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One of the biggest mistakes made by organizations across the world is that of overlooking employee engagement. Companies often assume that successful recruitment and onboarding results in the employees being engaged with the organization for a more extended period. 

Unfortunately, that is not the case. 

A company needs to ensure that its employees are thoroughly engaged throughout their journey with the organization. Employee engagement in 2021 is not limited to better pay and a desirable promotion. Employees today have a myriad of needs and requirements that need to be fulfilled by their organizations. 

Low employee engagement often increases the likelihood of your employees switching to a different organization. If you are willing to retain talent and increase the overall productivity of your firm, it is crucial to keep your employees engaged from their very first day at work. 

Before getting into increasing engagement with the help of Microsoft Teams, let us briefly understand the concept of employee engagement. 

What Is Employee Engagement?

Employee engagement is the degree to which your employees are genuinely driven towards their work and are naturally motivated to do so. If the rate of employee engagement within your organization is high, it implies that your employees look forward to working every day and feel genuinely connected to the company. 

High employee engagement plays an important role in achieving the desired goals and objectives of your organization. When your employees are engaged well, they tend to give their best in their work, leading to increased productivity. Highly engaged employees often contribute to the overall productivity, reputation, and culture of your company. They ensure a holistic work atmosphere and allow your organization to get the desired traction. 

Based on the attitude and behaviour of your employees, engagement can be divided into three major levels: 

1. Engaged
   
   This is the level at which your employees are fairly invested, motivated, and involved in the functioning of your organization. These employees are generally motivated towards attaining individual goals and the collective goals of your company.
   
   
2. Not Engaged
   
   As the name suggests, this is the level at which your employees are not involved and invested in your organization. However, this does not mean that they have negative feelings about the company they work in. These employees are mainly neutral in their attitude towards work and the goals of the company. Even if they are always on time and perform all their duties well, they lack the genuine motivation to go a step further.
   
   
3. Actively Disengaged
   
   This is the level where employees are demotivated to work and have negative emotions towards their organizations. They often resent the tasks they are required to accomplish and may undermine the company if given a chance to do so. It is extremely risky to have such employees work actively within your organization.
   
   

Elevating Employee Engagement And Experience With MS Teams

Microsoft Teams has become one of the most successful online collaborative platforms that helped professionals during the pandemic. When employees could not go to work and organizations had to operate virtually, MS Teams allowed professionals to collaborate with their peers on a centralized platform.

The collaborative platform facilitates seamless communication between users through different channels. It lets your employees interact with their peers and managers via individual chats, group chats, audio/video calls, mass mails, and many more alternatives. With the credibility of Microsoft and a range of advanced features, Microsoft Teams has found commendable adoption in organizations across all major industries.

Here are some of the essential strategies that help you use Microsoft Teams to elevate the engagement and experience of your employees: 

• Providing Your Employees With Digital Workplace Tools
  
  Microsoft Teams can be effectively used to provide employees with access to suitable digital workplace tools and software. If your office has incorporated Microsoft Office Suite 360, MS Teams allows your employees to work on Office tools that help them get their work done better.
  
  A single unified platform can be used to provide all your employees with access and login credentials for specific digital workplace tools to improve the organization's overall functioning.
  
  
• Integrating Your Service Desk With Microsoft Teams
  
  The functionality of Microsoft Teams can be increased by integrating your employee service desk with the collaborative platform. This provides your employees with a centralized platform for working and getting their issues resolved.
  
  Service desk integration with Microsoft Teams prevents your employees from switching to different platforms for obtaining automated support or personalized support from the agents. Similarly, this helps management approach all your employees (irrespective of the department) and keep their processes on a centralized platform.
  
  
• Microlearning Features To Get Your Employees Trained
  
  You can get your employees trained through microlearning by adding the necessary resources to your enterprise knowledge base. Microlearning allows your employees to get trained in specific skills from their respective MS Teams accounts.
  
  With microlearning, your employees can learn skills and gain knowledge by consuming small chunks of content daily. It helps them spend a mere ten minutes every day learning the required skills and getting trained in them. This allows you to keep the training sessions in tune with their limited attention span. As the employees consume limited content daily, they can remember the lessons more effectively, leading to efficient training.
  
  Also, you can improve the quality of training by allowing more experienced employees to share valuable resources with their peers. This allows employees to learn from the expertise and experience of their fellow employees and team leaders.
  
  Moreover, the platform of Microsoft Teams can be used to share training content in an engaging format. Instead of providing your employees with plain text, you can feed your knowledge base with images, videos, animation, infographics, and other engaging formats. This further improves the retention capacity of the employees.
  
  
• Automating The Ticketing System
  
  Working on the manual ticketing system is one of the most common challenges employees face using traditional service desks. When you integrate these platforms with Microsoft Teams, you can automate the entire ticketing process.
  
  Modern employee service desks help your employees create and track their support tickets by chatting on the collaborative platform. Once the ticket is created, the service desk would send specific details about the case, and the concerned employees gathered from the knowledge base to the support agent. This way, the concerned agent can provide holistic and personalized support to your employees.
  
  As the agent handles the case, your service desk would send automated notifications to your employee on their MS Teams account to keep them updated about their case in real-time. When the issue is resolved adequately, the service desk will automatically close the ticket and add its details to your knowledge base on the platform of Microsoft Teams.
  
  
• Automating Repetitive IT Processes
  
  IT employees within an organization are often required to undertake repetitive processes while handling requests such as resetting or changing passwords. If performed manually, the IT team would spend a reasonable amount of time carrying out these repetitive processes. This would distract them from their core processes.
  
  With Microsoft Teams, you can automate these repetitive processes to relieve your employees from wasting their time and effort unnecessarily. On integrating with your IT service desk, Microsoft Teams helps your employees change or reset their passwords simply by initiating a chat on the collaborative platform.
  
  By giving a simple command to the service desk on MS Teams, the platform would connect the request to the back-end, confirm the identity of the concerned employee and help them make the necessary changes within a few seconds.
  
  
• Seamless Interactions With AI Chatbots
  
  Microsoft Teams allows your employees to interact with dedicated chatbots through conversational AI. Modern service desks help you eliminate the need to approach an agent to obtain direct support. On logging into their MS Teams accounts, your employees can ask all relevant questions and raise issues by conversing with the virtual assistants. The AI chatbots would then scan your knowledge base and look for personalized solutions to the issues faced by your employees. This allows employees to obtain seamless and automated support within a few seconds.
  
  If an employee is not satisfied with the primary support and requires the help of a support agent, they can ask the chatbots to get their cases routed effectively. This results in the chatbot acting as a connecting link between the concerned employee and a suitable agent.
  
  

The Final Word 

These were some of the most effective strategies to increase the overall employee engagement and experience with the help of Microsoft Teams. Integrating your IT service desk or HR help desk with Microsoft Teams helps you optimize the collaborative platform and provide seamless employees.