If your business isn’t growing, you risk being left behind. This takes hard work, dedication and a tonne of creativity if you want to be at the forefront of your market.

But, if creativity fuels growth, what fuels creativity? You might think that you need some mysterious, bespoke, little known tool that gives you everything you need to grow.

However, the reality is that the best tool for empowering creative agencies is one you may not expect – Office 365.

Don’t adjust your screens, you read that correctly.

Office 365 can boost your creative agencies growth through improved collaboration and productivity, sparking new ways to solve the problems that get in the way of progress. It is the canvas creative agencies need to expand on the power of an idea, and a platform to encourage talented workers to get more done.

Why Office 365 is a powerful tool for your creative business

With Office 365, you take the familiar and create the extraordinary. Here are five ways it can help your creative business improve productivity, collaboration and creativity while promoting business growth:

1. Collaboration tools

Agency owners will extoll the virtues of the word ‘collaboration’. But for all its buzz, it can be hard to achieve with company cultures, schedules and inefficient tools potentially getting in the way.

But, even if you find collaboration difficult, you must persevere. After all, companies that promote collaborative working are five times more likely to be high-performing than their non-collaborative counterparts.

If you want your creative teams to come up with the latest and greatest ideas, you need to supercharge their collaboration. With Office 365 employees can work together in the cloud, editing documents in real-time, no matter where in the world they are.

Here are some of our favourite Office 365 collaboration tools:

• Delve. Quickly find any documents you are working on without hassle.
• Yammer. Communicate and collaborate with colleagues in this private social network.
• Sway. A colourful and interactive canvas to create interactive reports, presentations and more with colleagues.

2. Less emailing, more doing

A day out of the office, or a morning of meetings can leave your inbox looking very unappealing.

For the average worker, 28 percent of the work week is spent reading email – that’s more than 11 hours per week. Wasted time, lack of productivity and annoying spam emails can get in the way of your flow and creative thinking.

The ‘Clutter’ feature in O365 allows users to set rules to mark emails it deems less important and keeps track of the messages you read. As new messages come through, it will take low priority emails and filter them out.

This lets your creative teams focus on more valuable, revenue building activities. After all, every little helps when it comes to productivity.

3. Share files and permissions

You can’t bring ideas to life if you don’t have the right tools. If your creative team can’t access the files and other collateral required to do their job it is a waste of valuable time and resources.

Don’t let anything get in the way of your team’s creative flow. Make sure users have everything they need by uploading files to OneDrive. This allows them to access files via an email link with Outlook automatically granting them access and editing permissions.

4. Regular updates

Do you get business FOMO? One of the best things about Office 365 is that it will add new features and updates automatically.

With its cloud-based subscription, rest assured that you will never miss out on future improvements to the service. You’ll always have the latest and greatest in collaboration software, making your projects run smoothly and adding to your business growth.

5. Enhance team spirit and communication

Microsoft Teams has taken over Slack with 13m daily users. Teams is a chat-based workspace, connecting people and content into a single platform. This means your creative team won’t miss a trick. Even if they have different cultures and workstyles or are in different time-zones can easily connect, collaborate and chat.

With Office 365, you can have it all

If you want something to fuel your creative agencies growth look no further than Office 365. We think it’s unparalleled in its ability to empower your business productivity, collaboration and growth.

If you’d like to find out how Office 365 can help your creative business grow, get in touch today.