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Microsoft Teams is better known as a collaborative platform that is used to facilitate interactions between employees working within an organization. With a range of features and the credibility of Microsoft Teams, organizations can set up virtual workspaces and undertake effective communication across the board through individual chats, group chats, voice calls, and video calls. 

However, little do people know that Microsoft Teams can be used for providing seamless employee training. 

In an age where competition is intense in every industry sector, an organization needs to go a mile ahead to be recognized and get the desired traction. For this, companies need to increase the productivity of their employees and have an innovative approach to their processes. This would help an organization stand out from the clutter of similar companies with similar offerings. 

Microsoft Teams allows organizations to train their employees, especially by integrating with a modern employee service desk. The automated service desk allows managers and team leaders to feed your enterprise knowledge base with relevant training resources and make them available to the employees to get them trained. 

Before we get into the benefits of employee training via Microsoft Teams, let us understand the importance of employee training in an organization. 

The Importance Of Employee Training In An Organization

1. Increase In Employee Productivity
   
   When your employees are trained well in relevant skills, it increases their productivity. Extensive training allows your employees to give their best and boosts their performance to obtain the desired results. This is because training provides your employees with additional practical and theoretical knowledge that helps them do their work better and improve the same results.
   
   
2. Increase In Employee Engagement
   
   When employee productivity increases within your organization, your employees feel motivated and driven to show up at work every day. This increases employee engagement in your organization. Also, getting trained in a valuable skill boosts your employees' confidence, leading to higher engagement.
   
   
3. Identifying And Overcoming Weaknesses
   
   An employee may never be able to discover their weaknesses if they keep working within their comfort zone. When they challenge themselves with extensive training, it helps them identify the areas they are weak in and identify ways of improving. Overcoming weaknesses is essential for employees for their professional as well as personal growth.
   
   
4. Developing Their Key Strengths
   
   Along with overcoming weaknesses, employee training also helps them in identifying their core strengths. This allows your employees to work on their strengths and nurture the same to add to their productivity.
   
   
5. Increased Scope For Innovation
   
   Training allows you to expand the boundaries that limit your employees from achieving more and outdoing themselves. Effective training programs are directed towards coming up with innovative ideas and processes that are highly original.
   
   
6. Sticking To Quality Standards
   
   When you train your employees, their work is no longer substandard, and they get a little closer to the prescribed quality standards of the company or the industry they operate in. This helps the newly hired and the current employees work towards attaining standards that define the quality of their work.
   
   
7. Establishing Consistency
   
   This is relevant in the case of new employees getting onboarded. When new employees join your team, their experience and skills are lesser than the existing employees. Providing these employees with extensive training allows you to establish consistency within the organization, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
   
   
8. Better Reputation Of The Organization
   
   When your employees are trained well, they can bring in improved results and attain all organizational goals. This helps you in building a healthy reputation for your organization. Further, a healthy reputation persuades aspiring employees to become a part of your organization.

Why is Microsoft Teams Important for the Modern Workplace?

Undoubtedly, collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams have emerged as crucial tools for working together, communicating, and thriving in the modern workplace. Its importance lies in connecting employees regardless of physical location, enabling seamless collaboration and effective teamwork. With MS Teams, employees can engage in interactive conversations, share ideas, and collectively solve problems, creating a vibrant and inclusive work environment.

Using the platform's virtual meeting capabilities, teams can meet face-to-face, even when they are miles apart, allowing real-time conferences and decision-making. This interactivity sparks creativity, encourages active participation, and cultivates a sense of camaraderie among team members. Additionally, MS Teams integrates seamlessly with the Office 365 suite, providing employees easy access to essential tools and enabling efficient file sharing and co-authoring.

The Benefits Of Using Microsoft Teams For Employee Training

If utilized well, Microsoft Teams can provide extensive training to your employees, especially those who work remotely. The collaborative platform easily integrates with service desks that help managers optimize the enterprise knowledge base to train employees. 

Here are some of the benefits of using Microsoft Teams for employee training: 

1. Ideal For Training Remote Employees
   
   You can have employees from across the world logged in to Microsoft Teams while working with you remotely. If you are willing to train your remote employees, Microsoft Teams allows you to feed the knowledge base with the necessary training resources that help the employees train themselves.
   
   Instead of calling the employees for physical training and hiring dedicated trainers to conduct workshops and training sessions, you can digitally provide your employees with the same knowledge and training materials.
   
   
2. Ideal For Onboarding New Employees
   
   An organization needs to ensure that the new employees are provided with the right training in the first few weeks. When onboarding new employees, Microsoft Teams allows you to provide them with microlearning features that help them obtain seamless training while being onboarded.
   
   When the new employees are trained well, they will work with high enthusiasm and vigour, increasing the overall productivity of your organization.
   
   
3. Providing Engaging Training Content
   
   Traditionally, employees were provided with plain text with some images in the name of theoretical training. This made the training sessions tedious and monotonous. In 2021, people's attention spans have come down, and they need to consume engaging content to understand things better.
   
   Microsoft Teams allows managers to provide employees with the training content in interactive videos, images, infographics, animations, and other engaging formats. This reduces the tedious nature of training and helps employees understand even the more complicated topics with ease.
   
   
4. Increased Self-reliance
   
   When you use Microsoft Teams for providing training to your employees, you let them get trained themselves. This eliminates the need to depend on dedicated trainers, instructors, or managers for learning specific topics. When your employees are empowered to train themselves, they become self-reliant and independent from being bound to trainers.
   
   Once your employees are self-reliant, they naturally feel more motivated to work, increasing productivity and engagement.
   
   
5. Higher Training Flexibility
   
   Microsoft Teams makes sure that the training provided to your employees is flexible as it is not limited to a geographical location or a specific trainer. Your employees can access the training materials and get themselves trained from any location and at any time. Unless necessary, they can time the training sessions according to their convenience and learn at their own pace.
   
   Microlearning is the best method of training your employees. Microlearning is bite-sized learning that can be created as multi-media content such as images, video tutorials, audio podcasts, games, quizzes etc. This learning in bits enhances employee performance by delivering precise and relevant information to the employees, helping them to remember what they learned.
   
   When microlearning is integrated into Microsoft Teams, the organization has a centralized platform to find all vital information. Microlearning in Microsoft Teams can help you save time, reduce costs, and improve productivity.
   
   
6. Ample Amount Of References
   
   There is no limit to the number of references you can provide your employees to get them trained through Microsoft Teams. As the learning is digital, you can direct them to relevant articles, eBooks, videos, blogs, and a range of effective content available on the internet.
   
   Also, you can keep providing them with references from your side whenever you need them by adding them to your knowledge base. This results in free-flowing training sessions with no rigidity.
   
   
7. Monitoring The Progress
   
   Microsoft Teams allows you to provide dedicated assignments and projects to your employees to track their progress. The employees can complete the assignment and submit the same to be assessed in real-time. You can also conduct tests regularly to assess how well your employees have understood the lessons taught.
   
   
8. Staying Updated
   
   When you hire a dedicated trainer, they are likely to be traditional in their approach as their training is limited to their knowledge and experience. Microsoft Teams helps you keep your training resources updated to ensure that your employees are in sync with the latest trends and advancements.
   
   You can modify your training materials and alter the approach at any time to ensure the wholesome training of your employees.
   
   
9. Obtaining Seamless Support
   
   When you train your employees using Microsoft Teams, you provide seamless and automated support and training sessions. This allows them to reach out to the service desk and obtain personalized solutions to their problems while being trained. They can also reach out to their peers and managers through the collaborative platform to obtain assistance in real-time.
   
   
10. Immediate Application Of Lessons Learned
    
    Instead of switching platforms for getting trained in specific skills, Microsoft Teams allows your employees to obtain training on the same platform they work on. This helps them in applying the lessons learned immediately on the collaborative platform they use for work.
    
    
11. Saving Money
    
    Providing employee training via Microsoft Teams allows you to save money on hiring trainers and organizing training sessions for your employees. Also, it relieves you from spending money every time you onboard a new employee who needs to be trained.
    

The Final Word 

Through the collaborative platform, your employees can be trained efficiently and become self-reliant without compromising the quality of their training. Today, it is difficult to find a better collaborative tool than Microsoft Teams when it comes to employee training and development, offering an array of unique features that set it apart from every other solution. With its centralized training hub, organizations can effortlessly supervise and organize training materials, ensuring easy access for employees. These were the significant benefits of using Microsoft Teams to provide seamless employee training. 

Ultimately, MS Teams stands as the epitome of excellence in employee training, redefining how organizations nurture talent, drive skill development, and propel their workforce towards success in the modern workplace.

FAQs

1. How does Microsoft Teams improve employee engagement during training? 
   
   With its interactive and cutting-edge features like live virtual classrooms, chat tools, and collaboration, Microsoft Teams encourages employee engagement and active participation.
2. Can MS Teams adapt to different learning styles? 
   
   Yes, MS Teams delivers flexible learning options, including on-demand modules and self-paced learning, letting employees learn at their convenience and adapt to their preferred learning style.
3. Does MS Teams support real-time collaboration on training materials? 
   
   Indeed! MS Teams allows simultaneous editing, co-authoring, and version control of training documents, promoting collaborative teamwork and improving knowledge sharing.
4. Can trainers track attendance and participation in MS Teams? 
   
   Yes, organizations and managers or trainers can easily track attendance and scrutinize participation through attendance reports, activity logs, and analytics available within MS Teams.
5. How does MS Teams integrate with existing training tools?
   
   MS Teams seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft tools such as PowerPoint, Word, and Excel, allowing coaches to leverage existing training resources and integrate them into training sessions.