For many, this is a new practice that requires trial and error in order to find the most efficient remote management strategy. Even then, project managers and employees find themselves battling new challenges. According to Bill Palombi, head of product at the dataflow automation organization Prefect, these hardships vary depending on what stage a company is at in terms of growth. 

“I would say the most substantial challenge by far is onboarding people and gelling different teams together,” Palombi said.  “The processes that you need to be successful [remotely] simply change as a company grows.” 

According to Palombi, the struggle with onboarding teams remotely is compounded by the fact that team members and managers, or even team members and other team members, struggle to form a solid relationship without meeting in person. “Particularly, those informal ties within an organization are sometimes hard to develop with a remote team… when everybody is in the same workspace, there’s a propensity to lean on more informal ways of doing things,” he said. Without those informal bonds and methods that in-person work offers, project managers overseeing remote teams must leverage certain tools that are well suited for collaboration. 

Palombi believes that any kind of task and project management software that allows managers and team members to keep track of in-progress tasks, has become an essential part of managing teams remotely.  “There’s a tool that we use to capture tasks, assign those tasks to people, and then use that task… as a point to share status updates relevant to the completion of the task,” he said. These types of tools can be a huge benefit to project managers as they not only allow for a certain level of collaboration, but also the tracking of different team members’ work.

Another struggle Palombi highlighted was that of the mental health and the home life of team members and managers alike. “I don’t know that it’s any more important now [to offer mental health resources] than it always has been, but I do think that is it getting more attention,” he began, “We have a lot of informal conversations at Prefect that act as opportunities for those with challenges to come forward.” Creating an environment where team members feel comfortable going to their managers with personal problems that can have an effect on their work is more important now than ever. 

Ahva Sadeghi, co-founder and CEO of Symba, a women-founded tech startup that helps organizations streamline the management of their talent development programs, also emphasized the importance of forming this personal connection with employees when managing teams remotely. According to Sadeghi, the major challenges of managing a remote team can be broken up into two aspects: clear communication and mental health support. “One aspect is managing the workload, the workflow and communication,” she said. “It’s about making sure that project managers are in touch with their team, that there are clear expectations, and that their team is well suited to deliver on projects.” 

She explained that this can be harder to accomplish in a remote setting as managers no longer have full access to their team members. According to Sadeghi, without the option to knock on someone’s door and see how they are doing with the work they are assigned, managers can be left feeling slightly out of touch with how things are going. 

However, Sadeghi said the solution to this problem is striking the right balance between being overbearing and being too hands off. “It’s been challenging for some of these project managers whether they are overstepping and creating a micromanaging environment or if they’re not giving enough direction and their employees and teams feel lost,” she said. 

The next challenge Sadeghi highlighted was that of the mental health of team members working remotely, specifically during the pandemic. “I think the second biggest challenge is definitely around mental health because not only have we been in a remote setting where we don’t have a lot of the culture and experiences that we had in a workplace setting, but going through the pandemic we find ourselves isolated from other aspects of our social environment,” she explained. 

Throughout the pandemic, millions of people around the world found themselves disconnected from their friends and family. This social detachment paired with a remote work environment can leave people feeling alone, putting a strain on their mental health. According to Sadeghi, there are some ways organizations can combat this. She said, “The first thing is really treating your employees and team as people rather than just employees.” 

For project managers and team leaders operating in a remote setting it can be easy to fall into the trap of viewing team members as employees only. One way Sadeghi thinks organizations can prevent this is by hosting regular mental health check-ins with team members. Having this culture in place and making your employees feel heard and cared for will undoubtedly improve their experience and by extension, their work.

One tip Sadeghi had for project managers trying to make these mental health check-ins as effective as possible was her “red, yellow, green” system. “This is one thing that we do where we just ask how their doing and they categorize their feelings into either red, yellow, or green,” she explained, “red meaning things are on fire, I need to stop what I’m doing and I need to focus on something else. Yellow meaning I’m struggling with things, or green meaning I’m doing really great.” Having simplified terms for team members to express their feelings to their managers makes them feel supported throughout this challenging time. “This allows us to really understand and support our remote team,” Sadeghi said. “You can really create space for those feelings and see if certain employees need to take a step away or would benefit from a mental health day.” 

Sadeghi believes that offering employees the option to take a day to focus on getting back in the right headspace will help to avoid burnout, and this does not just go for employees but managers and team leaders as well. “One other thing that’s really important as a manager is to take your own paid time off and encourage people to sign off when the day is done; that really sets a tone for the organization,” she said. Burnout and fatigue are struggles for everyone. As a project manager working remotely, taking care of your own mental health and well-being will inevitably have a domino effect on team members. This will create a culture of inclusivity and care, ultimately leading to the production of better work as well as a healthier and happier work environment.

Another challenge of working from home is setting boundaries around working hours. According to Sadeghi, “It is so important to respect peoples hours. “If someone is working from 8 to 5, as a manager, you have to be sure not to reach out to them before or after those hours unless it is incredibly urgent.” This works to help team members accomplish a better work/life balance when working from their own homes. Without a separate work setting, it can be difficult for an employee to set those boundaries and differentiate their personal time from their working time. As a remote manager, helping team members find that boundary becomes an incredibly important aspect of the job. 

In that same vein, Sadeghi believes that working hours should be used methodically and meetings should be scheduled in a way that allows for the most productivity. “You have to make sure you’re scheduling efficient meetings that are mindful of everyone’s time,” she began. “Knowing the right people are there and knowing when to leverage certain communication tools will save people’s time in the end.” 

Sadeghi also stressed the importance of letting team members know that their hard work is valued in the organization. “I think in this remote setting it’s so important to give kudos or shoutouts to different teams,” she said. Sadeghi uses this in her own organization and she believes that having this model of positive reinforcement and employee recognition helps to set a positive tone. Showing team members that you appreciate their work gives them a feeling of pride and accomplishment and will, in turn, lead to more commendable work in the future. Having open communication pathways to express both positive and constructive feedback offers organizations a level of transparency that will help them thrive.

With this transparency, Sadeghi said that another struggle of managing a remote team can be staying on top of the work each person is assigned. “I think that it’s really important to have a structure within your team,” she began, “One thing we do is design OKRs to understand what the objective is and what key results we hope to accomplish with each task.” 

Sadeghi believes that as a manager, especially one working remotely, it is essential to know what is on every team member’s plate to ensure that the workload is being evenly divided. This is another place where she cites her “red, yellow, green” method, but in a professional way. “As a good manager you have to understand how you’re delegating tasks,” she said. “And beyond that, you have to ask your team for feedback; another part of that ‘red, yellow, green’ thing is the professional side.” This offers team members a way to let their manager know if they feel overloaded with tasks and projects. 

One-to-one meetings ‘powerful’

Hazim Macky, vice president of engineering for the cryptocurrency platform Coinme, believes that the most effective way to manage a team remotely is through personalized one-to-one meetings with team members.

“I think in general that one-to-one meetings are a very powerful tool for any leader,” Macky said. “It is an opportunity for both the leader or the manager and the employee to connect on so many levels.” 

Unfortunately, this personal connection between managers and their employees can seem unattainable in the remote working world we now live in. According to Macky, one-to-one meetings might be the solution for the disconnect that many companies are facing because they allow employees and managers to personally share expectations and work on plans for growth and development. 

When working remotely, it can sometimes be difficult to find motivation and intention to put behind different tasks. The same goes for the practice of one-to-one meetings in a remote setting. “This type of meeting is a great tool for any manager to have in their toolkit, however, there needs to be intentionality to back it up,” Macky said. He placed an emphasis on the effectiveness of these types of meetings for both the employee and the manager — both parties need to leave the meeting feeling as if they got something out of it and that it was a productive use of time. This becomes especially important when managing a team remotely because face time with your employees becomes more rare. 

This leads to the question of how to conduct one-to-one meetings remotely in the most effective way possible. Macky’s strategy for this is to schedule one-to-one meetings not as a method to get updates on certain projects, but rather as an avenue to invite open communication and form a trusting relationship between manager and employee. 

According to Macky, shared understanding is an important place to start. “They come from a ground of understanding, meaning that the manager understands what the employee wants to address,” he explained. “What are the expectations? How does the employee want the manager to behave? Do they want suggestions or do they want the manager to merely listen and hold a space for them?” For a manager, taking this time to hear employee feedback and understand their experience within the organization can be just as important for company growth and overall progress as hearing about updates on different projects. 

“There is a great opportunity with one-to-ones for the manager to see how they can best provide support for their employees during this challenging time,” Macky said. He placed an emphasis on the effect of COVID-19 on the mental health of the masses and how employees’ struggles in that regard may negatively affect their work, especially when that work is being conducted remotely. “It is important to create the environment to really let the employees know that they are heard,” he said. “If needed, the manager can offer some resources that either the company provides or that I just want you to know about.” Macky said this is oftentimes uncharted territory for managers, as they most likely have never had a need to be exposed to or trained in mental health services prior to the past year. Now, in the remote work setting, addressing these concerns becomes a more pertinent issue than ever before. 

When an employee is granted this kind of one-on-one, open communication, it also helps to build company loyalty, something that can be challenging to accomplish in a remote setting. According to Macky, using one-to-one meetings to let your employees know that you care about them as people rather than just as workers will motivate them to work harder and boost company morale. “Letting the employee know that they’re heard and being listened to [by the manager] is a powerful tool,” he said. “It creates a culture of inclusivity and belonging within the organization that I think every company should be striving for.” 

90% of project teams working remotely

According to the new Global Trends in Project Management 2022 report, nearly 90% of project teams are working remotely in multiple locations. Of those surveyed, 48% reported that they operate in multiple locations within the same country while 39% said that their teams function in multiple different countries.

 It was also revealed that only 26% of respondents are working with an established project or work methodology, such as agile or waterfall. Meaning, that there are many scattered teams operating without a uniform method in their organizations. 39% reported that they use a combination of Agile and Waterfall, 18% used many different styles within a single project, and 17% operate with no established methodology at all. 

When it comes to managing remote hybrid teams, there are many challenges for a leader to consider. According to the survey, the number one challenge these teams find themselves faced with is poor cross team collaboration. 26% of respondents reported that their organization struggled with this while operating remotely, meaning that many organizations are still learning to successfully accommodate hybrid teams. In addition to this, respondents reported that organizations also faced challenges such as outdated or ill-suited processes, overall difficulty working in a remote environment, and ineffective scheduling. 

In an attempt to try and mend these issues, 50% of organizations operating remotely use scheduled meetings as the primary way to collaborate within the team while 25% reported that they use chat or email to foster team communication. In terms of tracking project progress, 29% of those surveyed reported that they also use in-person or virtual meetings in this way while 20% use project management software to stay up to date with projects, and lastly, 13% said they utilize spreadsheets. 

In a hybrid work environment, project managers also find themselves facing the issue of balancing the wide range of skill sets displayed across team members. This becomes a bigger problem when many of those expected to manage projects in the remote environment were never formally trained in project management. According to the survey, almost 30% of respondents reported that they were not specifically hired to be a project manager, however, they consistently find themselves in these kinds of leadership roles. In addition, nearly 30% of those surveyed also said that they never participated in a formal management certification program.

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Metrics, key performance indicators, objectives and key results (OKRs), being able to measure progress – it all links back to a need within organizations to ultimately quantify return on investment.  When we all worked in one place, most metrics were tied to outputs – achieve sales targets, ship code, maintain a positive net promoter score.

Changing environments demand new metrics

But how have those ways of measurement changed in the last year? Do they take into account the challenges and opportunities that come with remote working? As Dan Montgomery, the founder and managing director of Agile Strategies, said, the current situation “is a great opportunity to get better at managing people around outcomes rather than tasks or, worse yet, punching a virtual clock to prove they’re working. Many employees working from home genuinely have big challenges, including bored kids, sick relatives and an unending stream of bad news. They need the flexibility right now and will appreciate your trust in them.”

Having that flexibility is particularly critical in uncertain times. “Now more than ever, the goals that we’re setting are so critical for us to be able to navigate what happens next,” Ryan Panchadsaram, co-founder and head coach of What Matters said.

Defining a clear vision

But how do we set those goals? One mistake many businesses make is not aligning targets and objectives throughout the business. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a start-up, a scale up or an established sector leader, without a goal at the company level, you’re lost. Chris Newton, VP of Engineering at Immersive Labs, calls this “Vision — it all needs to have a really clear, inspiring, well understood company vision that is really guiding every department in the business. Not just product and tech, but you’re talking about the whole wider business. There has to be a direction, a clear direction for the company.”

Chris was talking as part of a recent Indorse Engineering Leaders panel discussion. Once you have that big vision, he says “Underpinning that is going to be the product and tech side of things. You will have your product vision: ‘what are we trying to achieve for our customers through the product?’ Then you have the engineering vision that underpins the product vision. It is complementary to the product vision, and it supports it. The engineering vision & strategy lines up to delivering the best outcomes for customers through the product vision.”

It is only once that big picture is in place that a business can start to work out how it is going to get there.

The right framework for transparency and function

Chris was particularly keen on Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs. “Objectives framework, such as OKRs, can be a really powerful tool in terms of getting that prioritization and alignment right. It’s great to make a clear and visible link between what software engineers and managers are doing on the ground and how that then ties back up to top-level objectives.”

What this brings to an organization is transparency in goal setting. Everyone, from senior executives down to team members, is clear on how objectives are created and how what they do helps drive results.

Having that process is critical to determining what action is going to be taken. As another panellist, Nik Gupta, Software Development Manager at Amazon, highlighted, getting the basics right is critical. Nik and his team “spend about two months just getting our metrics right. Literally, just figuring out what are the right metrics we should track worldwide – are they instrumented, are they reliable, and how would we validate them, etc. It is absolutely essential to get that framework built before you start delving into ‘what projects are we going to do and why.’ ”

What that looks like is going to vary, and it can be easier for some functions than it is for others, as Smruti Patel, another panellist, highlighted. As Head of LEAP and Data Platform at Stripe, she has found that the former is easier to measure than the latter. For LEAP, “the metrics here are obviously more tangible. It’s easier to measure how much you’re spending on your infrastructure or how much time the customer sees when they make a request.” 

However, on the data infrastructure side “some of the inherent qualities or principles from the platform that the internal users require are security, reliability, availability, and leverage, in terms of product enablement, which then enables Stripe’s users. Here, identifying the right set of metrics for infrastructure kind of work has been a challenge.” 

To solve this, Smruti and her team were looking at leveraging learnings from LEAP and seeing how they could be applied to Data Platform. 

Prepare for change

However, while it is important to be clear on what you should measure, being too rigid once they’re defined is counterproductive. Panchadsaram pointed out that “OKRs were never meant to be these rigid rails, they were meant to be a tool for your teams to collectively commit to something.”

In a blog for O’Reilly.com, former Rent the Runway CTO Camille Fournier echoed this sentiment when she said “measurement needs to be focused on the right goals for right now, and you should expect that what you measure will change frequently as the state of systems and the business changes.”

That can only be achieved when metrics are aligned throughout the organization.

Put simply, for metrics to be relevant in the current climate, they need to be aligned with a company vision which is then cascaded down the organization. It is a process that needs to be rigorous in order to inform the work teams need to do, but it also needs to be flexible. At a time when the situation changes almost daily, it is the only way organizations operating with remote teams are going to develop metrics that are beneficial to the business.

The post Are your metrics right for a remote workforce? appeared first on SD Times.

At the start, some developers struggled with remote work, while others thrived. Initial struggles included setting up and getting used to a distributed environment for the first time, feeling isolated from co-workers, and balancing work and home life — especially for those with young children when normal childcare options weren’t there or they had to help their kids with remote schooling alongside working their normal job. 

Benefits included the ones normally associated with working from home: increased productivity, more free time due to not having a commute, and the convenience of not having to go anywhere. 

RELATED CONTENT: How you organize your development teams matters

One year later, the benefits might have remained the same, but the negatives have compounded themselves for some. Those feeling isolated from coworkers at the start of the pandemic are now dealing with the mental toll of having been isolated not only from coworkers for a full year, but also from family and friends. 

“A couple days in a month or a week, no problem, but forever? Well, that just requires a lot more intention from yourself, your team, and your coworkers,” said Anthony Tran, software engineer  at Rollbar, a company that provides a continuous improvement platform. 

In fact, a survey released by Harness in August—5 months into remote working—revealed that 12% of developers were less happy in their roles than they were pre-pandemic. 

There are some who either didn’t like or struggled with working from home at the start, but have changed opinions over time as they’ve gotten more used to it and experimented and figured out things that worked for them. 

“During the beginning of the pandemic it was a struggle to stay motivated at home, there were so many distractions that it made it difficult work,” said Tyler Corwin, a developer at digital marketing company Figmints. “I was still able to hit all of my deadlines, but I didn’t get the same drive to get things done as I did while I was still in the office.  After the first month things got much better as my time management and organization got better.” For example, one thing he started doing was creating “fallback” tasks that he could work on while he waited on answers from his teammates on Slack or email. “This kept me working more efficiently and it’s something that I’ll continue to do even after we resume work back at the office,” Corwin said. 

Corwin added that while at the start he struggled with motivation, communication with team members, and keeping his kids from running into his workspace, now that the vaccine is here, he finds himself not wanting to return to the office five days a week. 

Maxime Basque, a developer at Unito, said that working remotely has been more good than bad. “While I do miss the camaraderie and things like being able to just ask something to someone directly without going the async route, as a generally anxious person I feel a lot calmer these days; not wasting 1h+ in transport every day, being able to concentrate with no distractions when I need to, having almost full control over my schedule, not having to think about lunch, etc. Eliminating the small things that caused a lot of stress were really beneficial for me,” he said.

Daniel Valdivia, an engineer at Kubernetes-native object storage company MinIO, appreciated the extra time he was able to spend with his family. “As the father of a 2-year-old, it has been awesome to get as much time as I have had with my child at such a young age.” 

Sachin Goyal, a principal engineer at Rollbar, also has had mostly positive experiences with working remotely. “I was able to use my time much more efficiently. Cutting down commute, lunch, and room-hopping is a huge time saver. Apart from that, I spent much more time with my 2-year-old and my wife,” he said. The one complaint he has, like many, is not being able to see colleagues regularly. 

Goyal feels that his team and manager have been very accommodating throughout this time. For example, since his daughter’s daycare is closed, he and his wife plan their day and meetings around making sure one of them is always with their daughter, and his company allowed him to have a more flexible schedule. “The ability to work at flexible hours is a huge benefit for me. Open communication was really helpful. Clearly stating the accommodations I wanted from my team and my manager and working with them to create a win-win was actually a ‘win’ for all us,” Goyal said.

Tran also noted that his managers have put in a lot of effort in trying to make remote work a positive experience, such as having lunch meetings on working efficiently and ergonomically, Zoom hangouts with trivia, group yoga, or playing whatever the latest popular Internet game was. “Also, I’d like to emphasize being candid with my managers and coworkers at Rollbar and sharing that I was losing motivation and focus, and feeling distant from the company and team was very helpful because they related that this was a common symptom of working remote and being able to share that, we were able to put more events/meetings/activities in place to help mitigate this feeling,” Tran said. 

Rico Pamplin, a lead process engineer at Lincoln Financial Group, also sees positive steps being taken by management to ensure employees are doing okay. “My manager also heavily promotes maintaining a healthy work/life balance and we have scheduled 1:1 sessions to ensure our professional requirements aren’t overstepping the personal ones.” He said that one way he ensures he’s maintaining his work/life balance is scheduling activities that require him to leave his workspace, because otherwise he’s found himself with days where he’s gotten super focused on a project and then suddenly realized it was 10 pm. 

As more people get vaccinated, many companies are in the process of discussing what that means for future plans, whether that means fully reopening offices, staying fully remote, or adopting a hybrid model. 

Valdivia said that for most of his career he’s been in a physical office and preferred it—because he doesn’t feel that the collaborative process of problem solving on a whiteboard translates to Zoom meetings, and in-person conversations can help build relationships that advance your career—but now has begun to rethink his views and see the value in a hybrid model. “I think it can recharge you, allow for deep work and add a few hours a week of family time without negatively impacting your productivity or the culture.” 

Basque said his company, Unito, will be adopting a hybrid model once the pandemic ends, where employees will be able to work from home two to three days per week. “The company believes this will allow us to maintain our strong culture, foster collaboration, but also adapt to the new reality and new needs of the team.”

Pamplin also sees the value in a hybrid model. “Now that I’ve been remote for a while, the luster has worn off a bit, but I definitely wouldn’t want to go back to primarily working in an office. I don’t mind the cubicle setting occasionally, but to do my job effectively it’s not a necessity, especially given that most of what I do is virtual, and my team is geographically distributed.”

The post Developers reflect on challenges, feelings about remote work in pandemic year appeared first on SD Times.

“As increasingly distributed workforces and hybrid work models become the reality of a new normal, small and large businesses around the world are looking to adopt new technologies for smart collaboration, increased efficiency, and lower downtimes,” Lenovo wrote in its announcement.

RELATED CONTENT: WFH reveals an ‘I’ in team

The company will also provide a PC edition for virtual monitors. The ThinkReality A3 PC Edition enables users to see large monitors in their field of view and to use Windows software tools apps. The glasses tether can tether to a PC or certain Motorola smartphones via a USB-C cable, the company explained.

The glasses can also be used in more complex environments such as factory floors, labs, retail, and hospitality spaces with an industrial edition. Because the Industrial Edition is supported by the ThinkReality software platform, customers can build, deploy, and manage mixed reality applications on a global scale, according to Lenovo in a post. 

“The A3 is a next generation augmented reality solution – light, powerful and versatile. The smart glasses are part of a comprehensive integrated digital solution from Lenovo that includes the advanced AR device, ThinkReality software, and Motorola mobile phones. Whether working in virtual spaces or supporting remote assistance, the ThinkReality A3 enhances workers’ abilities to do more wherever they are,” said Jon Pershke, Lenovo’s vice president of strategy and emerging business at Intelligent Device Group.

The new solution is also part of Lenovo’s efforts to “accelerate adoption of the next generation of wearable computing” within the enterprise. 

In addition to the A3 smart glasses, Lenovo also produces the A6 headset as well as the mirage VR S3 for enterprises that want to take it a step further into total VR immersion for use cases such as soft-skill training. 

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Many of the features now are aimed at combating meeting fatigue and the fact that people are still feeling alone despite today’s collaboration tools, said Mark Rackley, chief  strategy officer at Microsoft technologies consultancy PAIT Group. 

“It’s now the go to-tool in the Microsoft stack for collaborating remotely and doing calls and meetings and Microsoft has been making a ton of enhancements to Teams with ‘call-together mode,’ which puts people in different scenarios as if you’re in a classroom setting or a coffee shop,” Rackley said. 

RELATED CONTENT: WFH reveals an ‘I’ in team

The feature, which came out in June 2020, shifts away from the traditional video-conferencing grid of boxes by bringing people together in a virtual space, creating an environment that users say has a profound impact on the feel of the video conference. 

“People’s brains are used to being aware of others based on their locations, and the mirror effect makes it harder for the brain to notice eye contact irregularities. Those are some of the qualities that make it easier for everyone to tell how they are responding to each other,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post. “Together mode is built to give people the impression that everyone is looking at the entire group in a big virtual mirror.” 

Microsoft also recently released Dataverse, which gives users a way to build custom apps, bots, and flows in Microsoft Teams by using Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate. 

Also at Ignite this year, Microsoft announced that users can get to their home site from within Teams. The home site app provides organizations the ability to pin company-branded entry points to their intranet as a top-level app in Teams. It provides quick access to company-curated resources, important sites and news similar to those provided by the SharePoint App Bar in the web.

“They’ve just rolled out so many features since the pandemic hit, like you can raise your hand and there are meetings where you can see a person actually imposed on top of their screen rather than just sharing your screen to get that more personal feeling. Basically everything that they’re doing right now seems really pushing you to Teams,” Rackley added.  “It’s just an explosion of the ability to get into Teams and do everything that you can do from teams. So in Teams, ‘you’re always in Teams doing everything within Teams’ kind of one-stop shop type thing.” 

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Microsoft Teams recently celebrated its third anniversary and in doing so, released some new, innovative features that are ideal for remote workers to help them become more productive during this COVID-19 outbreak. 

While working remotely is obviously much different than interacting within the same building at a corporate headquarters, where people can engage in face-to-face dialogue, at this time, organizations are doing their best to maintain connectivity by engaging in professional, online meetings. With this third anniversary edition, Microsoft Teams is enhancing and adding new capabilities to build the best online meeting experience to help users succeed from a remote location. 

RELATED CONTENT: Microsoft builds a new online developer experience

Let’s explore some of the new capabilities which have already rolled out, along with some new ones which are scheduled to be available later this year.

Avoid background distraction — While attending a Teams meeting from any location, the “user with background blur” feature can keep the focus on themselves without worrying about background movement. 

Minimize background noise — Many of us, while working from home or a remote location, can sometimes face noise issues in the background and are unable to clearly understand what is being said in online meetings, which can inhibit concentration. Microsoft Teams has arrived at a solution with real-time noise suppression features to minimize distracting background noise and to improve our ability to clearly hear what’s being said.

Easy participation in large meetings — The new “raise hands” feature in Microsoft Teams meetings makes it easier for attendees to actively participate in large meetings. Attendees can send a visual signal when they have something to say, and everyone in the conference will see a visual cue on the attendee’s video feed, as well as in the participant list. This will give an attendee the room to more actively participate in the current conversation.

Offline experience — With offline support, users can now access Microsoft Teams even when no network is available or with terrible network conditions. With offline capability, users can create and read messages, view calendar, browse previously viewed channels, pinned chats, and more.

Quickly reach a group all at once — Microsoft Teams allows creating a tag to categorize people based on attributes such as role, project, skill, or location. Tagging people helps the user notify a group of people all at once by @mentioning a tag in a chat or in any standard channel of the team without having to type every single name. Anyone who has been given that tag will receive a notification as they would if they were personally marked by @.

Automatic creation of an org-wide team — For small to medium-sized businesses, and for organization-wide collaboration purposes, Office 365 global admin can easily create a public group that automatically pulls in every user in the organization, and keeps the membership up-to-date with active directory whenever a user joins or leaves the organization.

New files experience in Microsoft Teams powered by SharePoint — The new file experience in Microsoft Teams provides you with the ability to have a rich preview across 320+ file types, create views, sync files to your computer, work with metadata, pin files to the top, take actions like check-in and check-out, and much more.

Pop-out chat windows for easy chat switching — For smooth movement between ongoing conversations, Microsoft Teams will now allow the user to pop out individual chat conversations into a separate window.

Several other new features are planned in the near future. Let’s take a look at what’s currently scheduled to be coming to Microsoft Teams.  

1. Low-bandwidth support — Microsoft Teams is also now optimized to work in low- or poor-performing network scenarios. With this support, a user will be able to send messages even with sub-optimal connectivity. In the case when network bandwidth is too poor to send a message, the user will be notified, and a message will be saved until the user has returned to a functioning network.  
2. Store recordings in region storage when stream isn’t available in Go Local — Teams meeting recordings get stored in Microsoft Stream cloud storage. In contrast, cloud recordings are currently not allowed/enabled for customers where Stream service is not available in the corresponding Go Local region. Now, Microsoft is going to change the current behavior by allowing “Allow cloud recording” and turning it ON by default. This modification will store the recordings in the respective in-region data center.
3.  Include up to 10,000 users in an individual team — In Microsoft Teams, the upper limit on individual team members has been increased from 5,000 to 10,000 users. This upgrade will likely start rolling out to customers very soon.
4. Group chat with up to 250 people — Sometimes we need to collaborate with a large group; for instance, members from multiple teams without creating a team as a group chat. The group chat feature will allow up to 250 users in a group conversation to quickly do a group chat. This upgrade will start rolling out to customers soon.

Microsoft Teams continues to expand its functionality to meet the needs of users in all roles and across industries, enabling work continuity during challenging times. There’s no debating the fact that “Work from Home” (WFH) is made much easier by using Microsoft Teams.  

Microsoft Teams allow you to quickly connect with teammates and be more productive from home as well. To ensure success, you’ll also want to consistently evaluate available technology options as they become available, and act quickly and efficiently consider them for support to truly empower your distributed teams and remote workforce. 

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