Best Practices for First Time users on Microsoft Teams

Change is not easy! We also know that Change is the only constant.

Influencing and Driving Change at an Enterprise level has it's own set of challenges. Many Microsoft / Office 365 customers are Driving Change in their communication / collaboration strategy by adopting #MicrosoftTeams.

This article focuses on some initial best practices / steps which will help such organizations towards driving this change effectively. This should be part of the #AdoptionPlan and relevant for #FirstTimeMicrosoftTeams users.

#MicrosoftTeams is like a Swiss Knife. It has many utilities, however for first-time users a Change Manager will need to provide some guidance or best practices which users can rely on. Following has worked best in my experience.

Focus on Chat :

Drive usage behavior of Chat.

Guidance - Use chat instead of email for quick messages. This can also be Group Chat between 4 to 5 people as well(even more). Best for water cooler conversations. Non-structured communications.

Benefits - This will lead to quicker decision making and reducing un-necessary emails in the mailboxes. Presence in Microsoft Teams allows you to assess if a user is available / busy / in a meeting and hence decide if you want to make a quick Teams Call rather than a long chat thread.

Helpful Resources - Chat and make calls using Microsoft Teams. Consider reviewing the interesting learning notes related to Chat in Teams.

Best Practices - Use @mention to gain users attention. Save messages or post that you want to refer later. One that connects with Employees very quickly, is that the app is available on the mobile, so download, sign in and get work done faster, when on the go.

Teams vs Group Chat :

While unstructured posts / conversations are covered above, provide guidance on how to get structured conversations in Teams and Channels.

Guidance - As soon as you realize that you have a structured communication / collaboration scenario (which is not a water cooler conversation), think of Channels in a Team.

Best Practices And Helpful Resources - Find and Join a Team, before you decide to Create a Team / Channel to discuss a common topic of interest. Have atleast 2 Owners to a team. To know how to make someone as the Team Owner, go here. Learn more about Teams and Channel here.

Personalize which Team / Channel you see :

With new tool, you will have to anticipate new challenges. Be sure that you let users know of how to address them ahead in time. Users may get overwhelmed with the number of Teams and Channels as they start using Teams.

Guidance - As you work in Teams, you may get added to several Team. You can hide Team/s or Channel/s that you don’t want to use often. Select the three dots(ellipsis / …) next to the Team / Channel name and then select Hide.

Benefits - You are more productive as you don’t have to hunt in all Channels and Teams.

Note - Hiding a Team or Channel will not remove you from that team or channel, it will just remove it from your teams list. You can always re-surface the same in your teams / channel list, by unhiding the same.

Best Practices And Helpful Resources - Show, Hide or Pin a Team or Channel in Teams. My Personal favorite is to Pin the Channel you care about in the Teams tab, it stands out on the top of the list.

Set your Notifications :

Let users know that they can be in control of what they are notified. So if there is a project that they care about more and need to be notified about every activity in it, they can set the channel notifications appropriately for the same(assuming that there is a channel created for having team collaboration activities around the project in the channel)

Guidance - Teams allow you to be in control of what you are notified. You can set notifications at Chat / Conversation level, Channel level and so on.

Best Practices And Helpful Resources - Learn how to manage notifications in Teams here. Customize Channel notifications. Check a channel for notifications in Teams. Hide, Mute, Pin a Chat in Teams. When on holidays, do remember to set notifications accordingly, refer to the article here.

Keep a check on number of Tabs in a Channel :

Guidance - Tabs let you highlight the apps, services, and files your team cares about right at the top of a channel, so everyone in your team can get to them. Too many tabs can be overwhelming, hence be judicious, and keeping on removing the irrelevant ones.

Best Practices And Helpful Resources - More about tabs in Channel here. Best Practice is to Start a conversation about a app / file / service in the contest of the same by click on the chat icon on the right top of the tab. This chat will show up as thread conversation in the Conversations tab.

An interesting Case Study from Accenture with regards to how they planned their migration to Microsoft Teams can be found here. It has interesting tips which can be adopted in addition to the above.

All the best and lead this change successfully!