“Right-sizing” your Microsoft Digital Teams with SWOOP

You might think that because you’re using Microsoft Teams you are “Digital Teaming”. At SWOOOP we provide predictive analytics for teaming performance. SWOOP’s 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking study shows, on average, less than 30% of staff are participating in Teams channels. If we exclude consulting companies, this figure drops to 11%. The remaining are either totally inactive on Teams or limiting their use to the telephony functions, transitioned from Skype. Telephony activities (calls, chats, meetings) in Teams are not aligned to a digital team. We believe the majority of organisations are missing out on a unique capability provided by Microsoft Teams. Collaboration in the workplace ultimately requires effective digital teams.  

For many organisations, “right-sizing” their digital teams will begin with just creating some teams in Teams in the first place. The COVID-19-enforced lockdown necessitated a rapid move to Teams, with the use of the telephony functions needed just to survive. We are, however, seeing that organisations are now looking to get more out of Teams; specifically using Teams Channels and forming digital teams.  

It’s still early days with digital teams and largely not a lot of thought or effort has gone into managing the process. There is a growing cost, however, for this lack of management/governance. Have a look at how many digital teams your organisation currently has. Have a look at how many digital teams you are a member of. You may be surprised; even shocked. Our benchmarking study analysed almost 100,000 digital teams across 33 organisations, over a three-month period. We found 74% had no activity at all and only 3% had any meaningful interactions (our threshold for ‘meaningful’ was at least three active members and one interaction per  day).  

Where to Start – Managing the Inactive Teams 

If you have found out how many digital teams your organisation has created, you’re off to a good start. If you are a SWOOP for Teams user you can use the Team Growth report to find out the number of active and inactive teams you have. We found most organisations have far more inactive teams than active ones.  

There are many reasons for teams being inactive. Many may have started as experiments, which have now served their purpose. Others may have been set up for a particular event, which has now passed. Consulting companies regularly establish a digital team for every project. Once the project is completed, they remain there for future reference; usually when a new project begins with the same client.  

Whatever the reason, there are risks associated with having a large number of inactive teams. For example, if it’s a project team, where external guests are invited in, these external guests still have access to your files well after the project has concluded. Other risks are related to the platform administrators, who may be concerned about the growing use of systems resources allocated to essentially dormant teams.  

The good news is that Microsoft caters for managing inactive teams by providing a Teams Expiration function which, if set, begins an automated process of managed removal of a team. As you would expect, the function provides many warnings to the owners of a pending removal and easy means for reversing the process if necessary. Even if a team is deleted, it is only “soft deleted”. The bad news is that there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to enact bulk expirations. If you have hundreds of inactive teams, this will become onerous very quickly. The good news for SWOOP users is we can easily provide a function to help with this process by enhancing our “Most Active Teams” report to provide an option to review the teams at the other end (least active). We are looking to provide a function to automatically select and set these teams for expiration.  

Managing the teams that aren’t really teams  

The design of SWOOP for Teams has been drawn from decades of academic research on what makes a high performing team. The most asked question about teams is; “What is the best size for a team?”. The research is clear; no double figures, i.e. less than 10. Digital teams on Teams, however, are regularly larger than that. SWOOP does not simply rely on team size to identify who the ‘real’ teams are. If a team has 20 members all tightly connected with each other, our algorithms classify them as a Self-Directed Team. If a team of nine members is made up of a single broadcaster, we still classify them as a “Forum”, independent of the size. We look at the interaction and engagement patterns of the members to classify each team as a team Persona/Type. We contend only the Self-Directed or Single Leader teams are ‘real’ teams. 

For groups classified as “Communities” or “Forums” we suggest reviewing them:  

• Is it a “real” team that has just grown too large to be effective? 

• Is it better placed as a Community or Forum in Yammer? Perhaps the Core members could still exist on Teams as a facilitating team for a Yammer Community?  

• Is the intent to be a “real” team but the level of engagement is not reflective of one?   

To make this assessment process a little easier, we are looking to add a column for the Team Persona on the “Most Active Teams” report. A team will not have a Persona if it has insufficient activity (we refer to this as the “Disconnected” Persona). The list will be sortable by Team Persona.  

Managing your own digital teams noise 

One of the common complaints we hear about Teams channels is the notification “noise” generated, especially from larger groups. We have seen many of the larger teams, classified as “Forums” or even “Communities”, established by functional leads to communicate with large groups of staff. Unlike Yammer, you can be added to a team on Teams by the owner without your knowledge or agreement. It can be time consuming managing all the teams you intentionally or unintendedly become a member of.  

To make the management of your own Teams memberships easier, we are looking to provide a similar function to the one planned for Teams Expiration. Your SWOOP Most Active Teams report will be extended to a list of all the teams you are a member of; with the facility to bulk select those you would like to leave.  

Right-sizing your teams and team memberships can be like a good spring clean. All of a sudden you can see the important things you need to focus on, rather than being constantly distracted by the digital clutter that can quickly proliferate within Teams.  

We welcome your feedback and ideas on what could make your life more effective in Teams channels.