Using Word when it keeps autosaving (beachballs/pauses)

I'm finding editing large documents to be quite painful when Autosave is turned on.  When Word is autosaving, the application doesn't respond, and shows a beachball.  It is the worst when the document is saved on a remote SMB (aka SAMBA, CIFS) share, it can take a long time to save a large document, and waiting 20-30 seconds every few minutes while it saves really disrupts the flow of editing.

Moving the document to a Sharepoint drive helps marginally, and moving it to a local SSD drive helps a little more, but it's still a major PITA.  Especially since I need to encourage staff to keep the documents in their proper location, on the remote network share.

Is there any way to make Microsoft Word to auto save in a background thread, rather than blocking the UI thread while it's auto-saving?  Is this something specific to my own installation, is this a known problem?  

I'm using Word for Mac version 16.71 (23031200)