Carpool - Stop the meetings and create fewer teams on Microsoft Teams

There are two keys to digital information consultancy Carpool’s success working in Microsoft Teams – create a new team only when it’s related to a new client and stop having so many meetings. 

Carpool boasts eight teams in the top 1% of SWOOP Analytics’ 2021 benchmarking of almost 100,000 teams on Microsoft Teams, with three of those in the top 55. Teams is the place where Carpool works and it has a simple strategy for success. 

Governance – keep it simple 

The first key to success is governance in Teams. All internal Carpool work is done in a team called Ecosystem, with a channel for each stream of work. For example, a channel for finance, marketing, client development and so on. 

A new team is created for every client. If Carpool is working with SWOOP Analytics, a team would be created and SWOOP employees may be invited into some channels as external users. That way, all meetings, files, documents with the client can be accessed within the channel. Another requirement to create a new team site is there needs to be a secondary engagement with that client. 

That’s it. One team for internal company work, done in channels, and a different team for every client. 

“Keep it simple,” says Carpool founder and CEO Jarom Reid. 

“We don’t create a team unless it’s related to a client. Everything else typically happens in Ecosystem. It’s an easy, logical breakdown for us.” 

Another tip is to hide the teams you’re not working on regularly. If you need to be alerted to something in one of those teams, you’ll receive a notification. 

Jarom recommends you have no more than 10 teams in view on your Teams dashboard. 

Carpool is adamant about sticking to these housekeeping rules and if someone does it differently, the Carpool team is small enough to be able to fix it. 

Rethink meetings 

Jarom’s second key to success is to stop having so many meetings.  

It’s hard to justify back-to-back meetings when the majority of the work can be done in a channel, and done asynchronously. 

Jarom Reid, Founder & CEO, Carpool.

“It’s not about the actual meeting, it’s about conversation, it’s about always being on,” Jarom said. 

“Yes, it’s asynchronous but it’s more about being engaged and aware. It’s being able to shift from that dependency that I’ve got to go from one meeting to another meeting to another meeting. 

“It ruins my flow. I’m a creative person, I need flow and if I jump from meeting to meeting to meeting, I never get a chance for that flow. So when does my flow happen? At night. And that’s when I’m tired or when I need to spend time with my family.” 

Jarom acknowledges meetings are important and necessary, so how do you make them better?  

“You have conversations first so you can filter out the stuff that doesn’t need to be discussed in the meeting, you can make sure everyone is on the same page so those meetings can be shorter, or not even happen,” he said. 

And if meetings won’t go away, Jarom says try to make them short and sweet. 30 minutes tops. 

“Get rid of large meetings and turn those into Community conversations on Yammer and destroy any semblance of a recurring meeting because they ruin you,” Jarom says. 

In fact, recurring meetings are Jarom’s pet peeve.  

“I have a meetings rule – I try and get out of pretty much every meeting,” he said. 

“I will actively ask; ‘Do I have to be in this meeting?’ And I can’t stand recurring meetings. Meetings should be ad hoc; meetings should be as needed.” 

If meetings are required, Jarom says team meetings should be scheduled inside the channel. That way the correct people are invited, and all files, documents and conversations are included in the channel.  

“I think it is about always building on a foundation and adding context,” he said. 

Treat your channel as a meeting 

A better strategy, Jarom says, is to consider your channel on Teams as an ongoing meeting. 

“That way we’re having an always-on conversation that can have the same characteristics as a meeting,” he said. 

“The more you get into it, the more interesting it is and the more valuable it is. It has way more functionality than a normal meeting.” 

If you don’t know everyone in your organisation, you need Yammer 

Jarom recommends utilising apps in Teams and he has a guide to follow as to when you should be using Yammer, the Communities app on Teams. 

“If you’re an organisation where there’s people in the company who don’t know each other, then you need Yammer,” he said. 

“There’s no number threshold you need to meet in order to justify Yammer. If you don’t know someone, then you need Yammer because you’re not talking to them every day.” 

Train employees how to use your company, not how to use Teams 

The Carpool team.

Carpool was one of the first organisations to implement Teams back in 2016. The simple governance of one internal company team and a new team for every client has been in place since day one. Jarom says that housekeeping hasn’t changed, it’s only improved. 

When a new employee joins Carpool, they are never trained on how to use Teams. 

“We train them on how to use Carpool, not how to use Teams,” Jarom said. 

“If you’re teaching Teams, you’re assuming that the person you’re teaching has enough understanding, enough contextual intelligence, enough desire to make the jump to the work that they’re doing, which could be a bad assumption because you don’t know if your training was motivating. 

“We don’t even talk about Teams, we show people ‘This is how we work’. When people join the company they’re able to digest how we utilise it really quickly. We keep it simple.” 

Jarom admits it’s easier for Carpool as an organisation to get it right with Teams because it is a company of 12 employees, so if a mistake is made, it can be easily corrected. 

That’s not so easy with clients with hundreds or thousands of employees. Which is more reason to agree upon governance in Teams, make it well known and stick with it, Jarom says. 

Unsurprisingly, Carpool’s No.1 team on Teams, according to SWOOP’s benchmarking, is Ecosystems, Carpool’s internal all-company team. The next two top teams on SWOOP’s list for Carpool are client teams. 

Carpool’s objective is, rather than convincing people that using Teams is the best thing to do, to help them understand how the communication ecosystems require technology to facilitate naturally occurring human tendencies to be more connected and more engaged.  

Using the data organically created by this effort, or shift, allows managers, leaders, and individuals to utilise analytics tools, such as SWOOP, to practice predictive strategizing and process innovation with increased accuracy, as well as leveraging human-centred adaptation and adoption principles.  

“Our clients who leverage SWOOP are not just looking for a dashboard that tracks users’ actions, they are finding influential stories, identifying persona or engagement trends, and articulating behaviours that drive scalable productivity practices,” Jarom said. 

“That kind of goodness and knowledge represents an evolved company culture, and that’s a competitive advantage in today’s working world.”