4 Ways to Better Connect Employees in the Workplace

The work-life balance is being championed, meetings are being transformed, and companies are benefiting from technology in ways like never before.

Here Lee Johnson from Air IT discusses with CEO Today four simple ways any CEO can better connect their employees in the working environment.

Technology is making companies more intelligent, transforming time-heavy meetings, and helping to solve complex security issues.

Microsoft’s Modern Workplace helps businesses stay on the cutting edge of technology. The question is – how can businesses make new advances to connect and support their employees and foster a cultural transformation?

Tools like Microsoft Teams enable all employees to edit and comment on a document simultaneously and in real-time, encouraging innovation and making work much more efficient and transparent.

Collaboration Tools

The days of writing a document, emailing it, waiting for a colleague to make tracked changes and send it back to you are up.

Cloud collaboration tools, such as Microsoft 365, can offer a range of benefits to your workforce, helping companies to achieve more together by better connecting them, and empowering employees to get work done from anywhere, on any device.

Tools like Microsoft Teams enable all employees to edit and comment on a document simultaneously and in real-time, encouraging innovation and making work much more efficient and transparent. Everyone can access the most up-to-date document, eliminating the risk of multiple versions of one document saved in different locations.

Meetings are useful for collaboration, but it’s estimated that businesses lose $37 billion in unnecessary meet ups per year. Advances in technology can provide audio and visual services based on the device type, enabling a high-quality meeting experience, that people can join and leave when they wish.

Let Them Work Mobile

Modern offices can’t hold back on offering the option to work from home anymore. It’s a necessity that, if you want to attract the best pool of talent, has to be available for your team.

In the last decade, mobile workforces have increased by more than 100%. New developments in technology like cloud communications and collaboration tools have made it easier for employees to work from home, and minimise the disconnect that can happen when team members are separated.

It’s also proven that employers who have a work from home policy have improved productivity due to less distractions, reduced office costs and higher employee retention. Advanced enterprise cloud technology has made it possible for employees to access the data and resources they need from almost anywhere, on any device. It also reduces the number of employees commuting, having a positive effect on their carbon footprint.

Bring Your Own Device

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategies, which offer the choice for employees to work and access corporate data and accounts from their own devices, are booming. Cisco recently claimed that it gained $300 million a year in employee time whilst Intel saw an annual productivity gain of around five million hours.

Of course, protecting corporate data is a huge concern for businesses. But technologies like Microsoft Intune can be leveraged to safeguard data and intellectual property.

Intune manages phones, PCs and tablets to reassure the business that a device is in the possession of the correct and intended user. Intune also implements other security issues for best practice, such as making sure that all devices have passwords with strong parameters.

By governing all devices, you’re much more likely to prevent any data falling into the wrong hands. Through compartmentalisation, you can control which apps to install on a user’s device without intruding on their personal usage and right to privacy.

You can also remove devices by wiping, retiring or manually un-enrolling them, to avoid any leavers having access to confidential data.

Open Communications

Employees are more at ease when they have visibility into the work environment, what its objectives are and where it is heading. Group messaging tools like Microsoft Teams offer full transparency, ensuring everyone is kept in the loop at all times, and foster a “we’re all in this together” mantra. You no longer need to repeat information to absent or new members of the team; they can catch up anytime, anywhere with fully integrated voice and video.

You can restrict teams or channels to specific users, and track discussions related to various projects. You can also assign email addresses to channels, so if something happens that all of the team need to be aware of, an email will automatically insert into the channel.

Modern meetings and messaging enables employees to have quick, real-time conversations and stay in constant contact with one another, reducing the incidence of lengthy email chains by staggering amounts. As the number of remote workers rises, open communication will become a must for your team.

No matter the workforce, technology is opening doors for businesses everywhere in their quest to achieve the modern workplace and prepare their employees for a new culture of work.

With the right digital tools, businesses large and small can offer services to empower employees, and help them to work as smartly and as flexible as they possibly can.