Published 27 January 2022
Is anyone else feeling the sting of readjusting to work life after a wonderful summer break? With 2022 now well and truly underway, it’s time to dive straight back in and turn some of those ‘new year, new me’ promises into practice!
If your hand shot up with an enthusiastic ‘me!’, then keep on reading. We’re going to share our top 10, quick win solutions with Microsoft that reimagine what productivity and collaboration within the workplace looks like, helping you be your best self in 2022.
As with all our services and solutions, these quick win ideas can all be tailored to suit you and your organisation, so let us inspire you to work smarter.
Managed services
Quick win 1: Intranet as a service
Asides from implementation, a good intranet requires ongoing content management, continued adoption activities and proactively planning for new updates. You know that already, but who’s helping you?
With no upfront cost, we’re changing the way you build, support, and manage your intranet through a monthly investment across three service levels. Intranet as a Service has been designed to help you to create a holistic digital experience for your staff and reduce the ongoing costs associated with maintaining an intranet.
No matter which service level you choose, our managed service is there to help you get the most from your intranet, as we take the time-consuming tasks out of your hands:
- Configure and implement your intranet
- Provide ongoing incident support requests, problem management and service management
- Ongoing support access digital workplace and adoption specialists
Quick win 2: Microsoft 365 ACM Evergreen Service
Microsoft 365 is an innovator, a trailblazer, and is always evolving to give us the best SaaS and cloud-based experience with the goal to make our work life as streamlined as possible. But managing the updates that come with innovation can be a fulltime job if you want to get the most out of your cloud technology investment. So how do you take the complexity out of managing new features and updates across the M365 ecosystem while still benefiting from everything it has to offer?
Let us declutter your workload by looking after your M365 environment for you with our Microsoft 365 ACM &Evergreen Service. Designed as a monthly offer, our M365 ACM & Evergreen Service takes the hassle out of managing the platform by providing you with a set of adoption & change management services and reports that free you up to focus on higher-value things.
Specifically, we’ll provide you with:
- Access to a PowerBI dashboard or Teams app to help you see what’s coming and the impact of the changes at a glance
- A monthly report highlighting the top updates coming to M365 – including change risk and opportunity scoring across people and technology
- Access to a team of change management and technical experts who can translate what each update to M365 means for your business
- Support with use-case identification and solutioning
- Strategic planning, advice and guidance to support new initiatives in your organisation (e.g. launch of a new app)
- Adoption reporting – including monitoring of M365 usage stats within the Admin Centre
- Regular facilitation of product and scenario-based training to your staff
- Communications support – including capturing success stories across your organisation
Quick win 3: Power Generator
If you have a solution built on Power Platform, then welcome to the future! Low code apps are changing the way companies work and they’re not going anywhere in 2022. To help your team get the most from the Power Platform, invest in our Power Generator managed service as we help your team scale and adopt the Power Platform across your business.
Through our Power Generator managed service, we’ll work with you to build a governance framework, undertake training, and provide assets to enable solution makers to fast track their ideas to solutions and take ownership. Plus, we’ll help you create a new digital business model, and offer on-going support to build an app practice with you, develop reusable components, and monitor and manage your platform.
Microsoft Teams apps
Quick win 4: Board Connect
If you speak to anyone who organises board or committee meetings, they’ll tell you they’re a nightmare. Long agendas, associated documentation, assets and meeting minutes are just some of the considerations. These meetings are a costly affair, but you can maximise efficiency in 2022 by using Board Connect, a third-party board management Teams app built by us!
Leveraging the power of M365 to meet all of your meeting requirements, Board Connect allows you to securely and effectively prepare, distribute and manage materials necessary for board meetings, all within Microsoft Teams.
Quick win 5: Shift Roster
The focus on healthcare workers is at all time high and it’s with good reason – there’s a lot of pressure on them throughout this pandemic. Unlike 9-5 roles, healthcare workers are often on call which has traditionally been carried out through switchboards, however with technology changing the way frontline workers can operate, we have created a Teams app to make things a little easier.
Shift Roster lets medical professionals quickly and easily roster and request on-call specialists rather than individual specialists. Shift Roster allows staff to be rostered on as on-call and be requested via Teams when there is an emergency. The specialist in question is instantly notified of these requests through Teams which allows them to respond quickly to an emergency!
Quick win 6: Feedback Bot
We have all learnt a lot about ourselves over the past two years but what do our peers think of us? Built with our own employees in mind, we developed the Feedback Bot to help us grow and flourish at Engage Squared. We think it’s such a useful tool, we want you to adopt it too.
Built using SharePoint lists and Power Automate, the Feedback Bot allows people to request informal and confidential feedback from their peers by submitting a request for feedback using a form on SharePoint. The best part is, the nominated person is notified and able to submit their feedback directly within Teams – making this a quick win for everyone!
Quick win 7: Incident Management app
Unexpected, major incidents such as not being able to access your money, or servers going down are hugely disruptive to customers and businesses alike. And when major incidents arise, it needs to be all hands on deck to ensure the quickest resolution so life can get back to normal. Easiest way to do this? By leveraging the collaborative power of Microsoft Teams through our Incident Management App!
The Incident Management App is designed specifically to help you and your team manage multiple crises at any hour of the day. It’s centred around collaboration in Microsoft Teams, meaning staff can collaborate and communicate in central place, automating the management process, minimising double-handling and leading to speedier resolution and happy customers.
Quick win 8: Find Me app
Want an easy way to collaborate with your field worker team members? Our Find Me app is the quick win you need to start the year off right! Built for Microsoft Teams, the Find Me app helps you to track jobs, job locations and time frames of field workers when they’re not in the office, while also enabling everyone on the team to manage and share current statuses if need be.
The Find Me app solves visibility and communication issues that come with field work, minimising safety risks for workers, while also automating day-to-day work processes. It also lets you build reports to track and analyse trends and work patterns so you and your staff can move to better ways of working.
Quick win 9: Room Check-In app
New year, same pandemic! As we all start to return to the office and school, and contact tracing responsibilities now largely up to the individual, how do we manage the risk of COVID-19 as best as possible? Our Room Check-In app for Microsoft Teams is the perfect addition to your COVID-safe toolbox.
The Room Check-In app allows you and your team to check-in and record the details of any meeting attendees, including visitors, for a specific room. It helps you seamlessly manage room capacity restrictions, while also giving visibility around room bookings to avoid any clashes.
Quick win 10: Company Communicator+
As we move increasingly into a hybrid working world, the need for largescale, instantaneous communication within organisations from leaders and communications specialists has grown exponentially. Whether it’s to announce new initiatives, assist with employee onboarding, or maintain culture, it’s important to have the right tools get these messages out quickly and efficiently – without the need to rely solely on email.
In the spirit of working smarter, not harder this year, our Teams app, Company Communicator+ (based on Microsoft’s Company Communicator app, but with a few additions!) is the perfect app to give you seamless, targeted, flexible, audience-specific messaging on a widescale across your organisation all within Teams. It cuts through the noise that comes with hybrid working by meeting employees where they work, in an efficient, time sensitive way.
We hope you have found our quick win solution blogs helpful. For more information on the solutions you have read about today, or to take a look a look at other solutions we have built, take a look at out Github page.