A little background …
Over the past five years at Microsoft, one thing has become abundantly clear to me: while the evolution of technology has and continues to support many organizations in becoming more efficient, the foundation for future success lies in delivering work practices and cultures that people desire. This is exactly why we built Microsoft Teams. It's not simply the hot new messaging and collaboration tool, it's a new way of working that is aligned to the modern ways in which people naturally interact with one another. I would not be writing this if I couldn't confidently say that...
I spend the majority of my day in Microsoft Teams and it has drastically improved the way I work, saved
me countless hours, and is one of those products that fires me up when I see a new feature.
What to expect from this series …
Many of you ask Microsoft and our partners how to deliver the work practices and culture your people desire using Microsoft Teams.
How do you get your people, particularly the laggards, to adopt and love Teams?
This is a great question, and as one of Microsoft's Teams Champions I feel compelled to address it. Each post in this series will contain details on a new productivity hack, or superpower*, with some real-life examples, as well as updates sharing where we are investing in Teams to enhance this experience.
Why do you care about superpowers?
While adoption requires some effort, getting people to adopt and love Teams is probably easier than you'd think. The key is to give people a compelling reason. How do you do that? By leveraging the Teams platform, which will help you deliver experiences that make the least productive tasks at work, easy, giving your people superpowers to do their jobs better, more efficiently and more transparently.
Talk to me more about this Teams platform …
We know that every workplace team is unique, though one commonality all teams share is the need for a variety of apps and tools to get work done. While there is no such thing as a universal tool for work, we believe that Teams is the universal toolkit to infuse all those apps and tools together. The extensibility of the Teams platform allows you to bring together all the apps and tools you love - whether or not Microsoft built them - into one application. In order to deliver that experience, we have a publicly available Teams Store with 200+ applications and growing**,
and we are regularly releasing APIs to help you integrate any additional tools and apps you'd like into your Teams experience.
How do you get started?
- Second post in this series can be read here
- Guidance for "the first ten things to do on Teams": see below and attached. I've made some minor adjustments to a great document that one of my colleagues created.
- Success with Teams page: further guidance and materials to support your Teams adoption efforts.
- Brilliant guidance from some of our Teams MVPs, including a great quote that I borrowed from Alistair Pugin.
The first ten things to do in Teams (#6 and #7 are personal faves):
- Connect from anywhere.
Download the Microsoft Teams desktop and mobile apps to enable teamwork from anywhere. Free version here and if your company has Office 365 already you can download the Teams desktop app either in your Office 365 portal or by contacting your IT admin. Mobile app is downloadable in your respective mobile app store.
- Start with chat.
Create a small group chat with colleagues you work with most closely, a great way to communicate in the moment. You can name and ‘pin’ the chat for easy locating.
- Create new teams, thoughtfully.
Create larger teams with dedicated channels around specific topics, projects, disciplines—whatever you like. Better to have fewer, larger teams with more channels than many, small teams with few channels. The Microsoft Graph APIs will allow you to better manage this process within your organization.
- Customize channels.
Upload files to the appropriate channel and add frequently used files to a tab to make them easier for everyone to find.
- Help foster active channels.
Be personally active in channels and @team name or @general to highlight posts for the whole group, and @ mention individuals if not relevant for the entire team.
- Add your favorite apps to your Teams experience.
Do more in one place by bringing your favorite apps and services—such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, PowerBI, Trello, Polly YouTube and more—into Teams chats and channels.
- Customize your activity feed.
Follow the channels (within Teams) that are most relevant to you. This will allow you to get activity notifications any time something is posted in that channel and focus on the content that’s only most important to you and reduce information overload.
- Spotlight key resources.
Pin key websites used to track news, performance, live site monitoring or metric tracking so everyone can access this information right within Teams.
- Elevate email conversations.
Forward email to a team channel to continue the discussion in a threaded chat conversation, with attachments automatically uploaded for easy team co-authoring. This is my polite way of telling my colleagues to start using Teams.
- Share content from other services.
Set up connectors to push content into Microsoft Teams from services like GitHub or Twitter.
* shout out to my good friend Steve Moses for the superpowers concept
Part 2 of the series: How to deliver superpowers to your people with Teams (pt. 2)
Welcome to the Microsoft Teams Blog! Learn best practices, news, and trends directly from the team behind Microsoft Teams.