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Raise your hand if this has ever happened on your team. Perhaps you’re even the guilty party.
A colleague puts together a slide deck and instead of posting it to your company’s online document management site or in the channel your team uses to collaborate, your coworker sends the slide deck via email to all team members and then sends individual chat messages to everyone updating them on the slide deck’s progress.
The result? Confusion, potential loss of intellectual property, lack of document control, wasted time and increased staff burn out.
“Companies are not really getting any benefit from their investment in channels, companies are not fundamentally changing the way that they're getting stuff done, and they're seeing lots of dis-benefits, like burnout and loss of intellectual property,” said Sharon O’Dea, co-founder of Lithos Partners, a digital collaboration and communications consulting firm.
Companies Rushed Collaboration Tools Out the Door
O’Dea traces these poor collaboration habits back to the early days of employees working from home during COVID. Suddenly everyone was working from home, with access to the tools to collaborate remotely, but most employees didn’t know — and weren't told — how to use the technology effectively.
Organizations rolled out Microsoft 365 and other collaboration tools in a panic during the pandemic, said digital strategy consultant Lisa Riemers. Riemers had been working as a contractor at a company piloting Microsoft 365 just before the pandemic. The plan was to test it out with a small group of employees, get their feedback and then roll it out over the next six months. Then came the COVID lockdown protocols. Suddenly Riemers was told she needed to expedite the rollout to everyone in the company by the end of the week because all employees would be working from home.
The result? A seriously compressed timeline that meant training followed, rather than was factored into, the launch plan. Every team at the company developed a slightly different way of collaborating and using channels.
Employees Cling to Old Collaboration Habits
Andrew Pope, owner of Designing Collaboration, studies the reasons people are reluctant to engage with channels — and he has a few theories. First, we are all creatures of habit and don’t like to change our processes, especially if it feels like it's working.
For example, sharing files by email remains popular because it’s easy. “You are guaranteed to get your message to the right person,” Pope said. Chat is easy because it feels familiar — it's like the texts we send every day.
One of the barriers to effectively using collaboration technology is it’s difficult to communicate the nuances of the different tools. They ostensibly do the same thing but they’re all different methods of communicating, collaborating and getting information from one place to another, Pope said.
“Most people just don't have the time to really understand that subtle nuance of one versus the other,” Pope said. Employees gripe about too many tools, too many notifications and activity in too many different places, he added.
Riemers agrees that if employees and their organizations want to get the most out of these tools, they need to understand how and when to use them. “You need to understand how SharePoint works, the difference between chats and channels, the difference between a private channel, a shared channel, a private team channel, an open team channel, when to use the general channel or when not to use it,” she said.
So how can you get employees out of email and DMs and into shared channels?
How to Incentivize Employees to Get Out of Chat and Email and Into Channels
Create a Team Charter
“Some organizations have way too many channels. People can't keep up with them, so there needs to be a little bit of governance around it,” O’Dea said. The best way to do that is to create a team charter, which requires everyone on the team to take a step back and think about how they work.
The team then agrees to use chat, email and channels in a certain way for the next two weeks and then collects feedback from team members about whether those rules made collaboration easier, O’Dea said. The goal is to have the team agree about how everyone will use each of the tools.
For instance, the team could agree that chat is for short immediate requests. Meanwhile, rather than sending that slidedeck by email, the team will use channels. Once a team agrees to a charter, then team members need to push back when someone does something outside the charter, like sending a document by email because it was easier in the moment, Cai Kjaer, CEO and co-founder of SWOOP Analytics told Reworked.
Provide Education Beyond a User Guide
Pope recommends educating team managers around the value of channels and how to use them.
Talk to team managers about what is and isn't working for them and what they’re struggling with. Then show them how using channels instead of chat or email can save time, increase productivity and efficiency, and reduce notifications. “If the team leader is still emailing or sending chats, you're not going to get the bulk of the activity in channels,” Pope said. Show team leaders how channels can be used to hold reoccurring meetings asynchronously or to turn a message into a task.
“It’s a time-consuming process, but you've really got to take people through a bit of a journey to show just how inefficient the way they work is,” Pope said.
Customize Your Dashboard
One of the biggest complaints employees have is there are too many places to look for activity and they are getting too many notifications.
This is easily remedied if each employee customizes his or her own interface, Riemers said.
Turn off the banner notifications, rearrange the channels and teams into an order that makes sense for your work, pin what’s most helpful and hide what isn’t necessary so you don’t get notifications for those channels.
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“I think if you spend a bit of time going through your settings, it can help it not be overwhelming in the future,” Riemers said.
Read more on how to improve collaboration:
- Communication Frameworks Are Vital Workplace Tools — Clear communication isn't the norm. But by adopting these frameworks, you can ensure your message is understood, internalized and easily shared by others.
- Personal User Manuals, Team Agreements and Company Handbooks for Hybrid Teams — Is hybrid work working for you? If not, you'd likely benefit by taking the next step: developing user manuals from the bottom-up.
- Don't Leave Teamwork to Chance: Why Collaboration Design Matters — Here’s how to make collaboration a teachable and repeatable practice.
