7 productivity apps in Microsoft Teams

Introduction

Microsoft Teams is the hallmark of an intelligent workplace today. Teams has a rich set of productivity tools and services in-built. A fascinating quality of Teams is that it lets you integrate as many add-ons or apps as you want and take productivity to the next level. This is to ensure that your employees while working remotely, stay focused in one place and do not switch to other applications for their specific requirements.

In this blog, we will read about some important apps which you can integrate to Microsoft Teams to amplify user experience and keep your teams engaged, organized and efficient.

1. Polly

Use it to collect employees’ feedback

Polly is a popular survey tool used frequently by organizations and employees today. Using Polly, you can instantly create polls in your Teams channel or group chat and customize the interface with many advanced options such as whether to keep users anonymous, display results, turn on comments etc. Polly uses vote-counting analytics to help you collect feedback or opinions of your co-workers on a specific question in real-time. Polly is an excellent productivity app to keep your workforce engaged without diversion.

2. Wiki

Use it as a dedicated space to share notes

Wiki comes as a default app in Microsoft Teams and gets integrated afer you create a channel. It is used as a central repository for all your co-workers to draft, edit and share notes. You can use it particularly when you have a specific or one-off project in hand and want everyone in the team to go through prerequisites or basic instructions before starting it. Additionally, you can store a how-to guide in Wiki which your teammates can access for their knowledge or to chat on a subject and collaborate effectively.

3. Karma

Use it to foster a positive and inspiring work culture

Karma is a chatbot used as a peer recognition tool that allows you to give ‘kudos’ to your team members to improve their performance. Using Karma, team members can reward each other based on Karma points and move up the leaderboards. You can give kudos to your colleagues for posting a good reply in a thread. Karma recognizes every small encouragement provided by employees to one another and builds a comprehensive performance report for them.

Karma collects and processes in-chat data about co-worker appreciation, micro-feedback, instant and long-term rewards etc. to give valuable insights about team’s performance to leaders. Besides, Karma builds user profiles based on information gathered with each karma request. It also provides a dashboard to visualize statistics of your team activity. This way, you can keep motivating your teammates to work diligently and efficiently.

4. Trello

Use it to manage your tasks and projects well

Trello is a project management app that helps you to organize your project and prioritize tasks in a flexible way for efficient collaboration. Once it is integrated to Teams, you will be able to view all your tasks or boards, directly from the app. Trello allows team members to create and remove card, assign card to other users and comment, or add an attachment to card. This type of task management is highly visual and easy to adopt. This way, you can easily know what work is being done or is under process and who is working on what.

5. ScrumGenius

Use it to run daily stand-ups

ScrumGenius app runs automatic check-ins and stand-ups in Teams to automate your daily status meetings to enhance communication and productivity. Each day, at a scheduled time, it asks team members a series of questions about what they achieved yesterday, what were the challenges they faced and what their plans are for today. This way, ScrumGenius collects updates from your team by recording their answers and generates an email report with important statistics and summaries of team’s result.

6. MURAL

Use it for visual collaboration with your creative team

MURAL app provides your creative team a digital workspace to brainstorm and collaborate on real-time. MURAL app has powerful visual collaboration capabilities to boost your team’s diagramming or design thinking methods. You can conveniently add MURAL as a custom tab, notification bot and messaging extension inside of channels.

If someone invites you to MURAL or mentions you, you will get an automated private chat message as notification. If anytime, while conversation, you feel that your team needs visual collaboration session, then you can immediately start a video call and share MURAL templates without leaving your conversation context. This way, you can let your team be innovative and work seamlessly having all visual collaboration tools in one place.

7. AttendanceBot

Use it to track your work time

AttendanceBot is used for absence management and shift planning while keeping others in loop. Once you integrate it to Teams, you can effectively track your paid time off, vacations, sick days, etc. and export timesheets right withing Teams. You can request time off or change travel statuses by messaging the AttendanceBot directly.

AttendanceBot also allows calendar integrations to notify you of approvals and responses on your requests. Besides, you can track the time you dedicated for some project, as well as lunch and break. All this data can be viewed on dashboard team leaders and members alike. This way, you can effectively analyze your work hours and avoid any wastage of time.

Conclusion

With everyday enhancements, new apps and features, Microsoft Teams strives to simplify communication and offer a matchless productivity. We have seen how by incorporating various productivity apps in Teams, you can empower your remote workforce to work not just harder but smarter and achieve more.