Is your email inbox driving you crazy? Are you sick of endless meetings and struggling to find the time to get uninterrupted work done? Is the rest of your team stuck in old ways of working? We’re sharing our top three tips, based on the world’s largest analysis of Microsoft 365 usage, to help you work smarter, not harder.   

SWOOP Analytics has analysed 213,411 Microsoft 365 accounts across 18 organisations around the world to learn how people actually work, rather than how they think they work. With these insights, we’ve identified Seven Collaboration Habits to transform the way of working in M365. Our research found that making just small changes to collaboration habits across an entire organisation will result in huge improvements and significant time and money savings. Our top three tips to transform your way of working:  

1. Cut back on email – replace one email a day with a Microsoft Teams channel message or Yammer post 

Email refuses to die, despite it being inefficient.  

Check out these statistics:   ​ 

• On average, 28% of the work week is spent on email.​ 

• 62% of emails received do not deserve attention. ​ 

• It takes 64 seconds to recover from an email interruption. ​ 

• Email access causes us to switch our focus twice as much as those without access, resulting in measurable increases in stress levels. ​ 

• More than 320 billion emails are sent daily, with growth rates continuing to increase at 4%/year. 

• Email is good for formal business correspondence, but ineffective for internal collaboration​. 

• Combined with attaching files it leads to versioning chaos and duplication.​ 

• Long email trails are notoriously confusing, and it is easy to get lost or included on things that are not relevant. Think about the dreaded "Reply All". 

We know it’s more time consuming to read and write emails than to write a quick message or post on a collaboration platform like Microsoft Teams or Yammer.  

SWOOP Analytics’ global benchmarking analysis of email volume found people read, on average, 28.2 emails per day and write 5.5 emails per day. Microsoft’s workplace analytics platform Viva Insights works with the following estimates for time spent reading and writing emails: 

• Reading 1 email = 3 minutes 

• Writing 1 email = 5 minutes 

This equates to 84.5 minutes reading and 27.5 minutes writing emails, or a total of 112 minutes per day.  

Reading and writing messages in a Microsoft Teams channel, or on Yammer, is estimated to take only 4 minutes. Messages are typically much more concise, and often part of a thread of conversation, which accounts for the difference. 

If you replace one of the five daily emails (20%) with a message posted to a Microsoft Teams channel or Yammer, 20% of the email time - 22.5 minutes - can be cut in half. You’ll be saving 11.25 minutes per day. 

Saving 11.25 minutes per day may not sound like a lot in an eight-hour working day, but when you add it all up we’re talking big numbers. Using an average hourly wage of $USD80 as the basis we arrive at the following cost savings for organisations: 

• Organisation with 1,000 people = $USD 3,841,372 per year saved 

• Organisation with 20,000 people = $USD 76,827,451 per year saved 

• Organisation with 50,000 people = $USD 192,068,629 per year saved 

These numbers only include the time saved using a different platform. It doesn’t include the uplift in efficiency from having everything in one place, and avoiding the unbearable email trails, cc’ing, bcc’ing, reply all, that is an inevitable consequence of “collaborating” in email. 

SWOOP Analytics for M365’s Email Liberated habit will immediately show you how good you are at collaborating in Microsoft Teams channels and Yammer compared with sending emails, and give you nudges and tips along the way to save you time, which can equate to money. 

2. Reduce meetings – work asynchronously 

Online meetings can be great, but often there are too many and people struggle to get work done. How many times have you felt exhausted after a morning of back-to-back meetings? 

As more people move to hybrid work, you’ve probably noticed fewer people are working the same hours. Having too many meetings is at odds with enabling hybrid work. 

After your next meeting, take a moment to think about whether most of it could have been achieved by working asynchronously. Could you have begun work on a document by chatting about it in a Microsoft Teams channel discussion, with every team member making their own notes and edits directly in the document? Maybe after you’ve done this, you could meet online to discuss ideas but the meeting might be reduced from one hour to 15 minutes because you’ve already all made your notes, comments and replies in the Teams channel. 

Recommendations to reduce meetings: 

• Reserve meetings for trust-building and complex discussions. 

• Move status updates and decision making to Microsoft Teams​ channels. 

• Do polling to make decisions.​ 

• Share dot point updates in Teams channel.​ 

• Post broader updates on Yammer​. 

• Increase your use of Teams channel messages.​ 

• Empower staff to say "no" to meetings.​ 

• Make meeting agendas mandatory​. 

• Automatically shorten default meeting times. 

SWOOP Analytics for M365’s Asynchronous Collaborator habit will immediately show you how good you are at collaborating in Microsoft Teams channels and Yammer (asynchronous) compared with collaborating in Teams Meetings/Calls (synchronous), and give you nudges and tips along the way to remind you to work asynchronously. 

3. Get your team to work the same way - any team is only as good as its weakest link 

It’s great if you’re cutting back on email and posting in Microsoft Teams channels or Yammer but it’s almost redundant if the rest of your team remains stuck in email. SWOOP’s M365 benchmarking analysis found the largest predictor of collaborative performance was the level of variation in digital habits that exists within the team. 

In other words, any team is only as good as its weakest link. Mismatched collaboration habits within close working teams can be disastrous for collaboration. For digital collaboration to work, the collaboration habits of team members need to align if optimal team collaboration is to be achieved.  

Therefore, it’s critical to develop team norms of digital behaviour, that way you’re all in sync.  

• Decide as a team how you will work, set clear team goals for working. 

• Ideally, choose to work in Microsoft Teams channels, establishing a new channel for each project. 

• Decide to limit chat to personal notes like; “Where are you going for lunch?”. Anything related to work should be in the Teams channel thread for all team members to see. 

• Access all work from the Teams channel, with apps added as tabs within the channel. 

• Aim for 80% working out loud in Microsoft Teams channels or Yammer. 

• Upon completion of a project, share a summary of what you’ve learned in a Yammer post to share the knowledge across the entire organisation. 

Using SWOOP Analytics for M365 you can track each team’s collaboration habits, and immediately identify where there are breaks in collaboration, how time is spent in M365 and how to improve collaboration across the team, as well as the enterprise. Habit tracking is the most effective way you ensure the new desired habits become ingrained and thereby achieve the return-on-investment. 

Try SWOOP for M365 for free today to see how you and your team are collaborating and learn how to work smarter, not harder.