Editorial
Giving someone a toolbox doesn’t immediately make them a carpenter. Now think about what happens when the contents of the toolbox change on a regular basis.
I’m talking, of course, about Microsoft 365. Handing your employees a powerful tool like Microsoft 365 without first taking a critical look at the processes you want it to facilitate will only result in a lot of sore thumbs.
Here’s what to keep in mind to ensure working and collaborating becomes better with Microsoft 365, rather than just recreating old ways of working with new digital tools. Because realistically speaking, you’re likely going to be working with Microsoft for the next 10 years, so the sooner you make it work for you, the better.
Microsoft 365 Deployments Are Missing Something
When you’re looking to roll out Microsoft 365, I think it helps to compare it with how we implement ERP systems and SaaS solutions. The former are complex, long-term projects where you map out all processes and then adjust the system accordingly. These projects often go awry.
SaaS tools roll out quickly, and processes get changed, based on the tool, as you go along. While in theory it’s meant to be a cheaper approach, it fails to acknowledge the cost for employees to have to continuously adapt.
Both have their trade-offs. But in common are the fundamental demands they place on employees to learn new ways of working and break ingrained habits.
Microsoft 365 implementations run the same danger when they fail to acknowledge that employees must master new ways of working and collaborating.
Consider a knowledge worker with a hybrid work schedule. Some questions they might need to answer individually and as a team include: when do I join meetings virtually or in-person? How do I keep people using Sharepoint to share files and not email? What if my colleagues are scheduling meetings differently than I do?
Answering questions like these will help you configure Microsoft 365 to better suit the style of working you’ve agreed upon. Because while I don’t expect you to customize all of the Microsoft 365 suite, you don’t have to treat it like an off-the-shelf SaaS solution either.
Related Article: Personal User Manuals, Team Agreements and Company Handbooks for Hybrid Teams
Generic Processes in Microsoft 365
The rule of thumb when using Microsoft 365 (and other collaboration tools) is that you take a good look at what you can and should do with your tools, and how you can best get that done. To illustrate, let’s take a look at three processes that Microsoft 365 supports in most organizations, no matter the industry.
1. Scheduling, Calendar and Tasks
A clear schedule lets you know what you have to do and when. Whether you have repetitive work or unique tasks every time, you have to plan all your activities somehow. Microsoft 365 suite provides several apps to do this — Outlook calendar, To Do, Planner, and Project — but which one is best to use when?
1. Calendar
Knowledge workers have a lot of control over how to organize their time. In that case, the Outlook calendar within Microsoft 365 is the best tool for you. Use it to schedule meetings and appointments with others, but also your own tasks that contribute to your personal mission, your development plan, new opportunities and innovation.
The advantages of the calendar over a to-do list or planning board (see below) is that you can see at a glance what you are going to do, when you’re doing it, how long it will likely take, and how much space you have left (or lack) for other things.
2. To-do list
If you and your team always have a number of different activities to accomplish under great time pressure, you might want to work with a to-do or task list. You can use the tasks in Outlook for this, but the To Do app in Microsoft 365 was basically created for this kind of scenario. In it, everyone will not only find their own tasks, but you can also assign tasks to one another.
3. Planning board
If you mainly work with colleagues on the same end product, for example as a designer or developer, then it may be best to opt for a digital planning board. In the Microsoft 365 suite, that’s Planner.
Of course, there may also be combinations of the above, and you’ll likely find different preferences among your teammates and colleagues, making it all the more important to agree on a common tool for shared activities.
2. Communication and Messaging Flows
Managing your schedule, calendar and tasks is mainly about how you set up your own work processes, although collaboration comes into play there, too. But what about communicating with colleagues and relations?
1. Email
Universal and interoperable, and therefore independent of provider and software: email certainly has its advantages. But is it the best tool for internal communication and collaboration? Probably not.
2. Chat
If you switched from email to chatting in Teams for internal messaging, you’re not alone. But chat has one problem: it’s as closed as email, because only the person(s) in the chat will see the messages.
The speed of messaging is often higher, and people are expected to respond quickly to chat, which increases the workload. If you don’t turn off your chat notifications, you run the risk of being constantly distracted. Context switching is a real problem.
3. Posts
More and more organizations are using Microsoft Teams as more than just a video meeting or chat tool. They adopt the idea that every group of colleagues who work together in one way or another deserves their own team, which then allows you to efficiently structure information and communication.
But if anyone is allowed to create a team and no one puts the brakes on the number of channels within those teams, it quickly becomes an unimaginable mess.
If you don’t choose which tools to use for what as a department, project group or an organization, all these channels will be used interchangeably, with everyone posting everywhere, ensuring everyone loses track of comms.
So think over and decide together about which type of message best fits which channel.
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Related Article: How to Pick the Right Kind of Tool for Each Digital Conversation
3. Working Together
The third generic process is “working together.” I deliberately use working together rather than collaboration, because the latter in my opinion has a connotation of simultaneity, whereas when you’re working together, you can work with colleagues at different times and even on different things.
Think about it: how often do you work on the same thing with all of your team at the same time? That probably doesn’t happen all the time. Yet you are still working independently on different things that still contribute to the same team goal. That’s what I mean by working together.
1. Meetings
When it comes to working together, you probably thought of meetings and gatherings. They’re certainly relevant for collaboration and building relationships. Online meetings are also great, as it allows every participant to join at the same time.
Working together, however, rarely requires you to be at the same location at the same time. So you must consider how you will keep each other informed of progress, what you might need help with, and so on.
That’s where other forms of digital collaboration come into play.
2. Information management
Information management or knowledge management is notoriously complicated, but a must-have for knowledge workers. The Microsoft 365 suite includes at least two apps for documents/files, and at least three for (non-document-based) information.
Strictly speaking, documents and files belong in a document management system (DMS). You can use SharePoint for that, and then documents can also be found via Teams..
Customer information belongs in a secure CRM (customer relationship management) system. Colleague information belongs in an HRIS, but colleague profiles should be visible on a more open platform such as an intranet. Classic reference material also fits best in an intranet, as does news and more formal (top-down) communications.
3. Asynchronous working
Finally, we touch on what has been called “nirwana” of digital collaboration: asynchronous work. Even if you hardly work remotely, you should learn asynchronous collaboration.
In this way, you create time and space within your team to be able to work on a project, both focused and undisturbed. You also create agreements with one another about when you can be reached, and through which channels. In this way, you ensure that you move, step by step, from short-term to long-term thinking, and from ad hoc to planned work.
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