Microsoft Teams

Time Tracking for Microsoft Teams 

Microsoft Teams reported a whooping 2.7 billion minutes spent in meetings, but the benefit of the tool goes beyond facilitating communication anytime, all the time. With all OneDrive files accessible in one place and Outlook shortcuts, Microsoft Teams makes online collaboration faster for 80% of employees. 

However, the time spent collaborating and working on documents can only be tracked with Timely. “Why would you track it?” you ask.

How you manage your time online matters. Whether you’re an employee or a business interested in supporting well-being in hybrid workplaces, you want to know where team time goes internally. 

Second, you want to capture every all work that goes into delivering projects. 

That chat about copywriting practices with marketing? It counts as work. 

The group chat you opened with ad managers to understand the strategy better? 

It counts as work. And you should bill for all of it.

Can Microsoft Teams track time? 

No.

And there’s a reason for that. Microsoft Teams is for collaboration and communication, no matter what industry. You, on the other hand, you’re here because that time spent on Teams matters to you. Timely is for you, whether you want to track internal communications, client meetings, or collaborative work on project documentation.

How can you track time with the Microsoft Teams integration?

Both admins and users can set up a Microsoft Teams integration with Timely, to capture the time spent on documents, briefs, or team communications. Capturing your collaboration time helps employees produce more accurate statements of work and gives employees better measures of productivity beyond the number of deliverables to help them estimate how long similar projects will take in the future.

What are the benefits of tracking time in Microsoft Teams?

Make collaboration productive and profitable

So many reasons to celebrate the rise of collaborative tools and workplaces! Diversity? Check. A sense of belonging? For sure! Working together, but WFM? You bet.

The secret to keeping collaboration productive is linking it to business objectives. Microsoft Teams allows you to create discussion groups for each project and topic, but that’s not enough. 

You want to track the time spent on each client deliverable – like documents created, updated, and shared. Using the Microsoft Teams integration in Timely, team collaboration can be routinely checked against running projects. You may find that some overtime work is due to misalignment or to poor access to briefs. 

As a project manager, keeping the pulse on how the team collaborates and feels about processes is easier with the Microsoft Teams for Timely. 

Track the impact of training and webinars

Top management and digital consulting firms use webinars to raise awareness around research and work they’ve delivered to clients. It’s common practice to track the ROI of webinars and client-facing events through attendance and lead quality KPIs, but these only inform you on the market impact of your efforts. 

Behind the scenes of all live streamed effects there’s the cost of employees and experts, and the time spent making the magic happen. How do you know if the time investment in a webinar is worth the operational cost? First, you need to track it.

Let’s assume that a consultant’s client target is 25 hours per week of billable time. If they’re able to fill it 60% from inbound inquiries coming from monthly speaking engagements, that’s a good use of both Microsoft Teams and of their time. But, if your best consultants are spending time on webinars because there’s a schedule to follow, then you will want to limit your time commitments and focus on activities that help you reach your quota.   

Know and measure the effectiveness of your engagement by tracking the time spent on Microsoft Teams with Timely.

Profitability

Meetings, calls, webinars – all of them have a purpose, but when unmanaged, they can quickly turn into company sunk time. Every minute or hours adds up to rising internal costs that may eventually hurt your profit margin. 

When it goes undetected, sunk time looks like under-performance: you planned for 10% more revenue this quarter, but only attained 80% of the quota. The answer is often found in understanding where time is wasted and where it’s productively utilized. 

Use the Microsoft Teams integration to start tracking team and time utilization in various areas of the business. Once you’re reviewing time and tagged activities reports regularly, the patterns will become obvious and you’ll be able to stop time-wasting initiatives before they impact your bottom line.

Who can make the most of the Microsoft integration?

• Companies that bill by the hour

• Digital agencies, consultants, accountants

• Professional services

• Advisors, Personal Concierges, Trainers & Coaches

• Remote teams
• SaaS companies