Millions of dollars to be saved but don’t put it all at risk without measuring collaboration

Collaboration platforms Microsoft Teams and Workplace from Facebook are saving companies millions of dollars every year, resulting in up to 800% in ROI by keeping employees engaged and connected, according to new, independent studies.

We’d like to demonstrate how SWOOP helps you measure the platforms to ensure you get maximum value from Microsoft Teams and Workplace, but let’s first go a little deeper in the ROI of collaboration.

Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact study of Microsoft Teams found a return on investment (ROI) of 832% for organisations using Microsoft Teams and its Total Economic Impact of Workplace by Facebook study found a ROI of 398%. We appreciate these studies were funded by Microsoft and Workplace respectively, so one may assume that organisations who have had the greatest benefits were included.

However, this research shows what ‘high performers’ can achieve. Furthermore, the costs reported are probably on the conservative side but, in any case, we’d suggest both sets of numbers are credible.

SummarisingWorkplace and Teams’ total economic impact, we get the following:

Any organisation implementing these tools wants to ensure they drive the realisation of the business benefits hard because without the business outcomes from implementing these networks, all you’re left with is cost. 

This formula will tell us just how much is at stake if you don’t implement well:

Given that you’re looking at costs of 1.5x you would be wanting to get at least the same amount in realised business benefits. Otherwise you’d been better off not implementing Workplace/Teams in the first place. After that, every single dollar of business benefit you can squeeze out of Workplace/Teams goes straight to your bottom line.

About 50% of the $30m in business benefits for Microsoft Teams is ascribed to; “Having features like co-authoring and version control, searching documents, conversations and names available in one place enables information workers to more effectively and efficiently collaborate in real time”.

For Workplace,a major part of the benefits are ascribed to “make [users] more productive and facilitating connectivity with colleagues, interactions with leaders, and the sharing of knowledge and experiences.”

Therefore, it seems obvious that we need to get people to collaborate better. But that brings us to the real crux: How do you measure if it’s happening?

According to an ADP Research Institute Report this is indeed a real problem as; “The challenge for almost all organizations today is that they are not set up to know very much about their teams. Most current HR systems are extensions of financial systems and only show their reporting structure via an organizational chart. Yet, most work happens in functional teams that can be fluid, depending on the project.”

The built-in analytics from Workplace and Teams will not tell you how people are interacting. Instead, these built-in analytics report on how many people are logging on. Addressing this problem is SWOOP’s sweet spot, as we put interactions at the core. 

SWOOP measures the online collaborative behaviours and gives clear insights on who is connecting with whom and enables the entire organisation to measure cross-team collaboration at an individual level, team/group level, and as an enterprise.

SWOOP for Teams personas.

In our first release of SWOOP for Teams, we’re focusing on what is happening in the so-called ‘channels’ where conversations between team members can be focused on certain relevant topics. This – along with co-authoring – we suggest are two important signals that will tell how your teams are interacting.

When we add employee attribute data such as location, department etc we can now see a clear picture of how your entire organisation is collaborating across geographical or functional boundaries. Then we’re able to answer the pivotal question: Has Microsoft Teams actually led to an increased level of collaboration?

And if there is still value to be realised, we can show you where the opportunities lie.

Furthermore, when we dive deeper into the interactions within a team we can identify team archetypes like Single-Leader Team or Self-Directed Team and discern if the interactions suggest the members are not (yet) interacting like a team. 

Being able to determine how many teams fall into each category becomes another important way of determining how good the organisation has become at collaborating.

SWOOP for Workplace (and SWOOP for Yammer) are comparable with SWOOP for Teams, but the focus is on identifying WHAT people are talking about as well as WHO is talking. That is because Workplace and Yammer are more frequently used for broader employee engagement, collaboration and communication purposes rather than for teams to get work done.

So - what have we learned? Thanks to the research from Forrester we now know that the cost is 1.5x the licences. You’ll need to get at least another 1.5x in business benefits to break even, and the real opportunity starts after that.

Without analytics to help you clearly understand where collaboration is - and isn’t - happening you have simply no way of measuring that you’re getting to the 5-15x potential business benefits.

Is your leadership team willing to accept that? Can they accept a ‘plug and pray’ approach with no way of measuring outcomes? We wouldn’t.

To learn more about SWOOP, or for a free trial, contact us here.