Editorial
Power tools are a defining part of the national psyche here in Australia. A mate of mine has every tool for every possible job. Whenever a new one comes out, he impulsively buys it and adds it to his collection.
Another part of Aussie culture is I’m welcome to borrow any of his tools. A browse around his shed is intimidating to say the least: tools as far as the eye can see that ostensibly perform the same job. Which model of leaf blower is most likely to annoy the neighbors? How do I pick the power shears that are least likely to remove one or more of my limbs?
Now, let’s imagine that my mate is the IT department and I’m a lowly employee. The IT department kindly offers a plethora of tools to perform different and overlapping jobs. I need to collaborate with my team to get these jobs done. Unfortunately, my colleagues all prefer to use different tools, so I end up using all of them. This makes collaboration decidedly ... uncollaborative. It’s like trying to use every leaf blower my mate owns at the same time: the leaves blow uncontrollably in all directions, dust gets in my eyes, and I end up needing even more tools to protect myself.
Sound Familiar?
This scenario plays out every day at many organizations. And Microsoft 365, with its extensive array of collaboration tools and features, isn't helping. As with the power tools, with time and experience, it’s possible to appreciate the nuances of each tool and how they can perform a specific job for you. But how many of us have actually worked out how best to use the tools for our needs? And how many of us have taken the next step and agreed with our colleagues to some consistency in how we use them?
Don't worry if you haven’t. It takes time, and time is something we don’t have. From conversations and workshops I’ve held over the last few months, a lack of focus time and a complicated array of digital working tools are the most frequently identified blockers to digital productivity.
It’s a Catch-22: To get more focus time, we need to find time to work out how to simplify how we use the tools. Yet instead, we keep on adding tools to our digital workday that further erode our focus and getting shit done time.
Related Article: How to Pick the Right Tool for Each Digital Conversation
Tools Upon Tools Upon Tools Upon ...
Collaboration overload is an oft-cited cause of stress and poor productivity. And the solution usually arrives in the form of a new wonder tool that will take the job of the others AND do it better. And maybe it does. But it won’t help if we keep using the others too.
There’s a reason email is still popular (SWOOP’s latest Microsoft 365 benchmarking shows that we spend one hour and 45 minutes in email every day). It works. It’s pretty much guaranteed to get your message to anyone straight away without having to log in to something else, switch tenants, run a quadruple factor authentication whilst dressed as Cher or be in the same organization. Yet, it isn’t particularly good for collaboration, decision making or managing tasks.
And so we're encouraged to use tools better suited to collaboration, decision making, coordinating tasks and activities. These could be Teams channels, Planner, OneNote, a virtual whiteboard and so on.
What typically happens, though, is we add these tools onto the existing toolset and leave it to the individual to work out the best way to navigate “digital collaboration.” And this is only getting worse, as more tools are added to the mix (looking at you, Loop), which will offer another means of collaboration.
Related Article: How to Help Employees Digitally Declutter
Let’s Take Action!
Obviously we need to ditch some tools. Great — no more email for me! I’ll only communicate with my colleagues using Teams channel messages. Wait, some of them keep emailing me. And my boss isn’t responding to any of my channel messages that @mention her.
But hey, we're using Planner to coordinate team activity. Although it looks like one of my colleagues hasn’t completed a task that was due 37 months ago ....
At least we all turn-up to our required daily stand-up meeting in Teams. So what if most of it isn’t particularly relevant to me, and I’ve already provided my update in Planner, and in the weekly activity report in Excel.
Changing How We Work Isn't a Solo Project
We can’t change how we work alone. We’re impacted by the habits of our colleagues and the expectations of our managers. And this explains why we keep adding tools and using them in such an uncoordinated and unproductive manner.
But from the scenarios mentioned above, we can see there is so much potential to make our collaboration more efficient. The majority of the activities mentioned above could have been performed in one place at one time. And probably asynchronously too.
So if something won’t work alone, we need to work together. Whether it’s a consistent way of teamwork, connecting more with other teams or creating some organization-wide norms, we need to take a step back and look at how we work, and how we could work.
- At a team level: Spend time with the team to agree on a teamwork charter or pact. Something that creates consistency while also meeting the needs of the team, such as agreeing how to contact each other when it’s urgent, which format of meeting works for particular situations, even down to how many hours we are encouraged to block out for focus time.
- With other teams we work with: Try to agree on some core tools or features that help to align work and share key knowledge. These could be agreeing planning tools like Planner or Trello, whether we work together in Teams for specific activities or use Viva Engage to create communities where there is overlapping interest or perhaps just sticking with email.
- At an organization level: Empower teams to make changes and give teams and individuals the tools they need to make informed choices. Providing only rigid frameworks, such as mandating office days, won’t help to find a way through the communication and technology confusion.
If we are given both permission to change and some simple ways to do so, grassroots change can make quite an impact. Team-by-team, we can agree on the tools we want, the practices we need and the things we can drop. Otherwise, we keep adding more and more tools and practices. No wonder flexible hybrid working is proving so hard to adopt. We need to simplify how we work for it to be effective. The productivity benefits are proven too: according to the Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Teams report by Forrester, we can save four hours per week by having content and conversations in the same place.
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So why use five different tools to mow the lawn when one will do the job? We just need to work out which one is best for us based on our needs and those of the garden.
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