The format of work in companies has changed dramatically: most organizations today adhere to a flexible hybrid schedule, while some have completely switched to remote work. The new format requires new methods of organizing work.
On the one hand, employees strive for flexibility and do not want to be tied to a rigid office routine. On the other hand, companies must create flexible workplaces for employees that meet modern realities.
How to do this as effectively as possible and with minimal costs? So that employees feel comfortable wherever they are, and so that they perform their tasks no less efficiently than in the office. This is what this article is about.
Companies face four major challenges in building a flexible workplace.
- Establishing communication. Companies need to give employees the ability to always be connected, regardless of their schedule or location. That is, it is necessary to provide them with tools with which they can perform their duties and have access to the information they need from anywhere at any time from any device.
- IT security. How to make access to organization resources across different locations and devices secure? In the solutions we will discuss, this issue is resolved by multi-factor authentication. Before an employee uses their account to work in the cloud with Microsoft products or with the SmartPoint Intranet portal, additional verification occurs. This could be a one-time password sent to their email or phone, a fingerprint, a face scan, etc.
- Maintaining productivity. How to organize work in such a way that teams work productively, regardless of where employees are located? This will be discussed below, in particular when we look at the Microsoft Teams and SharePoint tools, which provide shared access to documents and other company resources.
- Developing corporate culture. Building a company culture and HR brand can be challenging when employees work remotely, sometimes in different countries. How can you make sure they don’t feel abandoned and alienated? It is necessary to provide convenient access to important information about the company, corporate news, and documents outlining the principles and rules of the organization. Among other things, this will save time of HR specialists and other employees who are involved in onboarding and training new employees. We will talk about tools that help solve these and other issues below.
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Microsoft 365 tools and their capabilities
Most Microsoft 365 tools are well known. Some are relatively new and may be unfamiliar to many users. Let’s take a look at each of them.
Word is a common document creation program that is used to prepare various types of content. It allows you to structure your thoughts using templates, and built-in features such as reviewing and spell checking that make it easier to work with texts. What’s important is that this tool allows you to co-author a document: make edits, mention colleagues, discuss the text directly in the program. Each participant in the process does not need a copy of the document on their device. In addition, since Microsoft products are integrated into one system, when one of the participants is mentioned, they receive a message in Outlook. There is no need to constantly check to see if anyone has edited the text or made a comment.
Excel is a powerful product for creating spreadsheets, structuring and processing any data, including, for example, analytical data obtained in Power BI. Like Word, it has versioning, which means you can view the version history of a document and see the changes made by those who worked on it. This is a handy feature, especially when employees are collaborating on spreadsheets in a hybrid format.
PowerPoint is a convenient tool for creating powerful presentations. Numerous built-in templates make your work easier and allow you to create a presentation in different styles and different structures. It also provides additional visualization capabilities such as 3-D animation. With PowerPoint, it is also possible to work remotely and track version history.
OneNote is a digital notepad that allows you to record and organize your thoughts. No matter where and on what device an employee works, they will always have access to their notes. You can divide your notes into blocks or create multiple notebooks in one OneNote. If necessary, you can share the notebook with colleagues. It also has a separate drawing tab with the ability to use different colors, allowing you to quickly visualize ideas.
Outlook is an email program that does more than just send and receive emails. It has a calendar where scheduled events and tasks are displayed. For example, it will automatically include meetings in Microsoft Teams to which an employee is invited. This calendar can be shared with colleagues so they can schedule meetings based on the available time of everyone involved in the meeting. Outlook can also be integrated with To Do and some Viva tools, which we will talk about below. These tools can be pinned to the email service panel and used from a single window.
Microsoft Teams is a powerful communication tool and a complete teamwork hub. It provides instant messaging, audio and video calls. It enables meetings, as well as streaming and webinars. At the same time, users can group communications and create separate teams and channels within teams. However, Microsoft Teams is not only a communication tool. In each chat – individual, team or channel – you can share documents and other resources needed for work, store them there, and collaborate on them. Thus, Microsoft Teams allows teams to work efficiently from a single window without being distracted by unnecessary steps.
To Do helps organize the work of each employee by scheduling all the necessary tasks and setting their priority. The tool has a reminder feature. Its content can also be shared with colleagues, and it integrates with another organizer, Planner.
Planner. While To Do is more about a personal task list, Planner is designed to organize teamwork. It can be integrated with the SmartPoint Intranet corporate portal and thus planning can be carried out directly on the portal. Both Planner and To Do help you group tasks, track their completion, analyze progress, and work on improving productivity.
SharePoint is a collection of software products and collaboration components, including for building intranets, that is, corporate portals, common spaces for teams and the organization as a whole. The SmartPoint Intranet portal was created based on SharePoint.
Viva is a relatively recent Microsoft product that includes several tools for informing, developing and engaging employees.
- Viva Connections allows an organization to concentrate the most relevant services, products, resources, news from the corporate portal and SharePoint sites and other in one place. All these resources that employees need for daily work are collected on a single board in the form of cards. A separate block is configured for each employee; it displays the SharePoint sites he or she most frequently visits.
- Viva Engage allows a company to build an internal social network in which you can create separate communities, grouped by topic, publish posts, and involve colleagues in discussing them. Posts can be published by both administrators and each group member.
- Viva Insight analyzes the online activity of each employee during the day, sends them an analytical report and gives advice on how to improve their efficiency. For example, spend less time in meetings or take breaks more often so as not to overwork. Analytics and advice are addressed exclusively to the employee and are not available to anyone else.
- Viva Topics makes it possible to group the knowledge base around certain topics: add to each one the necessary documents, resources, as well as contacts of experts related to it. Thus, anyone in the organization, including new employees, can quickly become familiar with the topic they need or ask for advice from the relevant specialist.
- Viva Learning is a place for employee training, where you can collect all the tools and resources for development. In particular, you can connect courses from various external providers, such as LinkedIn or Coursera.
- Viva Goals helps set goals for teams and the organization as a whole, align work processes with them and track progress towards achieving them.
- Viva Sales makes it easy to obtain useful analytics and automate routine tasks for sales people, freeing up their time for communicating with customers.
Benefits and capabilities of SmartPoint Intranet
The SmartPoint Intranet corporate portal is a modern digital environment that has everything necessary for employee collaboration, developing the company’s HR culture, building your own knowledge center, providing information, etc. It is convenient to use for a single sign-on to the entire variety of resources that the organization uses, including corporate websites, pages on social media and other platforms and resources, working documents, etc. In addition, it contains separate areas for teams to work, as well as personal accounts for each employee with their own set of necessary services.
It is important that the portal can be accessed at any time from any location and device, including tablets or mobile phones, which provides the necessary flexibility in its use.
The SmartPoint Intranet portal consists of several modules:
The HR module contains an organizational structure with two visualizations (by employee and by department), an employee directory containing cards with personal data, as well as an office map and a corporate calendar. There may also be a separate board with information about the owners of the company and its key employees.
Personal workspaces make it possible to provide each employee with a personalized digital workspace that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, with just a device and internet access. The account contains everything an employee needs for effective work, including calendar, own knowledge base, personal tools and services, and a chat bot.
Team workspaces respectively contain everything necessary for the work of individual teams. Anything that may be useful for collaboration can be stored here: documents, resources, tools, etc. This way, teams will have everything they need in one place to complete work tasks together.
Intranet CMS is a portal content page designer. It allows you to organize and communicate to employees all the necessary information in the form of logical blocks. There may be a corporate library, sections dedicated to the company’s mission and vision, materials for onboarding, and various corporate rules, such as rules for visiting the office.
The media library consists of three blocks: video gallery, photo gallery and external videos. Here you can store any corporate photo and video materials that may be of interest to employees: from photo reports from corporate events to video recordings from conferences the company participated in.
News is a separate module for organizing and presenting corporate news with categorization tools.
Microsoft 365 and SmartPoint Intranet: a single work environment
Setting up team workspaces in SmartPoint Intranet is flexible enough to accommodate the needs of both the organization as a whole and individual teams. The number of such workspaces may correspond to the number of departments or divisions of the company. Moreover, each department can have their workspace on the portal customized differently. For example, such an area could contain sections for recording and storing ideas, publishing news, working with a document library, etc. Of course, there is also a common portal document library.
Whether you want to create a new Word document, Excel, or PowerPoint presentation to collaborate on, portal integration with Microsoft 365 allows you to do so directly from your SmartPoint Intranet workspace. That is, such workspaces are self-sufficient digital mini offices with everything necessary for teamwork.
As we mentioned previously, Microsoft Teams itself allows employees and teams to use it to work from a single window. This is also thanks to the tight integration with the SmartPoint Intranet portal.
You can pin the portal button to the quick access panel and work with it directly in the Teams window. In addition, each portal workspace has a separate team in Microsoft Teams. Documents in work of these teams are synchronized with documents in their respective workspaces. From the workspace you can access the chat of the corresponding team and vice versa with one click of a button.
In such sections of the portal as the organizational structure (with visualization by employees) and the employee directory, in addition to other information, you can immediately see the current status of each employee in Microsoft Teams. Right from these sections, you can switch to a chat, call or schedule a meeting, which will appear in all calendars: on the portal, in Teams and Outlook. All these features eliminate unnecessary steps in organizing communication.
The already mentioned Viva Connections, which allows a company to concentrate the most relevant and necessary portal resources for work on one board, is also conveniently viewed from a single window in Microsoft Teams. To do this, pin the corresponding button on the quick access panel. Let us remind you that in addition to the general board, Viva Connections contains an individual block with information on a topic of interest to a specific employee.
Thus, an employee can start their working day by opening Microsoft Teams, go to Viva Connections in the same window, read important information – both company-wide and personalized – then go to their work area or any other area of SmartPoint Intranet in the same window to continue work using portal-integrated Microsoft 365 tools.
Conclusion
The SmartPoint Intranet corporate portal, combined with Microsoft 365 tools, enables organizations to create a flexible, self-sufficient work environment for seamless collaboration. Employees receive their own digital office, teams – separate work areas containing all the necessary tools and resources for collaboration. All this is combined into a corporate space capable of harmonizing and optimizing business processes within the company.
If you’d like to learn more about how to set up a flexible work environment in your SmartPoint Intranet portal with Microsoft 365 tools, order a consultation with SMART business experts.
