The need for the modern workplace
Today’s enterprises rely on new business models, distributed teams, and complex security issues. So people require the right digital tools to connect and network with their peers from where they are to encourage collaboration, engagement, and productivity. This has increased the need for a modern workplace that packages all the workplace productivity apps, security tools, and business processes together that are being widely used on a day-to-day basis.
Microsoft Teams has evolved as the modern workplace toolkit that transforms teams to work together with options like channels and deep Office 365 and third-party integrations. Embedding project management capabilities and moving meetings into Teams are remarkable and have impacted the collaboration experience in a positive way. Many leading enterprises say that they see changes in how their employees collaborate using Teams and bring management into businesses.
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Quoting ‘sales’ as an example in a modern workplace
Creating modern workplaces have lead to company-wide transformation and has changed the nature of the company’s products, services, and business models by inspiring employees, optimizing operations, and engaging customers.
Let’s see how a modern workplace can help simplify the lives of employees and enable them to focus on what they should be actually doing.
Lets’ take, for example, the sales process which is the very crucial part of any business that takes your products and services across the table to potential customers. So it’s very important that your salespeople live and breathe your business services and solutions and continue getting them across without any distractions. Pretty much sales process in all the enterprises requires a lot of digital tools to swiftly execute day-to-day business activities starting from managing leads through converting them into opportunities and onboarding clients. Few times, they may come across lead re-engagement situations where the leads may not be really sales-ready yet and they have to be handed over back to the marketing team.
Sales is not a standalone process and cannot work in silos. To nurture relationships with the inbound leads and to redirect lead re-engagement, they need to collaborate with the marketing department. For successful client onboarding, multiple teams are involved including operations, IT, finance and HR. On the other hand, project management and issue tracking system (ticketing software) require a different platform entirely – to all of which sales team is definitely a part of. It’s clear that there are a lot of independent systems involved in the sales process and operating in silos takes a lot of manual effort to communicate the details to every team consuming time and productivity. Moreover, disparate systems make it difficult to keep track of what’s happening within the organization and get the work done on time. A modern workplace can address a whole lot of productivity, collaboration, and engagement challenges and help manage businesses more efficiently at a fraction of cost.
Leveraging O365 services to build modern workplaces
The main idea behind a modern workplace is providing employees with all the digital tools they need in a consolidated way and automating labor-intensive, repetitive, and time-consuming manual tasks can accelerate business growth and fasten time-to-market. Office 365 ecosystem is a classic example that provisions the right tools and technologies that allow for end-to-end customizations. To mention Azure cloud, SharePoint, Teams, Power BI and others help address day-to-day business challenges more efficiently using a consolidated approach delivering unified user experience.
For instance, Azure cloud services help meet your business challenges by giving you the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications in a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks. Needless to say, Teams is a unified communication platform that brings together all your workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration into a central hub. Whereas SharePoint is a document management and storage system that is highly configurable and its usage substantially varies among organizations. When you take Power BI, it helps visualize data through interactive, real-time dashboards and analytics from different sources and generates actionable insights to act on it immediately and there are many such apps in Office 365 that cater to a myriad of business needs on a day-to-day basis.
A typical modern workplace is explained below:
Teams has evolved as a modern workplace collaboration tool that supports integrations and its many avenues for customizations bring all the people and content into a centralized hub. Integrating various business process tools such as MS Dynamics, ServiceNow, Workday, JIRA, SharePoint, Power BI, etc. into Teams, clipping the most frequently used applications/files/content into the Teams tab, and creating identical channels for each project to start over business conversations bringing all the teams together on a common platform help boost collaboration, teamwork, and productivity. Enabling single login feasibility directly from Teams to different business applications helps employees focus on their core tasks rather than spending productive hours on multiple email follow-ups or switching between applications that can distract employees during work.
Process automation and RPA
Again there’s no predefined modern workplace model as it keeps evolving with new trends and changing business needs. The ultimate goal of a modern workplace is to provide the necessary digital tools that employees require and replace their manual effort by automating routine and repetitive processes that help them focus on the revenue-generating core tasks. Needless to say, business process automation is an inevitable part of a modern workplace which makes your business processes much more transparent and improves accountability. And from a long-term perspective, you begin to notice faster turnaround times and reduction in costs due to limited manual interventions. So it’s better off automating recurring, labor-intensive tasks that can enable business efficiency leading to continuous process improvements. For example, unanswered or follow-up calls in the CRM can be triggered as alert notifications to the respective salesperson that prevents him/her from going through the entire list every time consuming productive hours.
How AVASOFT can help build a modern workplace?
AVASOFT realized that understanding Microsoft Teams and its many avenues for customization would be critical to expand modern workplace offerings. AVASOFT created numerous custom apps and reusable components to centralize the modern workplace focus around Microsoft Teams and make the transition to Teams highly usable. By meeting various stakeholders of existing business processes and continuously learning how various teams work, AVASOFT team creates custom workflows ensuring full coverage for all the roles involved and user personas that show role-specific dashboards with updates, meetings, events, and tasks list when users login to their Teams portal. With these processes in mind, solutions utilizing components like the SharePoint Framework (SPFx), adaptive cards, the Microsoft Bot Framework are proposed to integrate custom incident management dashboards into Teams tabs, help manage and govern Teams with automated archival bots, as well as build vertical-specific conversational bots for shipment and delivery tracking.
That said, it’s clear that AVASOFT redefines the modern workplace experience and simplifies the lives of users by further optimizing Teams as the one-stop solution for all their business needs on a day-to-day basis and automating repetitive manual tasks. Whether it is migration of an existing collaboration platform like Slack or just the need for a Teams collaboration and governance strategy, AVASOFT has real hands-on experience in handling several projects of unique requirements across a myriad of industry verticals.
