Microsoft Teams for frontline workers ensures that team members away from the desk environment can still access a high level of collaboration and communication excellence. It’s not just administrators and knowledge workers in need of an aligned digital workspace today. Frontline workers also need to keep their finger on the pulse of business evolution.
78% of executives say that to be successful in the years to come, companies need to connect and empower their frontline workers with the right information and technology. For years now, Microsoft Teams has invested in a dedicated Teams experience specifically for frontline workers in search of better business alignment.
With Teams for frontline workers, you can create a single environment for teamwork, featuring deeper connections across the organisation. Teams is also agile and flexible enough to meet with business needs as they evolve.
Implementing Teams for Frontline Workers
Microsoft Teams makes it quick and easy to issue an excellent collaboration experience to your team at speed. You can use GitHub PowerShell scripts to configure a local environment in Teams and create and provision users at scale throughout the frontline landscape. Microsoft recommends creating Teams linked to specific locations, like a store, manufacturing plant, hospital, or distribution centre.
Each team created with Microsoft can have its own series of channels. In Healthcare, you might have channels for doctors, nurses, critical care, and administration. In retail, you may have channels for front and back of store, training, and corporate communications.
Once you have your teams set up:
- Create policies: Creating policies allows administrators to control what users can do in a Teams environment. Policies should be in place for both frontline workers and managers, to improve compliance, enhance governance, and reduce the risk of issues. Remember, your policies should cover everything from how to send messages and set up meetings, to who can download certain apps and apply them to the service
- Implement users and security groups: Adding a large number of users to Teams means creating the users first in Azure AD. You can find tutorials within the Microsoft ecosystem to help with this. Once you have your users in the PowerShell environment and added to Teams, you can begin to assign licensing to users in group format. Next, assign users to individual teams, and make sure that each user has the right policies in place to ensure compliance
- Add crucial features and tabs: Microsoft Teams allows you to customize your UCaaS experience based on the kind of business you need to run. In a frontline working environment, you may need access to things like Shift management, push-to-talk voice, and direct routing. It’s also worth looking into things like bots and connectors to boost the efficiency of your team and help with sharing information
One good way to simplify and enhance your Teams setup experience, is to use the Team templates already available from Microsoft. With Teams templates, you can create effective teams with speed, choosing from common business scenarios like employee onboarding and management, with industry-specific templates for retail, healthcare, and even government environments.
The templates available from Microsoft help to show what kind of channels and solutions you might need in place for your ecosystem, and each template can be customized.
Addressing Frontline Worker Needs
Setting up your Teams environment for frontline workers is only the first step. After that, you’ll need to start exploring the features available on Teams just for frontline staff. For instance, the task publishing service in Teams is excellent with the frontline workforce. Task publishing allows companies to create tasks at a corporate level in a central environment, and publish those tasks to different locations, and specific store layouts.
