How can Office 365 enable smart working?

The Office 365 user community met on Thursday 14th November to establish how Office 365 can support smart working.  

Topic #1 – Communication 

On the 5th of November alone, over 200k emails were received at the University whilst only 40k were sent. Holding such a large volume of information in our mailbox means that we’re spending a lot of time searching and sifting through emails when we need to recall something.  

Solutions offered by the Office 365 user community 

• Instant messaging is a fast way to move live conversations away from your email and reduce the need to meet in-person to discuss something, which saves time.  
• Sign in to Skype for Business (and arguably Teams) when you sign in to your laptop or PC in the morning. When you search for a colleague and they haven’t signed in, it forces you to resort to email. 
• If you’re describing something on your screen like a PowerPoint presentation share your screen through Teams or Skype for Business. 
• Mobile apps are useful for communicating with colleagues. 
• Like someone’s message in Teams to indicate you’ve read it. 

Extra tips from IT 

If you like to discuss a one-off task as group, set up a group chat in Teams. Upload relevant files and rename it so you can find it easily later. From this chat, you can also host video meetings and share your screen. 

If you find yourself sifting through emails to find attachments, you can save any email attachment directly to OneDrive by right-clicking the attachment in Outlook, select “Upload > OneDrive”. Or you can automate this process entirely by setting up a Flow to save all email attachments to a OneDrive folder. This saves you downloading the file locally to your machine. See this link for more information about setting up an attachment Flow. 

Topic #2 – Working as part of a team 

As the University is made up of over 60 locations, it’s important that we can work together and manage deadlines from anyway. 

Solutions offered by the Office 365 user community 

• Connect a Planner board to your Microsoft Team to assign tasks to different people in a visible area.
• Share meeting minutes before a meeting in Teams so everyone doesn’t need to record their own version and it can be easily accessed afterwards.
• Create a shared list in To-Do.
• @mention your colleagues in Teams to assign actions and highlight information relevant to them. 

Extra tips from IT 

Evaluate your shared work spaces at the start of the day. Make use of the Tabs in Team sites and chats to quickly access required information. Check your actions in To-Do and update if needed. This means you’ll work more productively throughout the day and shared spaces contain accurate information. 

If you have a headset and are working from home, arrange a Teams meeting instead of rescheduling.  

Topic #3 – Adverse weather 

We used this as a one-catch all discussion to end the day.  

Solutions offered by the Office 365 user community 

• Video calls to substitute 1-2-1 meetings. 
• Being available on Skype for Business is essential. 
• Productivity increases when there are minimal distractions and meetings. 

Extra tips from IT 

Based on the last point, you can minimise distractions when working in the office by: 

• Using Windows 10 features such as Focus Assist to block notifications.  
• Blocking out time in your calendar to let people know you’re busy.  
• Changing your Skype for Business status to Do Not Disturb (just remember to change it back when you’re done). 

How can Office 365 enable smart working? 

The basics 

• Make it clear when you’re available by keeping your calendar and Skype for Business status up-to-date. 
• When you’re available, be easily contactable by signing in to Skype for Business and Teams. 
• Engage with shared spaces by checking activity in Teams.  

By engaging with tools like Skype for Business and Teams, you are supporting your colleagues to work more efficiently.  

The aim of the event on Thursday was to raise awareness of this as it’s essentially the ABCs of smart working. 

If you’re not quite there yet

If there’s a particular tool or task that you’re confused about, let us know and we’ll hold an introductory session which anyone can attend. We’ll be offering a series of ‘Introduction to Office 365’ sessions over the next few months to help everyone reach a basic level of understanding. This will enable you to try out new features and attend more in-depth sessions. 

If you know you want to work more efficiently but aren’t sure where to start, contact our Business Productivity Liaison Officer, Mark Cathro. He can chat with you about what you’re interested in and help point you in the right direction of the tools and the training resources. 

Organised training courses are also a great way to introduce your group to new tools. To get your team or Unit started using collaborative and communication tools OneDrive and Skype for Business, contact [email protected] to arrange a training session. Doing the training as a group fosters productive discussions on how to make best use of these tools in your shared workflows.

The next step

After you’ve tried a few tools and realised the benefits, you may be looking to streamline the way you work, pick up tips and generally work more efficiently.  

This can be achieved by listening to how other colleagues work to get ideas. This is main aim of the Office 365 user community – to share how we work and learn from each other. It was highlighted at the event that watching someone ‘work out loud’ for 10-20 minutes and perform tasks in their own way is a good way to pick up tips and develop a better understanding of tools. We’ll organise more events like this in future, alongside more in-depth sessions around co-authoring, sharing files and other business tasks.