“… and it wasn’t a compromised way of working”

I’ve been using the Lync and SfB mobile clients for many years now, and they have been ok, a bit ‘meh’ in places and they normally will have killed your mobile battery dead in hours, and often resulted in only being logged in to where really needed. It has never been a truly successful solution to taking your communications and with you and you certainly couldn’t collaborate effectively.

Today was sports day at school (not for me obviously) but I took the time out of the office and headed off with my mobile and the Teams client. Now, if you haven’t looked at the Teams mobile client, you should, it is pretty much the same as the desktop client, yes really! After a couple of hours of being pestered by colleagues for input in to conversations, or checking to see if I could help out with client engagements, it became clear to me just how good the Teams mobile experience is. I was taking calls on Teams in the same way I would at home or in the office, I was answering messages in the same way, I was chipping in to client conversations on a number of different teams and channels. Nobody had any idea that  I was out of the office, nothing had changed, I was able to work from the middle of a field, and it wasn’t a compromised way of working for a change. Nobody had to contact me on my mobile, the call wasn’t forwarded either, they just called me, I answered and with my Plantronics Voyager 6200UC headset on, and nobody knew any different.

That phrase “it wasn’t a compromised way of working” is actually quite a landmark. Never before has being out of the office felt less problematic or isolated. You can genuinely work and communicate seamlessly with your colleagues and partners, and that is pretty darn good. Looking back, you realise how poor the Lync and SfB client are when compared to the Teams mobile client of today.

This could be one of the strongest organisational benefits to your mobile workforce and road warriors. This is going to be one cultural change organisations are going to want to adopt. If you haven’t checked it out, you really should. No, really!!