How to use Microsoft Teams effectively - everything you need to know

Online chats, videoconferencing and virtual workplaces. These are some of the key features that will define work in the post-pandemic world. However, many technology firms providing virtual workplace solutions have been slow to react to these fast-changing demands.

But Microsoft Teams has been ahead of the pack.

Teams goes far beyond the usual communications features like messaging, chat and calling to give companies a robust suite of virtual tools that not only help them get work done online, but completely transform the way they collaborate. Our 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report shows that among the 100,000 teams we analysed, there are immense opportunities for improvement open to 97% of them.

As the pandemic begins to subside and companies settle into hybrid work environments, the benefits of using Microsoft Teams for work are becoming more important than ever. Continue reading to learn more about the features your organisation can use to optimise work, and how they can benefit your business.

Most companies don’t know what they’re missing on Teams

When COVID-19 struck, most companies were forced to quickly and suddenly adapt to national (and international) restrictions by leaning on virtual workplaces to get things done. For many companies, that simply meant using email, videoconferencing tools and their usual instant messaging app more than they were before.

Even among the teams that used Microsoft Teams - with its host of digital teaming functions - most of them relied on these basic communication features. In fact, our report found that among the 100,000 teams we analysed, just 26% of them reported any activity at all. Among them, most teams have huge potential in front of them to expand their use of Teams and optimise their collaboration.

But this has become something of an open secret. As the pandemic begins to subside and it appears remote work will continue to be a core feature of workplaces in the future, most companies are realising they’ll need to optimise their virtual collaboration and communication channels to keep up with changing circumstances. Most of the companies in our report said they were ready to move beyond basic communications features and utilise teaming functions more extensively.

The key Teams features you should be using

Where do you start? Teams has a variety of features that most companies aren’t even aware exist. Use the following as a guide to help kickstart your Teams revolution.

Channels

Most of the teams using Teams are leaning on communication features like chat, calls and meetings to get work done. In fact, less than 30% of staff are participating in team channels. These features are important when it comes to maintaining productivity and engagement in remote settings, but they aren’t the best of what Teams has to offer.

Organisations can use the Microsoft Teams channel to have more focused conversations about a particular topic, project, discipline or anything else members of your team think is worth discussing. Channels help you better organise work, boosting your team’s productivity and efficiency as a result.

Team collaboration

Unlike many other virtual workplaces, Teams doesn’t just function as an internal communication platform. Teams users also have full access to all Microsoft 365 platforms within Teams itself, including Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Users can collaborate on documents in real time, providing edits, comments and suggestions, and send them to other users via group chat or private channel with those additions intact. This helps make team collaboration easier, faster and more productive.

Microsoft Teams integration

The beauty of Teams is that it’s easy to integrate other popular tools and apps right into the Teams platform. Take Trello, a popular project management software that uses virtual cards and boards to assign tasks and organise projects. In Teams, you can integrate Trello to allow you to see all tasks, assignments and notifications active in Trello. That means your team members don’t need to have multiple tabs running for different programs, wasting time jumping between different pages (and inevitably clicking the wrong tab once or twice).

You can also integrate Twitter on Teams. Use this to get alerts every time your organisation is mentioned in the social media world. This helps you gain real-time insights into what customers (and potential customers) are saying about you. Teams also integrates with ServiceNow, Adobe, Polly and GitHub.

How the most productive teams are using Teams

Our report picked out a few characteristics the most productive teams displayed that other teams can learn, adopt and benefit from. Many of these teams have developed into their own self-contained units, requiring little oversight and supervision from managers. We found a 20% increase in “self-directed” teams in 2021, as team members focused more on internal interaction and operational outcomes than before.

Alongside greater self-direction, the workers who were using Teams best also had a number of other qualities that made them stand out. They had a more clearly defined sense of purpose, they were more operationally focused, they displayed a high level of intensity, and they usually had much smaller teams than the average — typically between three and eight members.
For them, Teams wasn’t just a useful collaboration tool that helped them be more productive. We found that their level of productivity would have been impossible without Teams - that says a lot.

The benefits for your business

Employees are more engaged

One of the biggest problems companies faced at the start of the pandemic was how to keep employees engaged and motivated while working remotely. 20% of remote workers said loneliness was their biggest struggle at work, and this had a serious impact on the organisations they worked for. In fact, lonely workers routinely report being less productive and engaged at work, and they’re far more likely to leave their job at some point.

Teams helps organisations combat this problem. The Teams interface can be personalised to fit each individual user’s preferences, making the entire experience more personal and familiar. Channels and other communication features (like use of the @mention) make things more straightforward and easier to use, eliminating much of the frustration that can come with using digital tools.

Most important, because so many of the problems around employee engagement are handled within Teams itself, that gives HR and other personnel more time to handle other issues.

Everyone is more productive

Teams makes it easier for remote workers to stay organised, optimise workflows and make key documents and information easy to access and interact with. In addition to greater employee engagement, all of this helps to remove many of the headaches, hiccups and handicaps that can stall work and cause deadlines to be missed. Your employees become more efficient and more productive as a result, and that’s good for business.

Team members build stronger trust

People do their best work when they trust those around them, but remote work can make trust-building hard. Lots of trust-building happens in the break room, at lunch, or just during those slow periods in the day when your employees can talk about anything and everything. One of the great benefits of Teams is that it’s a lot easier to facilitate interaction and build camaraderie among team members.

You can create channels for non-work related subjects — happy hour plans, for example — to give employees a space where they can interact and build personal bonds with their colleagues. This helps to simulate a lot of that side conversation that takes place at work.

Employees also need to be able to trust their leaders. If their supervisor is merely sending them work via email, it’s harder for employees to feel any strong sense of ownership over their work or the work of their team. Holding regular check-ins can help close this gap and give employees the support they need to feel fully enmeshed with the team.

Your teams have a better sense of accountability

Accountability is one of the most important characteristics of a well-functioning team. It keeps everyone committed and on track, and encourages team members to continue delivering and own up to mistakes. In-person leadership teams can easily schedule meetings to maintain accountability to ensure all projects are on track and everyone is fulfilling their responsibilities. But this is more difficult in a remote setting.

Teams helps leaders overcome this challenge. Team leaders can assign a task to each team member explicitly using the @mention function, hold their weekly team meeting using video conferencing, and organise projects with another app. All of this creates greater division of each task and ultimately responsibility over work completed.

SWOOP Analytics helps you understand your use of Teams

The pandemic completely changed work, and there’s no going back. Even after the virus goes away and the masks come down, it looks like many companies will continue operating a hybrid environment to allow both in-person and virtual work. Virtual workplaces are no longer just a temporary measure to keep the lights on - they’re now a necessary part of success in the post-COVID-19 world.

Understanding how Microsoft Teams can benefit your business and transform your collaboration for the better is the right first step, but you need the data on your side to truly understand where your business can improve and how to do it.

Our team at SWOOP believes in the power of collaboration to help teams work better. When you partner with us, we provide insightful analytics into how to take your digital communications to the next level.

Reach out to us today for a free SWOOP trial, and visit our website to learn more about SWOOP Analytics’ Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report.