While predictions abound, no one can say with certainty when the ongoing COVID-19 crisis will end, and life will return to “normal.” What if it’s not like before? What will happen if, remote working is not a temporary thing and becomes the ‘new normal’? There is no other option but to take it in your stride and adopt the right technologies which enable you to move ahead with vigor and stay productive while working from home.
Over the last 2 decades, SharePoint has grown into one of the most successful enterprise-level collaboration platforms and presently has more than 100 million global users. It provides organizations with a secure, customizable, and easily managed platform for their teams. It is packed with various functionalities that can be leveraged to create an effective intranet and mitigate some of their remote working roadblocks.
Experts believe that effective communication and collaboration would be the secret to success in the post-COVID-19 world and SharePoint provides organizations with a competitive edge, in this sense. A SharePoint based Intranet, has all the tools and features that your employees need to stay productive. Below are five ways in which the SharePoint intranet can help your remote working teams.
Corporate Intranet, built on SharePoint, can quickly become a virtual hub where your teams get all the information easily. SharePoint offers a lot of features and the flexibility to customize the Intranet based on business needs. Organizations can utilize plug-ins, add-ins, workflows, and other widgets to create a corporate Intranet page that enables your remote teams to quickly search, store, or secure key company data. Such an Intranet can also help organizations disseminate important information across the workforce.
SharePoint add-ins like Employee Directory (allows the creation of a central directory for your organization), News Ticker, and RSS Viewer (for news and nnouncements sharing) helps your remote teams stay well informed and connected.
Collaboration is one of the most important contributors to achieve high remote working productivity. While working on projects, your remote team will need to work together. SharePoint helps such teams work on documents together without any interference through its Co-authoring feature. This feature offers a great way to get real-time feedback on ideas and work.
Remote teams can also utilize SharePoint lists as a project management tool to track and manage project more effectively. The team members can review the list of outstanding tasks, check deadlines, understand dependencies, and communicate accordingly.
Members working remotely will need to access files and documents to complete their set of daily tasks. SharePoint can serve as an awesome document repository. Required files and documents, in various formats (like Word, Excel, PDF, image, or videos), can be uploaded onto the corporate intranet portal. Once uploaded, the documents and files can be shared with remote teams at anytime from anywhere and on any device you choose to use. Also, SharePoint’s advanced search feature ensures that users can easily find the data they uploaded.
Additionally, user permissions can be set for accessing, downloading, or editing the documents. Thus, enabling secured storage of business-critical and sensitive organizational files and information.
While remote working team members might not be physically close yet they can always come up with innovative ideas that can lead to large business benefits. However, they need a central platform to connect and share such ideas. And a SharePoint Intranet offers them just that. Team members can post their innovative ideas, chat, pictures, and more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has restricted the people to their homes. As a result, your team members would want their Intranet to be cloud-enabled and support mobile access. SharePoint Mobile and SharePoint Online allow your remote team members to access company information from anywhere in the world. This means users can log in using the right credentials and open, review, or edit documents with colleagues even when you are miles away from the office.
A robust and intuitive SharePoint intranet can help you and your team navigate through the challenges of remote working. It helps you build a connected workplace to meet the needs of your remote teams and boost their productivity and collaboration with the best-in-class Intranet.
