These days, the traditional office setup has evolved. For many employees, it’s now a spare room in their home, their kitchen table, a quiet coffee shop or anywhere they can find reliable WiFi!
Yet while remote and hybrid work models offer valuable flexibility, teams often struggle to effectively communicate in this environment. It’s harder to feel connected to your colleagues without the in-person interactions that foster team cohesion. The different work schedules also often mean delayed responses that slow projects down.
To address these challenges, many organizations are turning to Microsoft Teams for remote work management. The platform bridges the gap between distributed teams and traditional workplace environments, offering a central hub for various Microsoft productivity solutions.
Despite its popularity, many teams only scratch the surface of what Teams can do. Let’s explore five innovative tools in Microsoft Teams that spark creativity and promote collaboration.
Remote Work Calls for the Right Tools—Not Just More of Them
Many assume that investing in a wide range of technologies will translate to a better remote work setup.
But remote collaboration tools won’t make work life easier if they don’t align with your team’s objectives. A sprawling array of unstrategic software and platforms just creates confusion, hinders communication, and makes it harder to stay organized with core tasks.
Microsoft Teams streamlines communication, file sharing, and project management, making collaboration far more efficient. The program consolidates multiple functions into one place, so your staff can spend less time juggling between different apps and searching for information in multiple inboxes or chat threads.
Effective remote and hybrid work technology should also provide a good user experience. A feature-packed tool is only useful if it’s intuitive to adopt; if your interfaces are complicated and clunky, your team will just be frustrated and less productive. But when staff can quickly grasp collaboration tools, they’ll feel empowered to do their best work in a cohesive environment.
Innovative Microsoft Teams Features for Upleveling Your Operations
If you’re already a user, you likely know about the basic Microsoft Teams features for
meetings and chatting. But there’s a lot more to explore! Here are five great tools that many users don’t know about:
- Announcements: Broadcast Messages Like You’re in the Office
In a physical office, sharing important updates can be as simple as gathering your team into one room or even calling something out over your cubicles.
In Microsoft Teams, the Announcement feature offers a digital version of that experience to enhance your remote work productivity. You have the ability to highlight key messages—whether about an upcoming project, meeting, team event or other news worth a can’t miss, teamwide alert—by displaying them as a banner at the top of a channel post.
These announcements are highly customizable:
- Add a title, upload an image, and even mark them as important with a red exclamation point to make them stand out.
- Post in a single channel or shared across multiple channels at once. If needed, you can also send them via Outlook for broader visibility.
- Create a custom announcement background using Microsoft Designer, where you can even use AI to turn simple text instructions into fully rendered visuals or browse existing templates for ideas.
- Whiteboard & Mural: Brainstorm in Real-Time, Virtually
Visual collaboration is really important for creating a shared sense of clarity where everyone in your workplace aligns on projects and goals.
Microsoft Teams offers two great features for visual brainstorming:
- Whiteboard: This digital whiteboard for teams brings the feel of a boardroom into your virtual meetings. On a shared digital canvas, participants can sketch, write, and brainstorm ideas in real time. You can add sticky notes, text, shapes, and even reactions to quickly offer your opinions. Templates are also available to help structure these collaborative sessions more effectively.
- Mural: This Microsoft Teams integration similarly makes organizing ideas and planning projects more engaging and effective. Using this app, employees can create and brainstorm together using diagrams, sticky notes, and templates in one centralized visual collaboration app. While Whiteboard is helpful for meetings, Mural supports asynchronous communication: you can add a Mural as a tab to any chat or channel in Teams, making it easy to revisit and continue collaboration whenever needed.
- Together Mode: Recreate the Meeting Room Experience
Together Mode brings a sense of presence to Microsoft Teams meetings. The virtual meeting software uses AI segmentation technology to place participants, up to 40 at a time, in a shared background, making it look and feel as though everyone is in the same room.
Your meeting’s organizer can assign seating for each participant, and you have the option to customize your background to reflect your organization’s branding or culture.
While it’s not necessary for everyone to use the feature, it works best when everyone has their camera on. When all meeting attendees are visible at once, it’s easier to pick up on body language, see how people react to each other, and keep the conversation flowing more naturally.
- Customized Channels: Organized, Ongoing Collaboration
Much like teams working together in a physical office, Microsoft Teams channels offer a streamlined way to manage projects and collaborate efficiently.
You can use channels to create various sub-sections within each team, essentially individualized team communication platforms that are tailored to reflect your organization’s structure, ongoing projects, or specific goals. Benefits include:
- Shared Space: Each channel offers a communal environment where members can meet, communicate, and collaborate on documents in a central location. By choosing to ‘follow’ a channel, team members can stay in the loop with any associated updates and activity.
- Contextual meetings: You can schedule meetings directly within a channel, making all related materials—chats, documents, and transcripts—easy to access and searchable within the ongoing conversation.
- Operation-specific functionality: Users can even leverage integrated Microsoft Teams apps to customize the experience further: messaging and meeting extensions, bots, connections to various web services, and more.
- Optimizing Hybrid Work with AI-Powered Tools
Introduced in fall 2024, Teams Premium users can now access Microsoft Places, an artificial intelligence app and powerful hybrid work technology for optimizing in-office days.
Employees working in person can see who is nearby to coordinate meetups or use the application to book desks and meeting rooms. You can even leverage its algorithm to determine recommended in-office days based on existing schedules, helping your team make the most of face-to-face collaboration while reducing unnecessary commutes.
Microsoft Teams also integrates with Copilot to use AI to enhance your experience in other ways: automating notetaking, creating meeting summaries, drafting messages, catching up on chats, and more.
Need Help with Microsoft 365? We’re Here to Support You
If your organization isn’t using Microsoft Teams yet, switching your communication system might not feel appealing. Who wants to train employees on new software and uproot their existing routines? And if your workplace already uses Teams, you might be concerned about overwhelming staff with unfamiliar features or sudden changes.
But adopting new technologies doesn’t have to be stressful with the right IT partner.
At designDATA, we help businesses unlock the full potential of Microsoft 365 with tailored implementation, training, and support
Want to get more from Microsoft Teams? Our experts can help you use your collaboration tools strategically to boost productivity, no matter where your team is located. Let’s connect to discuss how we can train your team for long-term remote work success.
