Make Your SharePoint Online Intranet Relevant

With many organizations moving to remote work and embracing Microsoft Teams as a crucial collaboration tool, opportunities to make Teams more useful to employees have become a priority.

Remote work has many positive features, but there are consequences as well. Ensuring employees feel they know what is happening can be a challenge even under normal circumstances. Remote work can make this more difficult as silos can arise as teams hunker down to address practical aspects of their role.

Microsoft recently released MS Viva Connections, which I believe can be an excellent tool for ensuring that team members see the same consistent message across the organization. It can also help everyone to understand their organization’s priorities and notable events by offering messages on a routine basis.

Like other organizations, Enavate has our share of emails sent to the whole company. While they arguably do the trick, we do risk those emails getting buried, among other things. Using SharePoint Online low friction news posts to capture and present this information may be an alternative. Having updates appear in Teams might be even better.

At Enavate, we recently implemented Viva Connections and have noticed page views on various news posts have gone up appreciably. I surmise that because we live in Teams, people are much more likely to review and absorb the information. By meeting people where they are during their business day, we can get important messages across and better engage our teams. Organizations using Office 365 and Microsoft 365 E5 have access to both Teams and Viva Connections.