The No.1 ranked team from almost 100,000 teams analysed as part of SWOOP Analytics’ 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking report is a digital team of four people who successfully undertake all their interactions on Teams.

Each week, this team of four people from global consultancy company Chaucer produce a company-wide staff newsletter for its 300+ employees. Apart from Dani Lindley, Head of Corporate Comms & Engagement, it’s a secondary part of their job, so the ability to jump in and out of their team on Teams allows them to work asynchronously, without interfering with their primary roles.

Every Wednesday, editors Alex Yelland and Paniz Mojahedi send emails to their contacts asking for contributions to the weekly newsletter. Emails start flooding back and one of the team creates a Word document to add the newsletter items.

The Word document is uploaded to the Teams site and everyone works on the one document. Sarah Parry, Chaucer’s Head of Knowledge Management, includes Yammer highlights (after checking the Most Engaging Posts on SWOOP Analytics). The newsletter is kept concise, so it contains links to longer articles published on SharePoint.

Sarah Parry, Head of Knowledge Management, Chaucer.

“As we get all of that input, we each go into the Word document in the team and update it,” Sarah said.

“We don’t have a meeting where we sit down and talk about what we’ve got. When we’ve got a moment and we’ve got something, we add it in and then others can see the progress.

“We will always read through and if we spot any typos, or something that can be condensed, we’ll do that as well. So we’re constantly editing as we go in, based on what’s in there.

“We don’t need to speak to each other. Everything normally is purely asynchronous.”

Making use of the @mention

Sarah said other team members are @mentioned when something needs to be brought to their attention.

“Because we’re all busy doing other stuff and we’re not living in that team, we use the @mention - @mention the team and @mention individuals - to catch people’s attention so they’ll get an alert,” she said.

The all-company newsletter is sent out every Friday afternoon so discussion in the team heats up on Friday mornings with final edits, a test email, more edits and lots of Teams conversation.

Sarah said the conversation in the thread is all quite fun. For example, Alex is responsible for selecting a weekly fun fact and always tries for a pun as the headline, much to the amusement of the rest of the team. While they don’t literally speak with each other, Sarah said the team of four has built strong, trusting relationships from working digitally.

“It’s all quite fun and lively, and we use a lot of reactions,” she said.
“When we’re ready to send the newsletter we give some high fives and love reactions and ‘have a great weekend’ comments.”

Because this team has only the one project each week, and comprises only four team members, it does all its work in the General Teams channel. Sarah said if they worked on more than one publication, they would have multiple channels but it’s unnecessary for the purpose of this team.

Veganuary 2021

Chaucer’s second highest ranked team in SWOOP’s Microsoft Teams analysis is a now-archived project team to run an awareness campaign about Veganuary 2021 across the organisation, encouraging a vegan lifestyle for the month of January.

The team of nine, led by project manager Greg Barrett, created the team using the project template within Teams and added Microsoft Planner to use as a day-to-day tracker of who was doing what.

“We approached it very much as a project with a defined start and defined end and the intention was always that we would use it for that period and then close down,” said Greg.

While planning for the Veganuary campaign was managed in Teams, the actual promotion was mostly done on Yammer, through the company newsletter and in Sharepoint articles and videos.

Similar to Sarah’s team, the Veganuary campaign was secondary to everyone’s primary role so work was mostly carried out asynchronously on Teams.

Greg Barrett, Managing Principal Consultant, Chaucer.

“We had a weekly meeting but due to the nature that everyone was doing this on top of project BAU, a lot of the conversation was driven through Teams updates and chat,” Greg said.

“People were given work packages or articles. We scheduled them in for when they needed to be started, checked and published, and people went off and did that at their own pace.”

The Veganuary campaign was the first coordinated campaign from Chaucer’s Environmental Responsibility Group, which has since gone on to be the driving force behind Chaucer signing the United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative.

“Our aim was to bring the discussion around a vegan lifestyle,” Greg said.

“We weren’t necessarily trying to promote or covert, we were just raising awareness.”

Some of the Veganuary posts on Chaucer’s Yammer network.

One of the most popular aspects of the campaign was a recorded discussion with staunch meat eaters and vegans, where everyone had to give their opinion on a statement.

The discussion was edited into a video which was shared on Yammer and received huge engagement.

“It turned it into this incredible video and showed how, as we had the discussion, we moved our positions,” said Sarah, one of the meat eaters involved in the discussion.

“That was posted to Yammer and it got fantastic engagement.”

When to use Teams, when to use Yammer?

Sarah has a simple rule: “Following Jeff Bezos, I agree that if a team needs more than two large pizzas to feed it, it’s potentially too big to be really effective. That’s when I encourage teams to move discussion (usually knowledge sharing) from Teams to Yammer.”

Microsoft Teams is for collaborating within your own team, Sarah says, when you know who you’re working with and you’re working together on live documents.

Yammer is for open knowledge sharing. A place to ask questions and find answers, or access knowledge across the entire organization, not just within your team.

“Teams is great for collaboration when you’re in a team and you know who your team is,” Sarah said.

“You set your team up, you know exactly who’s there, you’re collaborating live on documents, you cut out a load of email and you have a lot of collaboration going on in the team.

“That is very different to Yammer. Yammer, we have open communities, none are private, because if I find a private community, I’ll ask them, ‘Why do you need the community to be private ? Would it be better to be an open, discoverable community or do you want to do work in Teams?’.”

Cleaning up Teams

Chaucer’s IT Manager Daniela Kucerova says cleaning up teams on Teams could be a fulltime job. While Sarah uses SWOOP for Teams and SWOOP for Yammer to look at high performing teams and posts, Daniela uses SWOOP to identify the lowest performing teams to clean up inactive teams and help educate employees on archiving and cleaning up finished projects on Teams.

“For me, SWOOP is useful from this side to see how we tackle the clean-up and where we need to do the clean-up,” Daniela said.

“As a system administrator I need to see this because I’m the one who tells them how to use Teams.”

Daniela encourages Chaucer staff to check with colleagues to see if there is a need to create a new team or whether one already exists. She said sometimes duplicates, and even triplicates, of teams are created, which leads to information security concerns, especially as clients are invited into teams to collaborate on projects.

“It’s education of the team members and the owners that there has to be a clean-up done once you finish a project, you need to remove the guests, archive teams,” Daniela said.

“We need to archive all the teams that are unnecessary and any relevant and valuable information that is in the team, like documentation that can be used for future projects, to take out of the archive teams and put it in the shared location where other people can use it as a reference for future projects. That’s something that we need to work on.”

Hear more from Sarah Parry and Dani Lindley as they share the secret to their success and explain how you can replicate success on Teams. Watch here.

Learn more about how Chaucer sets a clear line on when to use Teams and when to use Yammer in our case study and how Yammer is the living digital brain of Chaucer.