Hybrid working tools your business needs

Over the past year, UK businesses have been jumping between working from the office and working from home with the constant change in government guidelines. Employee expectations are changing, businesses need to be doing more to define productivity and provide employees with tools to work safely both from the office and from home.

Collaboration tools

The pandemic forced many businesses to choose collaboration tools in panic in order to find a way for employees to work collaboratively. With hybrid working being a permanent solution for most, now’s the time to reevaluate your current tools and explore other options which will support your teams going forward.

Microsoft SharePoint & OneDrive  

Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive are both 365 services, which work hand in hand to  allow your employees to store, share and manage content across the business in real time and from any location – perfect for hybrid working. Whilst SharePoint works as the holding pool for where your data is stored, OneDrive is used to link document libraries from the team site and to a user’s computer.

It’s key features encompass:

• Greater security
• Personal employee OneDrive
• Intranets
• Team sites
• Content management
• Real time content collaboration
• Automatic syncing

Microsoft Teams

We’ve learnt that online only and virtual meetings can work, and they should continue. Microsoft Teams is the perfect tool for  quick, informal chats, important calls or collaborative meetings.

It allows your business to create ‘ Teams ‘ for different projects, departments and interests. And within each Team, you can create various channels which serve different purposes. Within these channels employees can add attachments, reply to comments and tag colleagues.

Unified communications system

Although emailing still has its place, it can’t beat a real voice-to-voice conversation, but not being in a physical office presents a challenge. A comprehensive Unified Communications system will allow your entire business to be ‘pick-up’ ready. A good UC system will let you take the hosted route, removing the headache of you having to deal with updates, back up’s etc as your provider will handle this for you.

Cyber security awareness training

We know that phishing attempts hit an all high time when pretty much the whole world shifted to remote working, unfortunately there are no signs of phishing attempts slowing down. A recent study even found that a fifth of employees will fall for a phishing message.

Without the right knowledge, your employees wont be able to take proactive decisions or recognise a phishing message. Nowadays phishing messages are made to look identical to your business, so it wouldn’t be a surprise if your employees did fall for the trap. That’s why your employees need to at least be able to recognise the difference between a legitimate email and a phishing one.

Remember that just dedicating one day won’t be as effective, cyber security awareness should be a continuous, business wide effort, not just for employees, but the executives too. After each training session, there should also be a simulated phishing test to test the knowledge of all employees.

For more information on hybrid working support, contact our experts today.