Digital transformation (DT) is a much maligned term these days, as DT projects continue to overpromise and under deliver, with Boston Consulting Group suggesting the failure rate is as high as 70%. Firstly though, just what is Digital Transformation?  

“Digital transformation marks a radical rethinking of how an organization uses technology, people and processes to fundamentally change business performance”, according to George Westerman, MIT principal research scientist and author of Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation. 

With this definition in mind, how would you describe the rush to digital collaboration tools with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020? Forcing staff to work remotely; was that a digital transformation? In most cases we think not. For many organisations the use of digital telephony services like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, Facetime, Facebook and the like were merely substituting a face-to-face meeting with a digital one. Yes it was radical, but not by choice. Did it fundamentally change business performance? Well, a good number of organisations reported productivity improvements early in the pandemic, but over time these claims become somewhat nuanced and depend a lot on just what sort of job you have, or organisation you belong to. So perhaps not so transformational after all. 

We benchmarked almost 100,000 teams on Microsoft Teams  

We were somewhat surprised, and dismayed, when we crunched the numbers for our recently released 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report and we found, on average, close to 90% of Teams users had not moved beyond the basic telephony (call/chat/meetings) of Microsoft Teams. The richer digital teaming environment provided applications and asynchronous online discussions into team workspaces that were not meaningfully used. However, they were not ignored. In fact, we found almost 100,000 teams created across 33 organisations. But only 26% were active in the three-month period we assessed. Less than 3,000 digital teams (3%) were meaningfully active.  

Having persevered with the digital teaming functions, we wanted to find out whether the effort was worthwhile. We focused our search on the top 10% of those 3,000 teams, 273 teams to be precise. We have quite sophisticated ways of rating team performance that go far beyond simple activity counts. We identified those organisations that were well represented in this top 0.3% of the 100,000 teams we assessed. Because our benchmarking is anonymous, we had to reach out to each of these organisations with the ID code for their high performing teams, and request to interview them. 

We were pleasantly surprised by the response, as our contacts were equally keen to identify where value may be coming from their investment in Teams. For the larger organisations, the identified teams were unknown to them. For others, the specific team identified may have been news to them, but their high performance was not a surprise. The result is 11 rich case studies in the benchmarking report; and they are all truly digitally transformational. Given time, we are confident we could have identified hundreds more from our identified short list. While a few hundred teams from thousands formed may not seem a lot, the return on investment (ROI) from just a handful of digitally transformed teams could more than justify the whole investment in the platform.  

What were these digitally transformed teams actually doing? 

We won’t go into the specific details here, you will have to go to the report for that. What we will do is to draw out some common themes we believe meet the digital transformation definition of “radical re-thinking of how work is done” and “fundamental changes to business performance”: 

1. They worked asynchronously and continuously in channels, eliminating the need for as many meetings because problems were solved online. 

These teams interacted heavily and consistently on a day-to-day basis, continuously working in Teams channels. They had high levels of reciprocity in their interactions (a factor in their selection) that had translated into a high trust and a psychologically safe workspace. For many, a formerly infrequently recurring interaction e.g. a leaders/managers weekly meeting; an executive strategy retreat; a project managers conference; had been transformed into a daily continuous collaboration in their Teams channel. 

Imagine if you could replace your recurrent team/management meetings with a continuous conversation. No need to wait.  

2. Being co-located no longer matters. The digital workspace breaks the geographic divide. 

The majority of these teams were virtual first and virtual only. Some will never meet face-to-face. They are okay with that. They have been able to experience the levels of trust usually only associated with tight co-located teams; but working virtually. Many expressed the view that if they were to meet face-to-face, it would be like meeting up with old friends.  

Imagine if you could form your “A-teams” from talent that is independent of place and the time zones of the participants?  

3. They broke the chains of the bureaucratic hierarchy.  

For one team of four leaders of geographically dispersed service teams, they agreed to support each other by cross-managing each other’s teams. Each individual leader got to know the members of their colleagues’ teams to the extent they could easily step in and cover for any unavoidable absences. Other examples of teams of project managers were formed to more effectively manage the agile needs of client projects. Resources could be flexibly swapped, loaned or transferred because the project managers trusted their colleagues.  

Imagine if the needs of your project or service teams could be flexibly adapted to the rhythm of your customers’ needs, without the “fight for resources”, “resource hiding” and “budget preservation” antics experienced in overly bureaucratic organisations.  

4. They found new ways to work digitally – all by themselves.  

These teams were not part of some enterprise-wide digital transformation initiative. There were no executives eagerly watching their every move and willing them to succeed. No carefully constructed formal training sessions on how to use the new tools. They saw the technology and opportunity and just worked it out for themselves. They helped each other. If the need arose they could always find a willing “adoption coach” inside. They found brand new ways for creating new value.  

Imagine if you are head coach of an elite sports team, but because of COVID-19 you couldn’t physically bring this team together to train? Now imagine each member had a local coach and a video camera. Now, even the local coaches can participate in a coaching network with the head coach, across the whole distributed team? That’s radical and that’s performance-enhancing.  

We think somewhere in your organisation you will have teams like these

Want to find out where digital transformation is happening in your organisation through the use of Microsoft Teams?   

It’s as simple as signing up for a free trial of SWOOP for Teams. For those organisations that agree to a trial before July 30, 2021, we will provide a list of your top 10 digital teams on Teams, using the same algorithms used to identify the high performing teams in our 2021 Teams benchmarking report.