The outbreak of COVID-19 has dramatically changed the way people work, live, and learn. Remote work has become the new normal as humanity tries to stem the spread of the virus, but this can have negative impacts on people’s wellbeing.

Without going into the office every day, people are missing the social interaction, built-in exercise, and healthy, ergonomic workstations that they’ve grown accustomed to. COVID-19 is hitting more than just the corporate world though – it’s putting immense pressure on the healthcare industry to keep up with demand and on schools to find new ways to keep students engaged remotely. On their own, each of these challenges would be significant. Together, they can seem insurmountable. Clearly, the world needs better tools to help businesses, hospitals, and schools function in this new remote world.

Introducing BindTuning

Enter BindTuning, a Microsoft Gold partner in Application Development and Cloud Productivity. Since its founding in 2012, BindTuning’s mission has been to empower people to achieve more with easy-to-use, code-free products that create rich intranet experiences. They believe that everyone should have access to a digital workplace that makes life simpler.

Even before COVID-19, BindTuning was helping customers get the most of their investments and accelerate user adoption for new solutions. “BindTuning helped us deploy a company intranet with a head start, without building anything from scratch, and with simple end user adoption by shortening the development plan from nine to only three months,” recounts Kranthi Kiran Kanneganti, Manager of Solution Architecture and Development at Scientific games. “Next, we want to have a new and equally easy to adapt collaboration space, as migrating workloads from Slack into Teams is our number one priority. BindTuning will be a tremendous help in pushing the drive and adoption of Microsoft Teams and it will empower our users to customize and make the virtual space their own, instead of relying on our technical team for support.”

Building solutions to aid COVID-19 response

As COVID-19 began to spread around the world, BindTuning quickly recognized the global need to improve work from home experiences. Noticing that many organizations were leveraging Microsoft Teams to support their remote workforces, BindTuning came up with the idea to build customized templates for Microsoft Teams by use case.

“In early 2019, we focused a significant part of our business on Microsoft Teams, creating solutions that could drive real collaboration beyond chats and meetings,” notes Beatriz Oliveira, CEO at BindTuning. “The crisis challenged us to double-down on our efforts, become even more agile, and scale up these solutions to a larger audience. Very rapidly, we delivered focused, meaningful templates to address urgent needs.”

Thankfully, BindTuning didn’t have to build these templates on their own – Microsoft provided support every step of the way. “Microsoft quickly recognized our efforts, providing us with technical guidance and the support we needed to leverage the platform,” adds Oliveira. “Our relationship with Microsoft gave us exposure beyond our borders. The partner community also played a significant role in giving us much needed feedback during the crisis from many corners of the world.”

BindTuning’s COVID-19 templates can be installed in less than 30 minutes without writing a single line of code and were carefully crafted by scenario and industry so organizations can focus on their people, not their processes, in these challenging times. Additionally, BindTuning is offering these templates to users for free via a 3-month trial. BindTuning’s templates can be sorted into three buckets: business, healthcare, and education.

Business templates

Recognizing the need for businesses to connect with their remote employees and the popularity of Microsoft Teams, BindTuning built two powerful business-centric Microsoft Teams templates: the Outbreak Preparedness Starter Kit and the Remote Employee Wellness Starter Kit.

This template helps organizations distribute company-wide information on preparing for COVID-19. Because the situation varies greatly between countries and industries, users can easily adjust this template to reflect their specific guidelines and response plans. This template lets organizations share up-to-date Power BI statistics about the virus or their business, surface curated news and social media feeds, training videos, and other informational content. It also enables businesses to share policy documents, helpful calendars, highlight key team members, and additional links or advice. Additionally, many BindTuning partners have taken the template a step further and built localized versions for specific countries, making it even easier for users to surface relevant data to their employees.

This template is designed to help drive a culture of wellbeing throughout newly-remote workforces. This template includes tips, checklists, videos, guidance, calendars, and more, to help employees cope with the challenges of working remotely. It enables businesses to set up a remote wellness plan for their employees to stay healthy and productive, addressing fitness, nutrition, mindfulness, and ergonomics. This template also helps promote company values and reinforces a sense of belonging with group workout sessions and meditations.

Healthcare templates

BindTuning has also built two powerful templates to empower people in the healthcare industry: the Hospital Campus Starter Kit and the Healthcare at Home Starter Kit.

This template facilitates the spread of hospital-wide information across multiple locations. It allows users to share messages from the board, alerts, industry news, staff directories, training videos and campus maps. This template is designed to create a hospital-wide comms hub while also providing each satellite location its own channel for local collaboration. This starter kit is not just for hospitals – it’s suitable for use by large, multi-location medical practices and physician groups as well. Because it’s built on the secure M365 cloud, this template ensures compliance with key regulations such as HIPAA, SOC 1, SOC 2, GDPR, and more.

This template empowers home care workers with all the information they need – such as medication schedules, medical records or exam results – so they can quickly access schedules, swap shifts, or check patient records. Organizations can quickly share best practices, FAQs, links, medical applications, and internal services with their home care workers, helping field teams manage their patient lists and work routes. Built on the secure M365 cloud, this template also ensures regulatory compliance.

Education templates

BindTuning is currently developing four additional templates for education, dubbed the K-12 Education Starter Kits. As schools transition to remote learning, these templates will help teachers and students schedule online classes, share sources, and set assignments. These templates go beyond just regular classwork as they will also help promote consistent engagement between students, parents, and teachers—all from the safety of their own homes. Although these templates are not yet available at the time of this case study’s publication, feel free to check BindTuning’s most current COVID-19 offers here.

Seizing the opportunity to make a difference with Microsoft

These Microsoft Teams templates from BindTuning go well beyond just bolstering productivity – they were designed to take care of and empower remote workers. With everyone trying to adjust to the new normal of remote work, it’s truly inspiring to see Microsoft partners like BindTuning stepping up to the challenge and building high-value solutions that put people first.

By offering these templates for free via a 3-month trial and providing a free Microsoft Teams assessment session to assist customers through their digital transformation, BindTuning is helping organizations everywhere accelerate the transition to remote work and protect the wellbeing of their employees. Creative partner solutions like this amplify the power of key Microsoft products, empowering millions around the globe to achieve more and live better.