Editorial
Over 20 years ago, teaming research legend and Harvard professor J. Richard Hackman bemoaned the fact that most “teams” were not “real teams,” but simply loosely connected groups. Fast forward to 2023, and little has changed. Swoop Analytics recently completed a major teaming benchmarking study across 17 globally located organizations, which included 67,000 teams and nearly 100,000 staff active on Microsoft Teams, to find only a small proportion of digital teams operate at anything close to what Hackman determined as “best teaming practice.”
Those digital teams provide inspiring case studies of best practice. Without exception, they relied on Microsoft Teams channels for the bulk of their communications and collaboration.
Microsoft Teams Channels vs. Chat
Microsoft Teams uses the term “channels” to describe online discussion threads. Channels keep online discussions ordered by time and topic. They provide a vehicle for teams to store and track their online discussions, and help line managers and/or new team members to quickly get up to speed on the current team status, maximizing the overall productivity of the team.
“Channels” are often confused with “chat.” Chat is essentially the same as instant messaging tools on popular consumer platforms. It is familiar and easy to use. However, our benchmarking identifies chat as being significantly overused. Chat is largely used for one-on-one communication and rarely includes more than three members. Chat was not designed for team usage. It was designed for short, sharp personal interactions (e.g. “Ready for lunch?” or “Can we do a call?”).
The separation of online interactions into channels and chat is not unique to Microsoft Teams. It exists in the same form in other popular enterprise collaboration platforms like Slack and Workplace from Meta. The same confusion over when to use channels and when to use chat is present on these platforms as well.
Related Article: Internal Communications: Email vs. Chat vs. Discussions vs. Meetings
Why Real Teams Use Channels
Our 2023 M365 & Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report contains recent inspiring case studies from several participants in our study. In all cases they relied on Microsoft Teams channels to communicate and operated as ‘self-directed’ teams.
Virgin Media O2: A Vehicle for Employees’ Voices
The highest ranked team at UK telecommunications giant Virgin Media O2 our benchmarking criteria identified is a forum for employees’ voices to be heard by upper management. The head of the team, Catherine Callan, senior manager, partner engagement and performance, told us about their day-to-day way of working in Microsoft Teams.
“We share everything in the team,” Callan said.
“If we have a meeting, we will put our minutes in there and then everyone will comment on it and you’re not filling everyone’s inbox. We make sure we tag the whole team. After a meeting we do all our comms on Teams and get feedback.”
“We always ensure that cameras are on so that you can feel as though you’re sitting in the same room together. I think that’s really important when you’re collaborating.”
Related Article: The End of the Social Collaboration Experiment: The Technology Is the Problem
VHB: How to Ditch Email and Work in Microsoft Teams Channels
This US-based engineering, planning and design firm knew it needed to change the way it worked when the COVID-19 pandemic started. The IT department led by example.
It started by committing to move off email and agreeing to stick with one communication channel. All department communication would switch to Microsoft Teams channels.
“We realized the main outcome we wanted was converting to one streamlined communication channel,” Will Scarbrough, VHB vice president, digital transformation, said.
“Splitting our lives between email and Teams is challenging. As a group, we committed to 100% internal communications in Teams, which actually makes our life easier.”
The results speak for themselves. VHB had a number of teams featuring highly in our benchmarking. One example in their own words:
“An employee was working on a residential site and wanted to build a pickleball court for the recreation area but didn’t have details or a design to do so. They posted in Teams asking for help. In less than 10 minutes they had 10 people responding. They were blown away by how quickly those answers came in. Whereas if that sat in somebody’s inbox, it might take them a week or two to respond and they wouldn’t have that same instantaneous connection. That’s the thing we’re seeing with Teams, and we want to maintain and foster it even more.”
New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE): A Team of Microsoft Teams Champions
NZTE is New Zealand’s trade promotion agency, with almost half of its 800 people based overseas. One of the benchmarked leading teams is a group of export promotions advisors. The team collectively agreed to move their work to a Microsoft Teams channel in November 2022. All conversations, files, meetings, agendas, minutes and more are shared in the Teams channel for anyone to access. No matter where they are located around the world, or what time zone they’re working in, their Teams channel gives equity to everyone.
NZTE’s Beachhead Network Managers team is a poster child for how to work successfully as a team using Microsoft 365 tools. According to Katherine Fippard, director, advisory and networks:
“Within the chat we made the decision to formalize it and make a Teams channel so we don’t lose things and files don’t disappear and we know this is the one source of truth.”
“Now we’ve just got the channel and you can search it. You can go into your Teams channel, you can search for the conversation and ‘bingo!’”
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Flippard said she has barely used email for this team since November 2022. She calls the time savings of working in Teams channels immeasurable, saying she no longer has to search through emails, or months of chat, to find knowledge.
Related Article: Too Many Collaboration Apps Are Bogging Employees Down
Engage Squared: It’s All Japanese to Me
Imagine being an English-speaking software developer living in New Zealand tasked with creating an app completely in Japanese. That’s exactly what happened to Engage Squared developer Ryan Clasby.
Clasby had to create the app from scratch. His team was in a different hemisphere and time zone, which in many cases required asynchronous communications. The translation requirements for the app weren't the only challenge — the Japanese client's requirements meant Clasby and his team had to design the app in a completely new format. The team ranked No. 2 from the 67,000 benchmarked.
According to Michael Cashen, Engage Squared’s Japan country manager:
“Apart from our bi-weekly check-ins, everything went back and forth on posts in the channels,” Cashen said.
“Ryan doesn’t speak Japanese and he built the app with the UI completely in Japanese. It was quite impressive.”
Many of these inspiring case studies would remain undiscovered, without the use of workplace analytics. These case studies are now available for these organizations to promote as exemplars to drive much needed digital transformation within their respective workplaces.
The full case studies are included in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 State of Digital Collaboration report.
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