Increasingly, technology can assist in tightening the bonds of teamwork. Here we look at SharePoint and some of the benefits of an intranet in building your team’s productivity.
Collaboration Software
When wide-scale work is taking place, it’s not always feasible to discuss constant progress face-to-face and not always practical to rely solely on email. One of the main benefits of an intranet is that SharePoint can offer a number of tools to aid real-time collaboration, such as shared discussion forums, surveys and task lists. Documents can also be added, with all relevant parties able to add to and edit simultaneously, but with overall control of versioning retained by an administrator should anything go wrong.
Scheduling
Everyone needs to take a break every now and then. The problem is finding a way to schedule leave so that the workload doesn’t stall when certain people are absent. One of the benefits of an intranet is that it can alleviate this with shared calendars, allowing everyone to plan their trips and their workload well in advance before it has a chance to hinder productivity. Project Gantt charts can also be built into a SharePoint intranet to visualise when resources will and won’t be available.
Remote Working
Some companies require their staff to be based off-site. Unfortunately, that can cause all manner of issues in the communication department. Some team members can feel disconnected from the business. By the time new information has been sent their way, it has all become common knowledge, and remote workers can’t act on that new information with the same level of proactiveness. Another one of the main benefits of an intranet is that all updates can be shared in real-time and progress can be made across multiple sites.
Integration
Some employers may want to improve their collaborative process, but they won’t want to change it altogether. And your employees will certainly find it difficult to get to grips with a completely unfamiliar system. Luckily, a SharePoint intranet intuitively integrates with existing tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel, thus allowing you to keep the fluency (many Office 365 licences provide access to both). And in more complex setups, SharePoint can even be linked to Dynamics 365 and Teams or advanced workflow functionality to create a unified working experience – just another benefit of an intranet.
Building Community
Many teams thrive because they have a strong company ethos motivating them. But sometimes, it can be difficult to find ways to be reminded of that ethos in the day-to-day tasks.
One of the teamwork benefits of an intranet is its ability to put an entire culture online, including what it stands for and how other people have benefited from it. It gives employees a greater sense of control over the culture they live by. And it can also provide new options for engagement beyond soulless emails – videos, blogs, updates and more are all possible.
The right intranet can transform not only how your organisation works but the culture within your workplace.
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