One of the things that stood out from SWOOP Analytics’ inaugural benchmarking of Microsoft 365 was that while many of the 18 organisations analysed had some high achieving teams or departments based on our Seven Collaboration Habits, they often had many more low performing teams. 

Take for example CityFibre, which builds Full Fibre infrastructure across the UK. It’s top performing team - Software Development - is a poster child for collaboration habits but so many more teams and departments barely ranked within the top 1,000 from the 3,773 teams/groups/departments analysed in 2022. 

This came as no surprise to John Holzman, Associate Director, Digital Collaboration, CityFibre. John’s purpose at CityFibre is to make it a place where all employees work out loud to share knowledge and solve problems, just as the Software Development team is doing. By identifying the Software Development team as a high performer – and having the data from SWOOP to prove it – he can showcase what “good looks like” within his own organisation for others to learn. 

It was a similar story with roadside assistance and member organisation RACQ. Its top performing department was Retail Stores. This team is the customer face of RACQ in stores – what a credit to the organisation! The members of the department are spread right across the enormous state Queensland in Australia, so they are located thousands of kilometres apart. To communicate, they rely completely on digital interactions and use M365 to do so. SWOOP’s benchmarking analysis shows they do it extremely well! 

In ranking the top departments in SWOOP’s M365 benchmarking for 2022, all seven of SWOOP’s Collaboration Habits - Email Liberated, Asynchronous Collaborator, Chat Liberated, File Sharer, Community Contributor, Screen Sharer and Camera Confident – are combined to give an overall collaboration score for every member of the department, which is then compared with the 3,773 departments benchmarked in the 2022 report. 

Our rankings were based on departments rather than an organisation’s entire M365 collaboration habits specifically to find the top performing teams, and because it’s easier for smaller organisations to have many strong teams than for an organisation with teams in the tens of thousands. 

For example, one of world’s largest agriculture companies, Syngenta, had hundreds of high-ranking departments across the individual measures in SWOOP’s Seven Collaboration Habits, but it didn’t top the rankings when all seven habits were combined. 

This can be partly explained by the fact some of the 40,000+ employees across all branches of Syngenta Group and its subsidiaries have only limited access to M365. For example, seasonal workers have access only to Outlook and employees in China can’t access the entire M365 suite. 

A department from Syngenta topped the rankings for Asynchronous Collaborator, which seems to be no coincidence when you learn about the company’s Work Better Wednesday initiatives to teach staff how to better use M365 tools. 

Syngenta departments also dominated the top rankings for File Sharer, which shows how good you are at working with files on SharePoint (shared by default) compared with OneDrive (private by default), and Camera Confidence, which shows how good you are at turning on a camera during Teams meetings/calls. The vast number of high performing departments based on these measures point to a culture of file sharing and turning cameras on across the organisation. 

UK charity Christian Aid’s Community Fundraising and Public Engagement team was ranked No.1 worldwide for large-size departments, those with more than 50 people, when all Seven Collaboration Habits were combined.

This team plays a leading role in developing and delivering church and community fundraising and engagement activities across Britain and Ireland, and provides public engagement through local and national media.

The 53 team members are geographically dispersed across the UK. They typically meet with supporters and churches and then collaborate as a team using M365 tools, mostly relying on Microsoft Teams, Yammer and SharePoint. Key to the team’s collaboration success is the fact they invite guests into Microsoft Teams to collaborate transparently. For example, many churches are invited into Teams to work asynchronously. This worked particularly well during COVID-19 lockdowns when meetings could not be held face-to-face.

Drumroll please…the 2022 M365 Collaboration Champions are: 

• RealFoundations - Managed services team 

• Engage Squared – Project Management Office 

• Christian Aid - Community Fundraising and Public Engagement team

• CityFibre - Software Development team 

• Syngenta - No.1 departments for Asynchronous Collaborator, Camera Confident & File Sharer

• RACQ – Retail Stores

• SWOOP Analytics - Development and Operations team

In the full report we share case studies from these top performing teams and departments. By sharing their stories and best practices, you can learn from the best. Each one has some different tips to share and, you never know, they might just be the thing that works for you. 

If you would like to uncover the best performing teams and departments in your organisation, try SWOOP Analytics for free today and we’ll provide you with your own custom benchmarking report.