Almost every restaurant and hotel group I walk into uses Microsoft Teams for the same three things. Video calls when the area managers cannot be in head office. A handful of chat threads, mostly between the directors and the finance team. And the occasional booked meeting with an accountant or a supplier. That is it. The licences are paid for, the app is installed, and somewhere between 60% and 70% of what Teams can actually do for a hospitality operator is sitting completely untouched.

This is the post I have been meaning to write for a while, because I keep having the same conversation. An ops director shows me a wall of paper rotas, a WhatsApp group with 90 unread messages, a shared inbox nobody is reading, and a stack of clipboards on the pass. Then they tell me they pay for Microsoft 365 Business Standard for 35 head office and management users. The tools to fix half of what is on their desk are already in the bundle. Nobody has shown them how to switch them on.

If you run a multi-site hospitality group and you would like more from your existing Microsoft 365 investment, here is the practical list.

The eight Teams features every hospitality group should actually use

1. Teams and channels structured by site or function, not by project

The default mistake is to spin up a new Team every time someone has an idea. Within six months you have 40 Teams, half of them dormant, and nobody knows where to put a message about the Soho site’s broken ice machine.

Structure it the way your business actually runs. One Team per site, with channels for FoH, BoH, maintenance and compliance. One Team for head office, with channels for finance, marketing, people and ops. One Team for the senior leadership group. That is usually it for a 10 to 20 site group. If a project comes up that genuinely needs its own space, use a private channel inside the relevant Team rather than a whole new Team. The mental model the office team needs is “where do I work” not “what am I working on.”

2. Teams Apps - bots and tools surfaced inside Teams

This is the bit almost nobody knows about. Teams is an app platform. Your reservations system, your HR system, your rota tool, your purchasing platform - most of them either have a Teams app already or can be plumbed in via an approved connector. SevenRooms, Harri, Fourth, Planday, Sage, Xero, Workday - the list is long and growing.

What this means in practice is that a duty manager can check tonight’s covers, raise a holiday request, or query a delivery without leaving Teams or learning yet another login. For the ops team, it cuts the number of “have you seen the email about” messages roughly in half. The setup is fiddly the first time and trivial after that.

3. Approvals for purchase orders, holidays and price changes

The Approvals app inside Teams is one of the most underused things Microsoft ships. It gives you a structured approval workflow - request, attach evidence, route to one or many approvers, audit trail - without buying a separate piece of software. We use it with hospitality clients for purchase orders above a threshold, holiday requests outside the rota tool, supplier price change sign-offs, and one-off marketing spend.

The reason it matters is governance. Right now most groups have approvals happening over WhatsApp screenshots and text messages, with nothing recorded against the purchase ledger. Approvals gives finance a clean record and gives the requester a clear status without chasing.

4. Planner and Lists for ops tasks

If your weekly site audit is on a clipboard or in a Google Sheet, you are doing it the hard way. Planner handles the recurring task side - opening checks, weekly deep cleans, monthly compliance audits - with photo attachments and per-site assignment. Lists handles the structured data side - snagging items at a new opening, equipment register, defect log, allergen sign-off.

Both surface inside Teams as channel tabs. The GM at the Marylebone site sees only their site’s list. The ops director sees everything. When a task is overdue, it nags the assignee in Teams. No more “did you do the Friday checks” messages.

5. Shifts for rota visibility

Microsoft Shifts is a free part of Teams that gives FoH and BoH staff a phone view of their rota, swap requests, time-off requests and clock-in. If you already pay for a dedicated rota tool like Harri or Fourth, keep using it - but if you do not, or if you have one part of the estate without one, Shifts will cover the basics for you.

The crucial bit is that it works on the Teams mobile app the team already has. You do not need to deploy yet another piece of software to people who turn over every nine months.

6. Walkie Talkie for radio comms on shift

This is the one I demo and watch jaws drop. Teams has a built-in push-to-talk Walkie Talkie feature designed for shop floor and shift teams. On the right company-issued phone, it replaces the physical Motorola radios sitting in a charger behind the bar. One channel per site, one channel per BoH, all encrypted, all logged, no licence cost beyond the Teams licence you already pay for.

It is not perfect. Walkie Talkie depends on Wi-Fi or mobile signal being decent across the building, so a basement kitchen with two bars of 4G will not be a happy place for it. But for groups with proper guest Wi-Fi coverage it is genuinely transformative. I know one operator who replaced a 12-radio fleet across three sites with Teams Walkie Talkie on company-issued phones and saved enough on radio licences to pay for the phones inside a year.

7. Meeting recordings and AI summaries

If you are on a Microsoft 365 plan with Copilot, every ops meeting can be recorded, transcribed, summarised and turned into action items automatically. Even without Copilot, the standard recording and transcription features cover most of the value. The summary lands in the meeting chat, the actions get assigned, and the people who could not make the meeting can read a one-page recap instead of asking somebody to brief them later.

For a multi-site group running a weekly ops call across area managers, this saves an hour of admin per week and makes sure decisions actually land somewhere searchable.

8. Tasks - one view across Planner, Outlook and Teams

Site managers get tasks from everywhere. Email from suppliers. Messages from head office. Things flagged in meetings. Items added to a Planner board. The Tasks app inside Teams collapses all of those into a single list per person. It is the closest thing the platform has to a personal to-do list, and once a manager sees their own tasks in one place they tend not to go back.

The mobile angle

None of the above lands unless your site managers and key BoH staff actually have Teams on their phone, with the right permissions and a sensible notification profile. The default is overwhelming - every channel pings, every mention buzzes, and within a week the manager mutes the app entirely.

What works in practice is a tight notification policy: mentions and direct messages on, channel chatter off by default, quiet hours configured around the manager’s actual working pattern. Plus a clear rule that anything safety-critical or finance-critical goes via Teams, not via personal WhatsApp. The cultural shift is the hard bit. The technical setup takes an afternoon.

The mistakes we see most often

Channel sprawl. Every new initiative gets a new channel. Within a year there are 200 channels, three are active, the rest are noise. Audit quarterly. Archive ruthlessly.

General channel chaos. The General channel in every Team becomes a dumping ground for everything. Lock it to announcements only and force conversations into the right topical channel.

No off-hours policy. Teams will happily ping a kitchen porter at 11pm. Set quiet hours, set expectations, and put it in the staff handbook. The Working Time Regulations apply to digital nudges too.

No retention policy. Chat history grows forever by default. For a hospitality business handling guest PII, that is a quietly accumulating risk. Set retention to something sensible - usually one to three years for chat, longer for channel posts that document decisions.

The security layer

The reason any of this matters from my seat is that as soon as Teams becomes the spine of how the office team works, it also becomes the most valuable account in the business to compromise. A few non-negotiables:

  • Conditional Access policies that block Teams sign-in from unmanaged devices outside the UK and require MFA on every sign-in. This is a 30-minute config job and stops a huge slice of attacks dead.
  • External sharing locked down to specific approved domains rather than open to anyone with a link. Hospitality groups share a lot with suppliers and accountants, and the default is too generous.
  • Data Loss Prevention rules on anything that looks like card data, payroll data or guest PII flowing through chat or files. Microsoft 365 Business Premium and above includes this in the box.
  • A documented joiner-mover-leaver process so that when a manager leaves on a Friday their Teams access is gone by Monday morning, not still active eight months later.

If you would like a hand getting these in place, this is exactly the kind of thing our cyber security team does as part of a Teams rollout.

How we approach it at CloudMatters

When we roll Teams out properly for a hospitality group we work in three phases. First, a workshop with the ops director and one or two GMs to map what the office and management teams actually do day to day, and where the friction is. Second, a structured build of Teams, channels, Apps, Approvals flows and Planner boards that match how the business runs - not a generic template. Third, a rollout with floor walks, short training videos, and a named person in head office who owns Teams as a platform after we leave.

The whole thing usually takes four to six weeks for a group of 10 to 20 sites. The pay-off is felt within the first month - fewer WhatsApp groups, faster approvals, and an office team that can find what it needs without asking three people.

If your group is paying for Microsoft 365 and only using Teams for video calls, you are leaving most of the value on the table. We can help you fix that. Have a look at what we offer through managed cloud and get in touch when you are ready.