It’s apt that the No.1 team identified by SWOOP Analytics at consulting company Engage Squared is called Team Awesome. 

The data from SWOOP confirms Team Awesome is, in fact, awesome.  

It was ranked No.15 from almost 100,000 teams benchmarked as part of SWOOP’s 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report, based on productivity and relationship measures. 

Team Awesome is a place of trust, safety and working out loud. 

All six members of Team Awesome had never met face-to-face when SWOOP carried out its three-month analysis of teams using Microsoft Teams, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, this team has built a place of trust and safety online through their Teams site. 

“The trust is what’s made our team be able to get through the last year,” said Elaine Batton, head of the Project Management Office (PMO) at Engage Squared. 

“And the technology has enabled that to come together and work.” 

Team Awesome is a team of six project managers – three based in the Australian city of Melbourne, two in Sydney and one in Brisbane – who share and resolve challenges around resourcing on all projects Engage Squared is working on. 

Two of the team members, David Fogarty in Sydney and Daniel Margison in Brisbane, joined the team during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and are yet to meet the rest of their teammates face to face. 

When they do meet at Engage Squared’s first corporate get-together in Tasmania, Elaine says she expects to feel like they already know each other well, although she has warned them she’s much shorter in real life than she looks when sitting in front of a computer camera. 

Their trust building, which Elaine and David say are so important to the business success of this team, started during the pandemic when the team did regular wellness check ins on a Teams channel video meeting. Importantly, Elaine says, cameras are always on. 

She said the project managers come together to check on personal health and wellness, but also to check if everyone is okay with what they are working on. Alongside the video meetings, all work is carried “out loud” in the Teams channels. 

“We came together as a team of PMs (project managers) more than I’ve seen historically in other organisations,” Elaine said. 

“We came together as a team collaborating and sharing our best practices amongst each other. 

“So if we hit a problem on a project, we’d say; ‘Hey, I need to borrow a resource, he’s on your project, can I borrow him?’ and we have those conversations out loud with the team and regularly do that collaboration, or talk about the problem that we’d hit, or say; ‘Hey I’m trying to deal with X problem or X process, how do you manage that?’ 

“It really was a different thing to have a group of PMs come together and be such a collaborative team and care about their projects, but also their peers’ projects, and backing each other up as colleagues.” 

Elaine is certain this ongoing collaboration on Teams is why Team Awesome was ranked so highly by SWOOP’s data.  

“Because Engage Squared, as a company, is very collaborative and quite flat-structured and very much a work-together, help each other-type place, it was more natural within our PM practice and the PMO for people to come together than I’ve seen at other organisations,” she said. 

“We’re about making everyone a success, not just yourself.” 

David agrees.  

“The support I feel from Elaine and my peers is far and away above any level of support I felt previously,” he said. 

Remember, these relationships have all been established virtually. David had never met his whole team in real life at the time of this interview. They later met in late April 2021 at an all-company get together in Tasmania. 

Retaining the trust after the pandemic 

Elaine wants to ensure this trust remains once the team can return to the office. 

“By working out loud and trusting each other, I think we’ve created a social contract with each other and I want that to continue because I think it underlies the ability to get through the tougher conversations,” she said. 

“I expect we’ll be in a hybrid working environment but we’re always going to be a bit remote so we’ll definitely continue having the open, safe conversations where you can ask anything. You can make any mistake.  

“The fact that we’ve been able to build the PMs into being a collaborative team is the thing that we need to make sure we continue doing and putting effort in to make sure we don’t lose it.” 

Elaine makes the point that; “trust can be broken pretty easily” so maintaining trust is important. 

David said the team often has contentious conversations about resources so the trust and feeling of safety to raise controversial issues is so important. He said working in a hybrid environment on Teams can often be a better place to have these discussions so as not to be overheard by others in an office environment. 

“I think that trust has partly come from the ongoing communication, partly come from the culture we work in, but it’s very much come from the people working together,” Elaine said. 

“Our team is awesome.” 

Best practice in Teams 

While Team Awesome is a small team, it still follows best practice by tagging appropriate people, or the whole team, into conversations. 

If a personal chat between two team members moves towards a work conversation, the discussion is moved into the Teams channel. 

The PMs can also use SWOOP to see their collaboration behaviours. David said he mostly uses SWOOP to show the success of Teams and Yammer adoption projects with clients. 

Don’t lock down Teams 

In total, Engage Squared has seven teams in the top 0.2% benchmarked by SWOOP in 2021, with three teams in the top 70 of the almost 100,000 benchmarked. 

Team Awesome is the only “business as usual” team among the seven, with the other six teams all being project-based teams set up to work on particular client projects. Three of those are external Team sites with the client.  

Engage Squared’s Microsoft 365 Evangelist, Mark Woodrow, said the fact external Team sites ranked so highly was proof of the importance of keeping Teams open to external guests for better collaboration. 

“The fact that we’ve got three external teams in this top group shows that trying to lock everything down is not the way to go,” he said. 

Claudia Piscitelli, Head of Change & Adoption at Engage Squared, said with so many project teams – internal and external – among the company’s top performing teams it shows the value of bringing people together for rapid collaboration. 

Imagine, Claudia said, if those projects were being carried out using a platform like email, as opposed to Teams. 

“That collaboration, happening across multiple emails, used to be a nightmare whereas now people have a shared space in Teams and they’re clearly collaborating and asking questions in that one place,” she said. 

Hear directly from Team Awesome’s Ruby Bailey, as she explains what her team looks like on a day-to-day basis, and learn Claudia’s top top 3 tips for a successful Microsoft Teams roll out.