Think you know Teams? Well, if you’re only using this powerful platform to help office-based employees communicate and share information, you need to think again.

Because Teams isn’t just for remote or desk-based workers; it can be a core hub for your entire workforce, embracing frontline or field-based professionals.

• It has enabled medical professionals to stay in touch with patients.
• It has helped government agencies to deliver services more flexibly.
• It has changed the way retail employees work.
• And more.

Become people-first for all your people
Teams can be a middleware layer for your workplace ecosystem, enabling customized experiences for all employee groups. For businesses with frontline workers, Teams becomes the perfect canvas to create a supercharged workplace experience, with huge potential across industries like healthcare, manufacturing, retail and more.

The inherent flexibility and extensibility of Teams allows you to be more people-first – building differentiated, branded experiences – as well as new applications – tailored to your workforce and your customers. You can introduce workflow automation, improve communication, drive productivity, fuel information sharing, and protect well-being for workers no matter where they’re based (in the office, on the road or on the frontline).

Here are six ways you can harness the Teams opportunity to enhance experiences for every type of employee in every environment.

1. Tailor experiences for end users
Microsoft Teams enables you to construct a workplace experience ecosystem that meets the needs of your entire workforce – by orchestrating the right blend of apps and interfaces to support the working practices of specific groups. When embracing Teams as part of a data-driven, people-first approach to your workplace experience, you can design your ecosystem to augment specific employee groups in their roles, according to their working locations, devices and practices.

2. Integrate your core services
Harness Teams to centralize and bring critical employee applications and data sources into the flow of work – such as HR apps, facilities and IT support, payroll, time recording, expenses, health and safety guidance, and more. Teams enables a more seamless experience for all employees, by providing access to everything in one place – eliminating complexity and breeding consistency.

3. Protect employee well-being
The great resignation era is here, and a significant proportion of employees are reporting they feel burnt out. As the pace of work accelerates, protecting employee well-being is increasingly critical to everything from productivity and customer experience through to recruitment and retention. By embracing Teams as a core work hub (with workplace analytics delivered by Viva Insights), you’ll be able to bring disparate workplace data streams together and help HR leaders to access actionable, real-time insights around wellbeing, which can be used to implement a better work-life balance.

4. Modernize workflows
By unlocking the potential of Power Platform alongside Teams, you gain the ability to modernize legacy systems and automate previously manual tasks. For both desk-based and frontline employees, this results in the simplification of day-to-day working practices – supporting a better employee “user experience” – as well as accelerating productivity. From the business’s perspective, this also offers the opportunity to reduce costs, improve agility, and enhance resilience.

5. Engage with employees
Through enhanced collaborative capabilities for non-desktop devices, and branded intranets for news, events and information, Teams centralizes and personalizes interactions with employees. That means you’ll be able to improve employee engagement – simplifying communication from corporate functions out to teams in the office, in the field or on the front line. And, as a two-way communication channel, Teams also enables you to create a feedback loop that empowers the voice of every employee. This allows you to source innovation or product and service optimisation opportunities.

6. Connect with your customers
Teams augments your CX by empowering customer-facing professionals to respond faster and more effectively. Through Teams, you can enable your frontline teams on the ground to provide personalized customer care with relevant product recommendations, tailored customer service, and accurate inventory and fulfilment information. Or, if you’re adopting a hybrid model, you can enable virtual customer care by embracing Teams to facilitate remote sales and service support.

Shape Teams to your needs
We work with organizations across the globe and across a variety of sectors to solve challenges beyond desk-based collaboration scenarios. We’ve worked with clients to develop oil rig shift management systems, doctor and patient collaboration capabilities, even applications to speed up and improve the maintenance and management of airplanes – and much more.

Teams can open a world of possibilities for your business and transform your workplace. As Microsoft’s #1 Teams deployment partner, Avanade can help you understand how to maximize your investment. Contact us to find out how to build the ultimate workplace hub through a Teams-centric approach – while also capitalizing on the potential of Viva and Power Platform – to enhance your workplace experience.

Learn how Avanade is enabling clients to renew their workplace approach to grow their business and their people.