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Jasco Blog

Maximising Work management in M365

July 13, 2021

Work environment disruption over the last year with multiple lockdowns, slowly transitioning back to the office and then being sent home… again… has caused challenges to employee workflow. 

From being forced to work from home initially, and to now be in a hybrid environment, digital overload has become prevalent, with employees finding they are burning themselves out and unable to have a positive work-life balance. However, even though employees were feeling burnt out, according to the Workfront State of Work 2020 report, it was found that 69% of respondents were still not investing into a work management tool.  

Most people’s idea of work management is having multiple sticky notes all over the place or emails placed in follow-up folders that we know we will never get to. However, Microsoft have put together built-in work management tools that can help your team save time and effort in the long run. 

Microsoft’s work management strategy incorporates multiple built-in apps to help your workflow productively.  

Work Management

Tracking your work and staying on top of tasks through work management

  

  1. Planner is for team tasks. You create a shared plan that you can monitor tasks across an entire team and manage task-based teamwork, like planning a corporate event or launching a new marketing plan.
  2. To Do is for individual tasks. These are tasks you assign yourself to do for the day, week, or even month. An example of this would be completing an online seminar or complete a blog. 
  3. Tasks in Teams is for both. It brings together shared tasks from Planner and individual tasks from To Do into a single platform in Teams to ensure everything is in one place. 
  4. Lists is for tracking ongoing initiatives with lots of your information items. These can include tracking work progress, maintaining an onboarding list for new employees, or managing assets. 

 

These apps for Microsoft Teams can help ensure your staff are on top of all workstreams by providing structure and deadlines. Having notifications can ensure your employees never miss a task again and manage your responsibilities with ease.  

Example 

Here is an example of putting together all the M365 work management apps. 

As a marketing manager, you can kick off your Marketing campaign in Planner, assigning tasks to your team like “reach out to partners” and “post over social media”. As the campaign grows and evolves you will be given more tasks assigned to yourself, this is when you can use the Tasks app in teams to view all your previous efforts but helps sort out your next plan of attack. This will also list every item you have in your To Do tasks, which could be “view post impressions” or “view page analytics”. After each campaign, you can enter the data into List’s to keep track of how each campaign went and you can track your progress towards your organisation’s goals. 

 

Take some time to educate your staff on the importance of work management to ensure they can stay on track effectively and efficiently. Being able to track progress and tick off achievements can help drive your staff to do a better job, and not burn themselves out whilst working from home. 

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