Six homeworking-habits to hang on to

Over lockdown, we’ve all developed new ways of working. As we return to the office, we asked our colleagues at our Weekly cuppa Teams what behaviours they’d like to take back with them.

1. Digital by default   

Gone are the ways of half-crumpled post-it notes and coffee-stained notebooks! Working from home during lockdown meant many switched from in-person to digital workflows. For example: 

• Using OneNote instead of a paper notebook 
• Meeting colleagues online using Microsoft Teams instead of in-person 

As a by–product of adopting these tools, we were able to: 

• Collaborate and co-author files more easily 
• Access notes, files, and chat from anywhere 
• Reallocate the time we would have spent commuting 
• Create a more inclusive workplace with Microsoft’s built-in accessibility features 
• Use less paper
   

2. Online presence  

Remember having to find colleagues when you had something to ask them? Trekking around various rooms or even buildings! And what if they were busy!?  

In Microsoft Teams and Outlook, you can see whether your colleague is busy by checking their presence status. This connects with your Outlook calendar and what appointments you have scheduled to let others know if you’re available. This means you appear as: 

• Available when you’re at your laptop and aren’t in a meeting or call 
• Away when you’ve closed your laptop or are idle for more than 15 minutes 
• Busy when you have an appointment in your calendar 
• Do not disturb when you’re presenting or sharing your screen 

As we return to the office, continue to use your online presence to let your colleagues know when you’re available. In turn, check your colleague’s availability before contacting them online or walking over to their desk to avoid interrupting their meeting.. 

Set your availability

3. Flexibility in location    

Being desk-bound eight hours a day is a thing of the past now too! As work moves online, mobile apps have found their space. Now we can answer emails from the air, text from the tube, and join meetings at the market. Between the online collaboration power of the Microsoft 365 suite and the smartphone’s ability to access said suite from anywhere – working has entered a new age of flexibility. Useful ones to consider installing on your device: 

• Teams for communicating and collaborating on the go 
• Office Lens for scanning paper documents or posters to OneDrive or OneNote
• Outlook for managing email 
• Microsoft To Do for staying on top of tasks 

4. Instant messaging 

Once we started hosting our meetings through Teams, we also adopted Teams chat. Conversations that would have usually taken place over email, phone, and meetings moved to instant messaging.  

Some of the strengths of Teams chat include the ability to: 

• Chat to just one or many colleagues – up to 250 
• Follow the flow of communication more easily in the easy-to-understand structured layout 
• See if someone has read your message  
• Invite colleagues to the chat and share chat history 
• Add Tabs to highlight relevant documents, apps, or websites 
• Name a group chat, making it easier to find than an email subject 

 Email has its place, but it is important to use the right tool for the job. Instant messaging is best used in day-to-day work conversations, whereas email is great for broad announcements and newsletter distribution. 

5. Shorter meetings    

Have you ever had a quick ten-minute Teams call that makes you question how meetings used to last? Often in-person meetings could stretch to well over an hour, factoring in travel time and that can be 1.5-2 hours gone for one meeting. Can you believe our colleagues in the Observatory would walk 1.3 miles to the Old Burgh School?  

While in-person meetings sometimes are the best option, according to CIO Dive, online meetings are on average 20.1% shorter! This is likely because we can: 

• Use the meeting chat to speed up round table discussion 
• Run polls to make decisions 
• Share relevant content from our screens with the rest of the meeting 

If you’re working in Walter Bower House and meeting a colleague in St Andrews, consider scheduling an online meeting rather than booking a room and travelling through. 

6. Increased digital literacy   

The University has worked hard to digitise services and make them available throughout lockdown. IT Services held weekly online sessions to introduce the University community to a range of tools to enable them to do this. As a result, staff have gained new digital skills in areas such as: 

• Hosting online events 
• Task management 
• Document review and collaboration 

Moving forwards, we hope the enthusiasm to keep up with the latest releases continues through engagement within our Microsoft 365 user community and demo sessions. Staff can register for new sessions each month. Subscribe to our IT Newsletter to get notified when new sessions go live in PDMS. 

Our Centre for Educational Enhancement and Development (CEED) has also given access to a discovery tool centred around digital literacy, designed to assess your level of digital capability. You can find this discovery tool and learn more in this blog post about the JISC discovery tool.