6 Expert Tips Organizations NEED to Boost Microsoft Teams Adoption
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Microsoft Teams is one of the fastest-growing business apps that helps organizations boost collaboration and productivity. Although it’s gaining popularity, changing behaviors and habits is always met with resistance. To help mitigate these challenges we have put together 6 strategies that are guaranteed to help increase Microsoft Teams adoption within your organization!
Strategy 1: Establish an adoption framework
Having an adoption framework gives you a foundation for an agile service management approach. It also enables an ongoing iteration of adoption throughout your journey with Microsoft Teams and Office 365.
There are three main phases to the adoption framework: Start, Experiment, and Scale. This framework helps improve the core collaboration that teams can get from utilizing Microsoft Teams. It also allows you to onboard early adopters and people who may become champions later on.
Strategy 2: Make it easy to do the right thing
Office 365 is a phenomenal platform, but it needs to be structured appropriately for people to use it as properly as possible. This is where governance comes in. There have to be specified rules of engagement that are consistently enforced so end users always know what/what not to do.
Office 365 governance falls into three categories of focus as illustrated below:
Strategy 3: Demonstrate quick wins
The days of the eight-month IT product before anyone sees the value from it are over. IT departments want to understand what Microsoft Teams can do for them immediately. This is why quick wins are a must!
Now more than ever, organizations need to understand how vital collaboration is to business opportunities and how Microsoft Teams can make an immediate impact. If organizations focus on enabling, empowering and extending the capabilities that Teams provides, they’ll find that quick wins are significantly more achievable.
Having trouble getting your users to adopt Teams? This post might help: Click To TweetStrategy 4: Facilitate leadership buy-in
Making sure leadership is using Microsoft Teams in their day-to-day collaboration is key. It becomes significantly harder to ensure lasting adoption if leadership isn’t setting an example from the top, no matter how hard the rest of the organization pushes adoption.
Some key highlights to share with leaders would be that Microsoft Teams can increase transparency (via its Team structure) and enhance organizational agility (via its chat functionality). It should also be helpful to bring up case studies of past Microsoft Teams success stories.
Strategy 5: Activate champions
Champions can actively rally support for Microsoft Teams adoption from the inside of your organization. It’s been proven that organizations who have champion programs are more successful in increasing adoption of new technologies than those that don’t. If you don’t have one set up, consider it!
Trusted peer-to-peer interaction is why having a community champion program is so impactful. The champions can help scale learning, do training delivery, and gather feedback on what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to adoption.
Strategy 6: Deliver contextual and continuous learning
There are a ton of different resources that can be shared to help reinforce Microsoft Teams adoption, but what’s the point if they’re not resonating with your end users? If you want your organization’s continued learning to be a success, you need to:
- Ensure training is relevant
- Keep it interactive to engage the participants to learn, and
- Issue homework so that participants are expected to apply what they’ve learned.
A Few Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a way for Office 356 Groups or Azure security groups to control Teams membership?
Private channels are coming this year. Azure AAD P1 licenses let you use dynamic groups to manage membership (that’s available today).
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How would we be able to call people external to our company using Microsoft Teams?
IF they’re a guest in Teams you can communicate with them in any meeting or chat. If you are federated (like TD and MSFT) then you can just find us in the directory and call us. You may have a voice plan that makes Microsoft Teams your work telephone, in which case you can use the call app to call anyone in the world.
Any tricks to get users to use Teams chat more instead of email?
If you’re a project lead, I recommend doing all of your communications in Microsoft Teams for a given project. You can also forward emails to a channel via the channel email address and say something like, “transferring to our team so everyone can see…” Once you start doing that people should get the point to communicate through Teams instead of email.
There are many more resources available to help drive sustainable adoption, so make sure to check them out!
- Etiquette in Teams eBook
- Transition Users from Skype to Teams Webinar
- Which Tool When: Microsoft Teams or Yammer?
