5 Ways To Boost Employee Engagement With Microsoft Teams

You can’t force genuine commitment — that’s why maintaining high employee engagement may seem hard at first.

Keeping the workforce engaged became more challenging when everybody went remote; with most successful companies staying hybrid, it pays off to have a new approach to employee engagement.

As it turns out, Microsoft Teams has untapped potential!

Previously only used for basic work requirements, people are starting to catch on and use Teams in creative ways that enhance employee engagement with ease. You can do it too, and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg — take a look at our suggestions below. ⬇️

5 Ways To Boost Employee Engagement With Microsoft Teams

Create specific channels (with willing participants)

Receiving an endless stream of unnecessary notifications makes even the calmest of us agitated. Many people mute the notifications and never bother to check them after, time and time again, they weren’t needed but were interrupted.

In this situation, nobody can blame people for wanting to escape the unnecessary noise when they need to focus. Still, this can result in missing critical work-related info, and other coworkers needing to personally reach out to them.

This blunder is easy to prevent by creating channels with specific purposes. Each team and each project should have a dedicated Teams channel for related matters and only consist of coworkers who directly contribute. 

There are more fun ways to use these channels, too: plan a birthday surprise for the unsuspecting coworker, vote for the next team-building activity/ location, or have a nice water cooler chat (participation optional).

You can use channels as you please, both for work and fun, but also for shared interests, education, and hobbies. The only rule is only to include interested parties!

Set some time aside for recurring check-ins

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The best thing about Teams is that it can successfully compensate for the lack of physical presence. What was once an office thing only, now can be virtual and equally as good!

Checking in with your team members regularly has a multitude of benefits:

• It keeps you posted about the most recent events, changes, and matters that need your immediate attention;
• Occasional chats before diving into work relax the atmosphere, and drive the Monday blues away;
• Some things are lost or are hard to communicate in a written form: a video chat helps where an email can’t!
• Having an honest discussion via video feels more sincere and builds camaraderie among coworkers.

Once a week at least, plus during the week as needed — don’t overdo it! 

Arrange a meeting only when you notice there’s an actual need for one. If they’re casual, keep them brief: half an hour tops is the best, considering the attention spans and different workloads people might have. 

For everything else, we encourage you to consult your team and check what works best.

Show that you care: employee recognition will get you far

Receiving praise for a job well done makes a work day sweeter, and an employee is more likely to stick around for a long time.

You don’t have to come up with anything elaborate or fancy to show that you appreciate and care about the effort your team is putting in; Microsoft Teams has you covered.

For starters, you can use regular communication channels and methods we’ve already mentioned above. A heartfelt message or a public announcement via an online meeting/ chat or feedback session can work wonders!

To add a special touch, you can use an app such as Praise; it lets you create a point-based system and customize it to the tiniest detail, for a more engaging experience.

Use Teams to schedule shifts and days off

As your workforce grows and becomes international, the admin tasks will become more complicated, including PTO tracking and scheduling the working hours for an increasing number of employees.

Instead of using pricy, clunky HR software too complex for your needs, or tinkering with Excel sheets, you can move the whole process to Microsoft Teams and put an end to it.

Wondering how?

Cue Vacation Tracker — a PTO tracker that lets you handle everything without even opening a new tab. Vacation Tracker has a seamless Microsoft Teams integration that requires one click to approve, and five to request time off in full detail.

This comprehensive leave management solution comes with:

• Custom notifications that remind everyone about current and upcoming days off, so you never mix things up when assigning shifts and working days;
• Leave data accessible directly from the Teams tab and quick dashboard access,
• A clean and simple calendar tab that leaves no place for confusion.

Vacation Tracker also integrates with email, Slack, and Google Workspace. You can start for free, and all paid plans come with a 7-day free trial if you want to explore every feature.

Provide valuable feedback and educational content

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When everything works smoothly, it’s easy to forget about your stellar contributors — but that may cost you their presence and loyalty to your business.

Many employees report a lack of feedback made them insecure about their worth. 

Some even concluded that it means their managers don’t feel they can do better and that their growth is stunted, and they don’t feel comfortable asking why. To others, the lack of regular feedback accompanied by a non-existing improvement budget feels like a symptom of quiet firing. This is a highly toxic workplace practice employers need to avoid at all times, especially with the recent mass layoffs that instill fear in workers worldwide.

Using Teams to provide employees with much-needed education and feedback is a quick fix that takes little effort:

• Schedule 1-on-1 feedback sessions, or update the whole team about their progress on a video call;
• Share training videos and instructions via built-in Microsoft Stream, or create a special tab in Teams and add an online course;
• Encourage using Yammer as a social, knowledge-sharing platform to connect and learn from others.

Bottom line

Increasing employee engagement with Microsoft Teams is quite an easy feat if you explore the service further than your daily tasks dictate. 

Here are a couple of no-brainers for you to try:

• Create topical or team-specific channels to avoid communication burnout;
• Check-in with your coworkers, but make the Teams meetings worthwhile for the attendees;
• Employee recognition matters, and dedicated Teams apps such as Praise will help you show that you care and appreciate their work;
• Enable an easy, neat solution for shift scheduling and arranging the days off — Vacation Tracker lets you do it without ever leaving the Teams app;
• Use Teams to let your employees know how they’re doing, provide them with additional training and advisory sessions.

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Anja Milovanovic

A journalist turned content writer – Anja uses her investigative skills to produce high-quality SaaS, Marketing, and HR content.