With Covid-19 changing how credit union employees work and serve their members, shifting to technologies that enable a remote and hybrid workforce has been essential.
In 2019, Celero started offering Microsoft Office 365 to clients, allowing them to create more productive teams. Since then, 56 credit unions have migrated to Microsoft 365. With so many clients now in the cloud, we wanted to share some ways that Microsoft 365 can help your credit union work virtually and in a hybrid environment.
Conversations
Chatting with a co-worker and want to talk face-to-face to have more clarity in the conversation?
With Microsoft Teams you can go directly from chatting with someone and seamlessly transition to a video call to engage without having to host a meeting. These calls are private and won’t appear in any team conversation.
Creating Teams
Are employees in your credit union struggling to communicate effectively while working remotely or in a hybrid environment?
Microsoft Teams puts everything organizations need to make faster decisions into a single hub, including chats, meetings, calling, and Office 365 apps. With Teams, every type of worker (from the frontline representatives to Investment Officers) is empowered to contribute their voice and take shared accountability for business outcomes. By empowering employees with Teams, your credit union can reduce the costs of collaboration, accelerate decision-making and improve the member and employee experience.
Check out the Hybrid Work Guide from Microsoft to help business leaders empower employees and meet members needs in a hybrid work environment.
Collaborate with Confidence
With security always being top of mind for credit unions, the last thing you want to worry about is the security of your collaboration tools. Discover how Microsoft 365 delivers an enterprise-grade experience without compromising privacy and security below.
User Privacy
With Microsoft Teams, you can take advantage of data transparency and privacy safeguards and rest easy knowing that your personal data is protected from unwanted access.
Data Protections and Governance
With Microsoft Defender your credit union can safeguard against malicious software hidden in files and protect sensitive information and confidential resources with integrated data loss prevention and sensitivity label policies.
Support Internal Compliance
Easily hold and manage information with eDiscovery, legal hold, audit log and content search capabilities. Your credit union will also be able to hold retention policies to preserve information and meet industry regulation and compliance requirements.
Meeting Safety and Security
Foster safer and more inclusive meetings with strong admin controls and policies that make it easy to prevent interruptions, set attendee privileges, remove disruptive attendees and block anonymous guests.
The Lists App in Teams
If your team has information to track, work to organize or workflows to manage, the Lists app can help. With Lists, users can track data such as issues, assets, members, and more using customizable views, rules, and alerts to keep everyone on the team in sync.
In Teams, users access Lists as a tab in a channel. Click + to open the tab gallery and add a new Lists app tab instance to a channel to get started. Users can create new lists or pin existing lists from within the same team or from a different SharePoint site that they have access to.
New lists can be created from scratch, from built-in templates, based on the structure of an existing list, or by importing data from an Excel workbook. Customize the list to match how you work and share it so the whole team can stay informed and make contributions.
Forms Polling Feature
In late 2020, Microsoft integrated the Teams and Forms app to create a new way for meeting presenters to poll attendees. Before the meeting, the presenter can create draft polls. During the meeting, the presenter can create and launch polls that any attendee can view and answer. All attendees will be able to see the results in real-time, and respondents can respond to a poll after the meeting if the poll has not been closed.
Following the meeting, meeting presenters can evaluate responses in the meeting tab; export responses to an Excel workbook; or review responses on the web in the Forms app.
This feature is useful for credit unions while members are voting during virtual AGMs.
Live Transcriptions in Teams Meetings
Live transcripts in Microsoft Teams meetings will provide another way to both follow and review meeting conversations. The new Live Transcription feature will give users a new way to follow and review meeting conversations.
Once the change is implemented, Teams users will be able to see two options in the meeting control bar: recording and transcription. Transcripts can be viewed in real-time using the desktop client, or at the end of the meeting on the web application. Considering that transcription is a key aspect of the collaborative office experience, live transcription capabilities should definitely help to improve accessibility.
Virtual Breakout Rooms
Microsoft has created a virtual breakout room functionality within Teams to allow meeting organizers to split main meetings into smaller sessions for focused discussions. The meeting organizer can create up to 50 breakout rooms and choose to assign participants automatically or manually into rooms.
The organizer can start a breakout room in a Teams meeting or a Teams channel meeting, allowing greater flexibility in how you meet. Creating meaningful connections can be difficult in larger group settings. Breakout rooms allow organizers to divide the meeting into sub-groups to facilitate discussions and brainstorming sessions and then come back to a larger group discussion without having to create multiple meetings.
Increased Meeting Limit/Live Event Limit
With the uptick in virtual meetings since the pandemic started, Microsoft has increased the participant limit for Teams meetings and live events.
The Teams meeting participant limit has increased to 1000 (view-only allows for up to 20,000 listen-only participants to join a meeting with certain licenses), and the live event attendee limit has increased to 20,000 (license dependent).
The increased limit should help credit union teams be able to communicate at once and allow for larger meetings with members, such as virtual AGMs.
Yammer
While working remotely, employees miss those everyday connections with co-workers. Microsoft Yammer provides a solution for employees to engage across your organization with an internal ‘social network’.
With Yammer, you can improve engagement and enhance communication within your credit union. The platform allows employees to build communities of interest, gather ideas and feedback, and keep everyone informed, aligned and moving forward.
To keep up with all of the updates to Microsoft 365, check out the Office 365 – What’s New Page on the Celero Client Extranet. If you are interested in learning about Microsoft 365, contact us or speak to your Celero Account Executive.
Editors note: this post was originally published in February, 2021 and has been updated for accuracy.
