We just rolled out MS Teams company wide and the biggest question is not how to use it but why do we use it. What kind of channels do we create and who do we invite etc. I have read and watched so much content online that my brain is fried. Anyone have experience with Teams that has been down this road already? Any tips? Comments? Anything would be helpful since this is part of my new job that I started Monday lol
14 Spice ups
Hi @SuperRay72!
Well, due to the nature of how Teams was built, it can be used for…anything. It is limited to your imagination and what your organization/team needs it for.
Personally, I have several channels fed into our “Security” team so that we can get high level alerts on various events that need attention.
These channels can also be fed via many of the native integrations (Slack, etc) or a simple email address.
Most of my alerts are simply sent to a unique email address tied to the channel and get fed in.
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That is a great idea actually. So instead of say a group mailbox you could actually use the channel email address and bypass email altogether. A world without email would be a wonderful thing LOL
@kyleparrish
Right now, we only use it for the Chat function.
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When somebody at your org asks you “why do we use Teams?”, how do you answer them?
Sounds like you’re in the un-enviable position of completing this Teams roll-out (taking over for your predecessor), and now your org is suffering from low adoption rates of this new and unfamiliar app.
I’ve seen moderate success with smaller Teams roll-outs at our smaller customer sites (less than 50 users avg), but honestly there’s a big learning curve for the average 40+ year old worker to learn to use a new “workplace collaboration app”.
At the risk of sounding ageist, if the majority of your users are so old that they can barely use email, this may be a tough roll-out for you!
This doc from Microsoft may be helpful for getting your bearings:
As the guide suggests, perhaps you could encourage a few of the younger groups to be “early Teams adopters”. Why not recruit them to help your org figure out “why we use Teams”?
With Slack Inc going public yesterday with a $23 billion valuation, I’d say now is a great time for anybody to dive into the “workplace messaging and communication platform” of their choice.
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Hello!
OH man, talk about baptism by fire! New job and trying to give use case scenarios for an app. Two heavy lifts!
I have worked with a ton of organizations that have implemented Teams, and most have gotten traction in actually having a high-adoption rate as well.
There is a couple of ways to do this. Teams is such a rich app, it can do so much. The folks that have had the most success did not just roll it out to everyone in a short period of time and tell everyone to use it. What they did was learn the capabilities of the Teams app and when a Dept or user needed a solution that Teams fit, they would show it to them.
It is this way you get the ‘cheerleaders’ within your organization that bring others on-board.
I know of an organization that is using Teams as an emergency communication platform. They are in an area that is prone to severe weather (hurricanes) and had a bunch of different tools to try and communicate with staff if the facility was closed due to severe weather. Teams was a perfect fit and they consolidated a texting platform, a cloud phone switch and a couple of conference lines into Teams.
Now their core leadership team jump on a call through Teams to discuss when the storm is rolling in as well as all employees get a message saying that work will be open or closed the next day.
Of course there will still be folks that will have challenges using a new platform, but it is nice when IT can get a win by providing solutions that just work too.
Let me know if you want to chat about this!
Thanks and don’t forget to provide us with an update!
2 Spice ups
We first used Slack and had pretty low adoption rate in company. After we changed to teams we tried a more “aggressive” implementation, and it worked pretty good.
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We created sweet spots: channel for organizing lunch breaks, Offtopic channels, a smoker-lounge
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We allowed the users to send problems in the IT-Support channel instead of opening tickets. They loved that they now got immediate answers in the channel instead of some auto-generated ticket mails
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Alerts and announcements were only sent to channels by webhook
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IT refused to create new email-distribution groups. User now have to create their own team for every group and can then just order at IT to give it a public mail-address if needed. After a bit of nagging they acutally love it, because they can now easily control the members of their lists on their own.
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Oh, and it proofed that activating Giphy (and removing the 18+ filter ¯_(ツ)_/¯ - 70% of our employees are female and between 25 and 35…) was an absolute key factor for success
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We rolled out Teams replacing Skype for our chit-chat application and had pretty good adoption (we removed Skype to force the issue). One thing I have gotten zero adoption on is “Teams” in Teams. Everyone just uses Chat and adds users. We have a shared file server, so there isn’t a lot of point of sharing files on Teams and no one seems to have used the other features.
Teams is mostly used as a virtual water cooler for 50% non-work and 50% work chatter. I’ve positioned it as more intrusive and not as persistent as an email.
Teams seems to be making everyone happy as they have a way to chat with staff on different floors.
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Only been a week on the job but learning a great deal and it helps to have people here to get input from.
I really appreciate the responses and love some the ideas here.
Where’s that Praise app in MS Teams? Oh wait this is Spiceworks lol
@kyleparrish @kenlubar8969 @davidhoffman @kevinsanders02 @falkoziemann @darren-for-cdw
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The honest answer is “because Microsoft is killing off a tool we use and we like in order to force us to adopt their Slack wannabe, and they don’t care what we need or want”. Haven’t quite figured out the diplomatic way to put that yet.
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“A word without email would be a wonderful thing.”
Slack/Teams would agree, and both have been touted as the “email killer” app promising to make the world a better place.
Email is just fine for lowest-common-denominator, inter-business communication, but for internal communication within the organization, I think email fails and should be largely replaced with chat apps.
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I agree! However, we are in the same struggle where some of us youngin’s are looking for this type of collab as it is quick and efficient and more closely resembles normal interaction with others. But…most of the more “experienced” team members still prefer email.
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