In today’s post-pandemic world, workplaces have experienced a major shift that has caused priorities and perspectives to evolve. As businesses have been transforming digitally at a rapid pace, a new dawn has broken out, one characterized by the rise of remote and hybrid work models.
The debate over the efficiency of remote or office work models was only a point of focus last year. However, the current year has witnessed businesses, unhesitatingly, adapting to office productivity tools despite their work models. The rise in the popularity of work productivity and collaboration solutions can be attributed to the increased efficiency and their capacity to overcome geographical obstacles for international teams.
Challenges Businesses Face Without Productivity Tools
Covid-19, as destructive of a force as it was for the world, put spotlight on some rather ignored aspects over how businesses used to function in the past. It highlighted the discrepancies that were always there without ever being unaddressed. These discrepancies hindered optimized productivity and caused high travel and operational costs.
Businesses relied on dissociated tools for collaboration: Unconnected productivity tools spread over international offices meant none of the employees were on the same page. Even if they did the same kind of work, they did it on various tools which made it difficult for them to collaborate on each other’s data.
Businesses did not have a unified data source: Organizational data being stored in computers instead of the cloud meant data being spread over a variety of devices and none of it was accessible remotely. This meant employees had to travel to access another team’s data, which was highly counterproductive and cost inefficient.
Businesses relied only on emails as a form of intra-organizational communication: Emails, as popular as they are, as a redundant form of communication and do not support seamless collaboration between more than two employees. They are counterproductive and often difficult to keep track of.
Data retrieval and data security were alien concepts for businesses: Data stored on multiple sources without any enterprise-grade security meant unprotected data, prone to virus and malware attacks. Moreover, data stored on hard drives made it difficult for businesses to retrieve data in case of any attacks because the backups are often stored on the same drives.
With Covid, and the remote work culture, businesses suffered when these discrepancies emerged as travel and office were shut down. This caused perceptions to evolve, and businesses noticed their dependence on enterprise-level, all-in-one collaborations tools which maximized productivity and streamlined intra-organizational communication.
Microsoft 365, the Perfect Business Partner
Previously known as Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft 365 is an enterprise-grade collaborative suite of integrated applications that increases office productivity and enhances collaboration. Microsoft 365 provides business intelligence capabilities with familiar applications like Word and Excel.
It is subscription based and caters to organizations of all sizes, from small and medium to large enterprises. Business can choose its basic, standard, and premium subscriptions based on their needs. The subscription is annual and tenant-based, which means it is easily scalable.
According to Forrester, the Total Economic Impact of Microsoft 365 is:
- It brings businesses an ROI of 163%
- It improves user productivity by 1 hour per week which means 3500 hours (about 5 months) for a company of 70 employees
- The productivity recapture rate for businesses was measured to be around 50%
7 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Microsoft 365
Secure Cloud-based Data Storage: Organizations with subscription to Microsoft 365 employ OneDrive and SharePoint for cloud storage. These provide the efficiency of cloud with enterprise-level security, which protects organizational data from external harm. SharePoint Online enables employees to access data while seamlessly collaborating on documents and access to version history further enhances productivity levels.
Seamless Transition to Remote Work: By subscribing to Microsoft 365, employees are geared with all the necessary communication, productivity, cloud access and assistive tools, accessible remotely. This allows businesses to be prepared for remote transition without any difficulty if the need arises. Furthermore, it provides employees with the flexibility to take their work wherever they go.
Enhances Employee Experience: Most employees are already familiar with Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Microsoft 365 implementation provides these applications with added productivity features. Familiarity with these tools saves training time and boosts employee productivity. Furthermore, with integrating Microsoft Viva in 365, employee experience is improved in five key areas: engagement, wellbeing, learning, objectives, and knowledge. Employees can improve their workflows and upgrade their skillsets through Viva’s extensions and partner apps like Viva Connections, Viva Engage, Viva Insights, Viva Pulse, Viva Glint, Viva Topics, Viva Learning, and Viva Goals.
Decreases Travel and Operation Costs: Microsoft 365 provides a suite of integrated applications that provides tools catering to business communication, productivity, cloud storage and other business apps. This suite capability minimizes the cost spent on separate subscription of separated unconnected apps. Furthermore, with enterprise-grade support, businesses can significantly reduce IT support costs. By enabling remote access of data stored on the Cloud, managers do not have to travel to various company outlets to retrieve data.
Unified Data: OneDrive centralizes all organizational data in one place, on the cloud. Data stored in one place enables easy manageability of data and empowers employees to independently access and explore data without any data experts. SharePoint empowers employees to seamlessly share business data files from a single data source.
Modern Workplace for Your Business: Microsoft 365 provides every tool and functionality, and employee needs in their workspace. From Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, Microsoft enables employees to easily integrate calendar, goal tracking, time management and even notification managements tools. These help employees organize their tasks and enhance productivity, while managing time. Furthermore, with Copilot integrations in 365 apps, employees can leverage the power of generative AI to power through their work tasks.
Enhanced Collaboration and Communication: Teams, Outlook and Yammer provide an interactive space for employees to engage and collaborate. Discussion threads and sharing capabilities allows employees to broaden their knowledge horizons and innovate more. Teams is integrated with several business applications (based on your subscription plans) that enable employees to collaborate on documents, content calendars, presentations, whiteboards and more.
Maximize Your Business Productivity with Dynamics Solution and Technology
By digitizing your employee work processes and empowering your data with cloud functionalities, you can save time and invest it in other productive avenues. Furthermore, with your IT team free from menial troubleshooting tasks, can employee their prowess in automating company processes and invest their energy in innovation.
To get an increased ROI and heightened productivity with Microsoft 365 implementation, you need a trusted implementation partner like Dynamics Solution and Technology. With years of unparalleled experience and an extended range of satisfied and digitally transformed clienteles in GULF and Mena regions, we are proud Microsoft Gold and Solutions Partner in Microsoft’s vision of digital transformation of businesses globally.
To gain perspective on which subscription model for Microsoft 365 suits your business, contact us now and get a prompt personalized demo.
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