We all carry memories of keystone moments with us, whether it’s learning about when Elvis died or the moment your company held a meeting saying you were working from home for a week or two while this COVID thing calmed down. Elvis’ legacy is still being debated decades after his passing, and some experiences that COVID brought us abruptly, like working from home, are definitely still a part of our day-to-day lives.

Nothing says 2022 like hybrid work. We’ve talked about it before... plenty... But seriously, according to nine out of ten executives polled by McKinsey, the hybrid work model is what to expect moving forward, and 35% of workers responding to a Qualtrics survey say they’re more likely to search for a new job if they are required to return to the office full-time.

But along the other blade of this double-edged sword is the lack of connection teams are now experiencing. Sure we’ve grown accustomed to working from home in some ways, but we’re missing the little moments that office work provides.

Remember back to sophomore year geometry class? When you got in trouble for saying math was boring, and Mrs. P said, and this is a direct quote, “We’ll never just have mega computers in our pockets capable of connecting us to the entirety of helpful, digital suite services, like Microsoft 365!”

Okay, maybe she didn’t say the last part about Microsoft 365. But the point is that, for a long time, people have been wrong about how younger generations will continue to utilize the technology at their fingertips.

Document management is a tricky thing. While management may believe files are stored digitally and easy to access for those who need them, the rank-and-file who sift through the rank files will likely tell you a different story. Studies find that sorting through documents to find what your team needs adds up to over 21.3% of all productivity loss, and professionals take an average of 18 minutes to find each document they need. 

No matter what Nick from the sales department tells you about his financial scheme – you know, the “inverted funnel” one – someone promising you’ll get rich quickly is lying.

In favor of a more direct approach, our goal is to simplify the useful tech we use every day so that the endless options we're all inundated with every day feels a little more manageable. 

This is all a fancy way to say we really love to geek out on tech stuff. Seriously. It’s all we talk about. Stand around our proverbial water cooler and see what we chat about. It’s usually tech. And for today’s blog, we’re geeking out on Microsoft Planner and all of its incredible usefulness. 

Back in October 2019 – you know, before it all changed – Microsoft beta-tested a new baseline security program with 30 million users. We let the mega-computers crunch all of those numbers but the result was astoundingly clear: Adding things like MFA and conditional access to accounts made a world of difference.

To be fair that isn’t exactly a surprising find. While it’s our job to care about how nefarious types are trying to get into your data, you’re likely busy thinking about the 99.9% of the rest of your business. Cakes, cookies, muffins, whatever kind of delicious baked goods you make. (And even if you don’t make baked goods, you should still keep reading..)