If you’re in retail, healthcare, manufacturing—any industry with a large, disperse frontline workforce—you know how challenging it is to connect people from the top floor to the shop floor. That coordination is now more critical than ever, too, as leadership navigates unprecedented changes to frontline locations.
Microsoft Teams helps bridge this gap, especially with the recent release of the Tasks app in Teams and, as of today, task publishing. Task publishing is now generally available to coincide with our announcement of the release at NRF, one of the largest retail conferences in the world.
With task publishing in Teams, leadership can create tasks centrally at the corporate level and publish those tasks to targeted frontline locations like stores, clinics, or factories. Tasks can be assigned to all frontline teams or specific locations based on customizable characteristics like size or layout. After tasks are assigned, frontline workers see a simple list of their task assignments through Teams, while corporate has full visibility into task progress across all locations.
2020 is now behind us, but companies would be remiss to ignore its lessons in 2021 and beyond. Of everything we learned, the most important was the essential role of frontline workers. Microsoft is taking this lesson to heart, too. You can read about our frontline worker strategy and enabling features like task publishing in a pair of new blogs from Emma Williams, CVP of Microsoft Office Modern Workplace Transformations, and our friends on the Microsoft Teams Tech Community. The first blog is here and the second here. We’ve also put together a short video at the end of the blog that highlights our strategy in the context of a potential real-world scenario.
Companies around the world are already seeing the benefits of managing their frontline worker tasks in Teams. This includes Chedraui, a publicly traded, Mexico-based grocery store and department store chain. “We chose Microsoft Teams because it brought all the communication and productivity tools we needed together in a single platform, combined with robust security,” says Pilar Rojas Suárez, CEO and Director of Systems at Chedraui. “With Tasks in Teams and the mobile app, area managers have considerably reduced the time it takes to carry out, monitor, and supervise tasks.” You can read the full Chedraui case study here.
For more details on task publishing and how to get started, check out our dedicated support page—but first you’ll need to set up your team targeting hierarchy. If you need more help with this, contact your sales representative. We’ve also developed a Tasks in Teams and Task Publishing look book that goes into even more detail about the feature.
Microsoft has several virtual sessions at NRF this week. We hope you tune in! We also hope you’ll continue visiting our Tech Community and submitting your ideas to improve Planner on UserVoice.
