Empower your Firstline Workers with new capabilities in Microsoft Teams

Firstline Workers are more than two billion people worldwide who work in service- or task-oriented roles, across industries such as retail, hospitality, travel, and manufacturing. And today, we are announcing the general availability of Shifts, in addition to three new features in Microsoft Teams to help Firstline Workers achieve more. Read the full blog here.   Plan and create schedules with Shifts With Shifts, your schedule management tool now available in Teams, managers can easily plan and create shift schedules, and team members can review schedules and make shift requests from their mobile devices, all in real time. For managers, create and distribute schedules to your team. And for team members, easily review your schedule, and day or shift notes, directly from your mobile device. Customize your mobile Teams experience and leverage new mobile features With the new customizable mobile experience available today, Firstline Workers can customize their navigation menu to have the features most important to them at their fingertips. In addition, Firstline Workers can leverage new mobile features such as: location sharing and smart camera, as well as the ability to record and share audio messages. Lastly, IT administrators can now also give each employee role-based access to the primary Teams features they need. Availability: The customizable mobile experience and new mobile features are available starting today.   View all conversations in one place (left), share location and record audio messages (middle), and customize your navigation menu (right) to make Teams relevant to your role.   Integrate your workforce management system with Teams using a Graph API for Shifts The Graph API for Shifts, the schedule management tool in Teams, is the first of a set of new APIs that enable organizations to integrate their existing workforce management systems with Teams. Available in public preview, the new API makes integration between Shifts and enterprise scheduling systems possible, enabling seamless access to workforce management systems for managers and employees, right from Teams.   Availability: The Graph API for Shifts will be in public preview this quarter.   Celebrate your team with Praise The new Praise tool, rolling out this quarter, gives managers and employees a simple way to recognize co-workers, right in the Teams app where the whole team can see it. Taking steps to engage and recognize employees can go a long way to improving their satisfaction, and reducing turnover.   Availability: Praise is rolling out this quarter.   Share badges to celebrate success, increase employee engagement and foster greater comradery. Please visit our Teams for Firstline Workers page to learn more about how Teams can empower your Firstline Workforce.   Let us know what you think! Try the new features and provide feedback using the feedback link in the lower left corner of Microsoft Teams. If you have suggestions on how to make Teams better, please submit your idea via User Voice or vote for existing ideas to help us prioritize the requests. We read every piece of feedback that we receive to make sure that Microsoft Teams meets your needs.   —Keara James, product marketing manager Microsoft Teams

View article...