Microsoft Inspire | Recap & Lessons Learned

Microsoft Inspire 2020

Did you ever think that you would be able to hold a video conference from a city park instead of a stuffy board room? Or road trip down the coast, hopping from one Airbnb to the next, while taking care of business? That’s the beauty of cloud connection—everything you need for productivity, collaboration, and customer service is at your fingertips, no matter where you are in the world.

Right now, there’s an acceleration in companies making the shift to the cloud with the help of managed service providers (MSPs). CTECH IT is a top Microsoft partner in Canada. We recently attended the Microsoft Inspire partner conference, an all-digital event, and came away with lots of ideas on how to help you discover new ways to conduct business.

Everyone has questions when they transition to something new. Here are some answers and a few of the ways Microsoft 365 can inspire your company to turn your office into a modern workplace, from anywhere in the world.

How Can Microsoft Inspire Your Company’s Priorities in the Coming Year?

When you consider your business’s priorities for the coming year, how do you envision things such as scalability? What about team collaboration and continuity in customer service? Does remote work make sense for your office—or maybe a hybrid in which team members rotate in-office time?

Cloud infrastructure enables software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to help you scale operations quickly and efficiently with a click. Implementing cloud capabilities transforms your company into a modern workplace with infrastructure that streamlines your business and ensures business continuity.

For example, an efficient MSP ensures backup support to protect your data by making copies of your files, applications, programs, operating systems, and other vital business data. They can also help you automate a system for continuous backup. That means you have fully automatic cloud-based backups of your entire network resulting in business continuity and helping you to avoid unexpected downtime.

Microsoft 365 also has an array collaboration tools that give you video conferencing, instant messaging, and the ability to work on documents together in real-time. As remote work becomes more the norm, you can easily expand your team with remote workers who can communicate in real-time—no physical office space required, only a laptop, smartphone, or tablet.

Here’s some inspiration—You could potentially decrease overhead costs by 30 percent or more while also increasing efficiency.

How Do You Ensure Productivity?

Do you worry about productivity if team members can work anywhere, unsupervised? First of all, you always need the right team to make any business successful. You should be able to count on your employees to do a good job.

Set Goals with Clear Expectations

That means management needs to provide direction, expectations, and the tools to make their team successful, whether they’re in the office, meeting in a park, or working in a virtual environment. It’s vital to have SMART goals that will help you determine which metrics will help you meet your mark.

Smart goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Time-sensitive

Your clear expectations form the goals that will result in success. Microsoft 365 provides analytics to track productivity, activity, resources, and more. What’s more, you can use those analytics to determine if the goals you set are achievable.

For instance, if you expect your sales team to contact 50 prospects a week and expect that to result in ten sales, you can use analytics to determine if those numbers are realistic and attainable.

Adding a due date ensures that the goal has an identifiable success indicator.

Implement Analytics

One of the best ways to track anything in business is with a set of key performance indicators (KPIs), which make your company more reliable, and they connect your company’s goals to individual expectations.

It’s easy to get the big picture with real-time data and reports generated through the cloud network. You’ll gain insight into how to improve team productivity with Workplace Analytics, an application that utilizes data in Microsoft 365 to identify patterns that impact three areas:

• Productivity
• Workforce effectiveness
• Employee engagement

Workplace Analytics offers a tool to analyze organizational data trends via a dashboard that you can customize with both organizational and customer data. Once you uncover the challenges and areas of improvement, you can create action plans with MyAnalytics. Then set clear, attainable goals, and track the outcomes.

How Do You Keep Track of It All?

Additionally, you can put many of your systems on autopilot. Auto schedulers and booking ensure you won’t double-book or miss an appointment. Microsoft 365 provides integration and automation to help you keep track of your organization’s planning, too. Calendar integration, for example, automatically adds calendar meeting details, including the location with links to maps and directions, an agenda that you can make interactive, and a list of attendees with contact information, if appropriate.

Bringing it All together

If you’re inspired to implement cloud services and create a modern workplace in which you and your remote employees can work in real-time, then there are a couple of considerations right out of the gate. First, it’s essential to evaluate your company’s processes from workflow to current technology. An evaluation will provide you with a clear understanding of how you can integrate or replace existing systems.

Of course, you’ll want to find an MSP that you can collaborate with to strategize the best course of action and one that will work with you to provide a foundation to expand Your business’s technology as needed. It’s a good idea to check reviews and customer testimonials to make sure that you find an IT provider that delivers on their promises. You also want a partner that manages the network and monitors the strategy, providing automation where appropriate, to save time and money.

CTECH IT Services to Help Microsoft Inspire Your Work Environment

Do you feel inspired to update your work environment with new tools for success? CTECH IT offers Microsoft 365 and hosted cloud services, including data backup and disaster avoidance. Our IT consulting services cover compliance issues, discover and address security problems, and enhance work productivity and communications. If you’re searching for an IT services provider who can help inspire your work environment with Microsoft 365, then get in touch with CTECH, and let’s make a plan.

Written by Carl Fransen

posted on August 22, 2020

Carl Fransen

My passion is to make my mark on the world in a positive and lasting way. I want to set an example for my son that his father can compete with integrity in today’s world, be very successful, and leave the world a better place for him.

Combining my technical/business-based education with a long career steadily progressing up the corporate ladder, I decided to build a company that held true to my values. So, I founded and designed the next generation of IT support firm: CTECH Consulting Group Inc. We are a completely automated, cloud-based IT company designed to compete against any other IT firm without the overhead. We promote a lifestyle to all our staff where they can work anywhere, at any time, access any information on any device that is relevant to their job, and collaborate with anyone they want to.