With 145 million daily active users, it’s no secret that Microsoft Teams is taking the world by storm. An application which started life as a replacement for Skype for Business, Teams is now a full UCaaS solution, complete with its own telephony solutions (or direct routing capabilities), APIs and integrations, and more.
Of course, before you can leverage all the benefits of Microsoft Teams, you need a plan to encourage adoption among your employees. If your team members aren’t going to use your Teams environment, then you can’t expect to see incredible results.
So, how do you get ahead with driving Microsoft Teams adoption?
Here are some top tips to help.
Find Tangible Use Cases
The best way to encourage any team to adopt Microsoft Teams (or any technology), is to show them how the solution is going to make their lives better. Start by looking at the potential problems your employees or team members might be having in their current workday.
Are you struggling to keep hybrid teams on the same page? Demonstrate how Microsoft Teams can bring staff together through chat, conferencing, file, and screen sharing. If your employees spend too much time moving between different apps to stay productive in the workplace, show them how the Teams environment can align multiple apps into one space.
Finding genuine use cases that matter to your audience and demonstrating the ways that Teams can make life easier will get employees excited about the potential of their new technology.
Customise the Experience
The great thing about Microsoft Teams, is it’s a very open and flexible environment. Your Teams solution doesn’t just integrate with your existing Microsoft 365 applications; it can also work alongside countless other applications too. Integrating things like CRM tools and service desk systems can make the app even more valuable to your workforce.
When you’re evaluating your existing communication and collaboration strategy to find use cases for Microsoft Teams, look for areas where you can customise the experience to suit your employees’ needs. This could even include making sure your team still has access to the same UCaaS tools by using direct routing for telephony.
Alternatively, you could look into building your entire communication environment within Teams, by getting involved with vendors offering native Teams contact centres.
Deliver Training and Guidance
Training will always be a crucial part of implementing new technology in any workplace. When you’re migrating your employees to Teams, it’s important to ensure everyone knows how to make the most out of the solutions available to them.
To start planning your training strategy, make a list of all the essential features of Teams your employees are going to use every day. This could include things like threads and messaging channels, as well as video conferencing tools, Tabs, and integrations with services like Salesforce. Once you have your list, think about how you can deliver training to staff effectively.
For hybrid teams, digital webinars and videos might be the ideal way to get people up-to-scratch on the services they need to use, wherever they are. You could also look into choosing early adopters in your group (people familiar with Teams), who can act as mentors and answer questions for other employees. Providing access to articles, documentation, and guidance direct from the Microsoft website will also help to answer any common user questions.
Run Adoption Campaigns
When you’re ready to start introducing your employees to Teams, make sure you don’t provide too much information all at once. Adoption and change campaigns which gradually roll out new features can help to simplify the migration for your staff. For instance, you could start by showing employees how to manage and share files through Teams, and how to schedule video meetings.
Gradually, you can begin to introduce more aspects of Teams, like how employees can use tabs to access integrations and add-ons or bots to unlock new functionality. Try not to implement too many integrations and extras into your Teams environment at once, as this can overwhelm your staff.
Throughout your adoption campaign, make sure your staff have an easy way to share their feedback on the adoption experience with you. This could mean regularly polling staff to ask them how they feel about new features, sending out surveys, or just having meetings with your team every so often to gather insights.
Encourage Employee Engagement in Teams
As your employees continue to adopt Microsoft Teams, encourage them to engage with new features and discover the benefits on a wider scale. Microsoft Teams comes with a powerful selection of analytics called “Viva Insights”, where employees can check their own productivity levels, access tips on how to improve efficiency, and even get guidance for work/life balance.
Showing your teams how to use things like Viva Learning and Viva Community can help them to discover new opportunities within Teams a lot faster. Show your employees how to:
- Get insights into their work patterns and productivity levels
- Examine their wellbeing and collaboration levels
- Access knowledgebases and business information within Teams
- Reach out for assistance when they have problems
- Use the Activity feed to catch up with messages
- Use Tasks apps to plan work
- Plan their availability for uninterrupted periods of focus
If, after checking their wellbeing metrics, your employees find that they’re not being as productive as they’d like in Teams, ask them to get in touch with you.
Remember to Constantly Communicate
Remember, as your employees begin to embrace and discover Teams, keep the lines of communication open. Your staff need to be able to reach out and ask questions about their new technology whenever a problem might arise. At the same time, they need to be able to trust that you’ll keep them up to-date on any new features or functionalities that emerge within the service.
Keep the communication lines open and have regular meetings through Teams where you can all discuss the adoption experience, and address any problems as a group.
