Edwin Morales knows his teammates have his back. His tight team of four have never met face to face, there’s a huge geographic divide between them all, they rarely speak, and yet they trust each other implicitly. 

Every day, this group of four Team Leads from Humana, one of the world’s largest health insurers, connect, communicate and collaborate on Microsoft Teams to remain on top of urgent issues to ensure their members receive the best medical care. 

They also look out for each other and each other’s teams. It’s a reflection of the culture of support, collaboration and employee wellbeing at Humana, which has been nurtured on digital platforms including Teams and Yammer, as most associates work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

If Edwin has a doctor’s appointment and needs to head out for a few hours, he knows his fellow Team Leads will be there to help his team of 15 associates. 

“I feel like I can go to a doctor’s appointment and not feel like I’ve got to rush back because there’s nobody there looking out for my team,” said Edwin. 

“If something happens with my team, they (the three other Team Leads) have my back, they will always come back and say, ‘Hey, someone on your team needs help and I’m helping them’.  

“I’m aware of what’s happening all the time. We all do it. It’s me for the three of them and the three of them for me. It’s something that’s really reciprocal in the way that we’ve got each other’s back.” 

Edwin’s team, named MCD Team Lead, was ranked No.4 from almost 100,000 teams analysed as part of SWOOP Analytics’ 2021 Microsoft Teams Benchmarking Report, based on high reciprocity and productivity measures. The MCD Team Lead is essentially an ongoing group chat in the Teams channel, in organised threads, to ensure everyone is kept up to date on the latest developments and urgent issues that need addressing, discuss coverage needs and talk about shared accountabilities. 

The four Team Leads from the Resolution Department are located in Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Edwin is in Puerto Rico. They all work from home during the pandemic, and each manages a group of 10-15 associates, all of whom also work from home. 

Ultimately, the job of these four teams is to provide the best medical care for Humana members. That means working quickly to resolve issues. If an issue arises that someone needs help or advice with, a Team Lead will ask the question in their Teams channel to get the answer. 

“There are so many issues that we solve from that channel,” Edwin said. 

“If I have an associate and I’m working that case with an associate and we reach a point where we don’t know where to go, I can go to the channel and say, ‘Hey, we’re stuck with this one’. 

“Somebody will jump in and say, ‘This is what you need to do’, and that happens all the time. 

“I will put the case number and what the issue is and somebody will jump in and say; ‘Hey, I saw this last week, this is what you need to do’ or ‘This is where you look to solve it’.” 

It’s a perfect example of the business value gained from using Teams to collaborate and knowledge-share to solve a problem, providing a better and quicker outcome for Humana members. 

It’s also a reflection of the way Humana associates help each other out, creating a collaborative and supportive (digital) workplace. 

If one team is busy, and another has some capacity, a Team Lead will jump into another team’s inbox and help out with reports. They’ll pop a note in the MCD Team Lead channel to let the other three Team Leads know what they’re working on. It’s efficient, helpful, contributes to employee wellbeing and provides a faster and better service to Humana members. 

“We use this team (on Teams) to keep track of what everyone is doing,” Edwin said. 

“Our interaction is all the time, all day. We all know that the team chat (done in the team channel) is a priority because if one of us writes something in there, we know it’s important.” 

It’s that constant interaction that has built the trust amongst these four Team Leads. 

“I feel like I know them and they know me, even though we’ve never met in person,” Edwin said. 

“Since I’m so far away from them I don’t know if I’ll ever get the opportunity to meet them face to face but I feel like even if I do, I know these people.” 

Prolific Teams users at Humana 

Humana boasted three teams in the top 15 of SWOOP’s 2021 Teams benchmarking and a whopping 84 teams in the top 0.3% of the almost 100,000 analysed, making it the most successful organisation in SWOOP’s research sample.  

The member organisation has more than 75,000 employees and contractors using its Teams platform, along with almost 3,000 guests. There were more than 1.6 million posts on Teams in the latest three-month sample and more than 4 million replies, according to SWOOP data. More than 40% of employees are active Teams users, with SWOOP showing every active user has, on average, four interactions a day. 

Humana, one of the largest publicly traded health insurers in the United States, started rolling out Microsoft Teams, alongside SWOOP for Teams, in November 2019 on an opt-in basis for employees. There was a significant surge in Teams usage from March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic forced all but frontline workers to work from home.  

With a history of using Skype, the initial introduction to Teams for many was using chat. The MCD Team said it made a team decision to use Microsoft Teams for important conversations rather than email. The key, they said, was coming to a team decision to use the platform to ensure everyone was aware of the intention for using Teams. 

Tapping into analytics

Humana employees are encouraged to log onto SWOOP as part of a WOW program (Work On Wellbeing). They can then see their personal behaviours on SWOOP and how they’re connecting across the organisation. Internal webinars are also hosted to showcase the O365 suite, including showing employees how they can log onto their SWOOP dashboard to see their personal behaviours and what measures they should look at to improve their collaboration on Microsoft Teams and Yammer. 

With the rollout of Microsoft Teams, SWOOP was used to spotlight high performing teams and identify people for an internal champion program.  

“When we encourage folks to utilise Teams, we have this shortened link (to SWOOP) and we let people know there are metrics out there for your own personal Teams use, you can look at how your teams are collaborating, you can look at the enterprise view, and we have promoted that on Yammer,” said Karen Kenney, Organisation Effectiveness Lead at Humana. 

“I have people reach out to me all the time, asking for Teams data. They ask, ‘How is Teams being used?’, and I am able to direct them to the team’s SWOOP data and say, ‘Look, you can look at your statistics, you can change the time period, you can look at the enterprise view. 

“From an HR perspective, it’s been so helpful to have this out there for folks and we have utilised some of SWOOP’s best practices for our guidance documents we have on our learning site as well.”