How To Motivate Employees Using Office 365

There are several benefits that accrue to business owners who have motivated employees at all ranks.

For starters, employee motivation has been known to improve engagement, something that many companies are looking for. Consequently, motivated employees are more productive and less likely to leave their company.

While there are many programs that help improve employee motivation and ultimately production, there is a simple solution that businesses overlook – Office 365. This is a cloud based solution many small businesses already use as their main business intelligence tool. However, Office 365 can also help business owners in motivating their employees. Here is how you can you use it to your advantage.

Embrace Workplace Flexibility

Workplace flexibility allows businesses as well as individuals to achieve set goals by changing the location, time and the approach that employees use. It is all about making changes that mutually benefit the employer and employee while resulting in superior results. Thus, workplace flexibility motivates employees to work better and ultimately helps improve productivity.

Office 365 offers several tools that allow for flexibility at work through collaborative and sharing features like Skype for Business that enables messaging, video calls, and screen sharing. Another tool, OneDrive allows users to access files remotely and enjoy superb sharing capabilities.

The Office 365 suite is an excellent choice for remote workers. It is specially designed to offer a wide range of features to help the entire team improve productivity by embracing workplace flexibility.

Encourage Communication and Collaboration

The rise of cloud computing and mobile technology has transformed how we work, thus making collaboration easier.

Office 365 allows your team to get the ultimate experience when working regardless of your employees’ device or location. More than a billion people across the world use Yammer, Skype, OneDrive and Office to communicate, collaborate and work.

The suite helps you improve communication as well as collaboration by turning corporate intranet to a social network that eliminates the barriers created by time zones and physical distance.

Use Office 365 tools to cut through hierarchies to improve employer-employee connections and enhance employee motivation. You can utilize Yammer to draw on the knowledge of the whole team, thus improving the accuracy with which you complete a sales proposal or respond to a customer’s query. The suite also incorporates OneDrive, a cloud solution that you can use to remotely store files, manage your projects and make meetings more productive.

In general, Office 365 allows you to clearly and succinctly convey information, delegate tasks and provide feedback necessary to motivate your employees.

Use Visuals to Engage Your Team

Most people learn visually. It’s why we love pictures, videos, movies, graphs and charts rather than continuous prose or large strings of numbers.

Using visual reports will help you provide clear visibility and understanding in order to improve worker engagement. Some of the tools offered by Microsoft’s Office 365 suite that can help you create interactive pictures, graphs and images include Dynamics CRM, Visio and Power BI.

Among its other characteristics, Dynamics CRM has a feature that allows you to visualize a hierarchy of records, allowing you to clearly see where particular records fit within the parent/child relationship. Another tool, Power BI, is an analytic tool that analyzes data and allows users to share their insights through visualizations. Finally, Microsoft Visio enables you to create custom diagrams that make it easier for your workforce to understand your vision. You can use pre-crafted templates, starter diagrams and thousands of shapes that meet a variety of industry standards to make your vision come to life.

While most people find reports boring, complicated and demotivating, interactive visuals created by various Office 365 tools will help you engage your team and enhance your business productivity.

Share Your Vision and Offer Praise

If you want to keep your employees motivated, you need to share your company vision with your team and emphasize objectives for the period ahead. If your employees don’t know how their work contributes to the overall business success or what exactly is expected of them, they will be less productive.

Use Publisher, SharePoint or Sway to provide staff newsletters in order to share future goals and relevant information with your team.

Office 365 Calendar and Groups will help you keep your staff in the loop. The Groups feature in Outlook enables your team to stay organized, up to date and focused on important tasks. It is the perfect tool to share your vision for the company as well as praise employees who have done an exemplary job.

When it comes to praise, Yammer offers a praise feature to provide positive reinforcement to successful team members, thus motivating the entire team to work better.

To sum up, Office 365 incorporates tools that make collaboration and visualization easier, thus helping your employees to stay motivated, focused and engaged. In addition, the suite allows for more workplace flexibility and enhanced communication. Take advantage of all the features and possibilities offered by Office 365 in order to motivate your employees and increase overall business productivity.