teams can help your business and frontline workers, contact us at iCorps for a free IT consultation.