New Zealand Trade and Enterprise - A team of Microsoft Teams champions
When a team of 10 people at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) began to get lost in the sheer amount of documentation and conversation happening in a never-ending Microsoft Teams chat, they made the conscious decision to move their work to a Microsoft Teams channel.
NZTE is New Zealand’s trade promotion agency, with nearly half its 800 people based overseas. To provide expert knowledge for Kiwi exporters, it has also created a network of “beachhead” advisers, who can be called on to provide specific advice. The 10 people within NZTE who run this program live around the world – New Zealand, Australia, China, Singapore, Germany, UAE, the United States and Chile. You can understand how complex this relationship must be, and to begin with, their shared digital world was based on Microsoft Teams chat and Outlook email. They soon realised this was not an efficient way to collaborate.
As a team, they all agreed to move their work to a Microsoft Teams channel in November, 2022. All conversations, files, meetings, agendas, minutes and more are shared in the Teams channel for all to access. No matter where they are located around the world, or what time zone they’re working in, their Teams channel gives equity to everyone.
It may then come as no surprise this team was ranked No.13 from more than 67,000 teams benchmarked in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 M365 & Microsoft Teams Benchmarking analysis.
One of the key findings from SWOOP’s benchmarking analysis is that for digital collaboration to work, groups and teams must agree on how to use the M365 tools to improve collaboration and save time. If there are substantial variations in how people prefer to use the M365 tools within one group or team, this causes confusion and negatively impacts collaborative performance.
NZTE’s Beachhead Network Managers team is a poster child for how to work successfully as a team using M365 tools. Director of the team, Katherine Fippard, said that in October 2022 the team was still working in Microsoft Teams chat, rather than Teams channels.
“What we found is we got a bit confused because there’s so much going on in chat,” Katherine said.
Katherine Fippard, Director - Advisory & Networks, NZTE.
“Our knowledge would get lost in the chat and it was too difficult to tap into that knowledge.”
Within the team of 10 in the Beachhead Network Managers team, three were Microsoft Teams champions, a self-selected group with a passion to learn and be upskilled in Microsoft Teams, and they suggested the chat be moved to a formal Teams channel, an idea Katherine embraced.
“Within the chat we made the decision to formalise it and make a Teams channel so we don’t lose things and files don’t disappear and we know this is the one source of truth,” she said.
“We all agreed that was our means of how we were going to communicate”.
Katherine said she has barely used email for this team since November 2022 and the time savings of working in Teams channels has been immeasurable. No longer is she searching through emails, or months of chat, to find knowledge.
“Now we’ve just got the channel and you can search it,” Katherine said.
“You can go into your Teams channel, you can search for the conversation and ‘bingo!’.”
Aoroki Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand.
One of the best things is the ability to be able to resurface a conversation, or nudge someone, with a quick comment in the thread, rather than starting a whole new chat or email, Katherine said.
That’s not to say Katherine no longer uses Microsoft Teams chat. She uses chat when she’s communicating solely to one region, a deliberate move to quiet the noise in the channel. But as soon as the work pertains to the program, the information is shared in the Teams channel.
“It just makes sense to work this way because everyone is so global, we can’t find times to collectively talk because someone has to get up at 3am,” Katherine said.
“So because of the global nature of our team, then the Teams channel makes the most sense because no matter what, no one misses out. Whereas when we’re talking and trying to have an actual meeting, someone either has to be the sacrificial lamb that gets up at 3am for the call or we end up breaking into two meeting times.
“This way we’re all on the chat (within the Teams channel), we’re all informed at the same time and we know what’s happening.”
The People Advisory Team
It’s a practice used across NZTE’s global workforce. NZTE boasted two more teams on Microsoft Teams in the top 20 of the 67,000 ranked teams in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 benchmarking, by far the most successful government agency in the global benchmarking.
Coming in at No.17 is NZTE’s People Advisory Team which is part of the wider People and Kōrako team.
Phoebe Chandler, Director People Advisory Services, NZTE.
Phoebe Chandler, Director People Advisory Services who leads the People Advisory Team, has team members located across NZ, partnering with people and teams across the globe in different time zones which makes working in Microsoft Teams channels the obvious choice.
Like Katherine, Phoebe was surprised to learn her team had ranked so highly in SWOOP Analytics’ benchmarking because the behaviours of posting in Teams channels, sharing files within those channels, working asynchronously, screen sharing and using cameras when in meetings, are part of the team’s culture, which enables the team to effectively engage with each other.
Phoebe said email is now rarely used within the team and if an email arrives that needs to be shared with the team, it is shared into the Microsoft Teams channel with the click of a button, rather than forwarded in Outlook.
Although she feels her team is only scratching the surface when it comes to capitalising on the capabilities within M365, Phoebe believes her team’s willingness to always be learning from each other continually improves their online behaviours.
“For me, it’s less about the tool and it’s more about the behaviour of the team,” she said.
Goat Island, New Zealand.
“The team wants to do a good job. The team wants to learn more. There is a belief that we’ve made this commitment and we want to use the tool to be more effective.”
A big aspect of improving digital collaboration behaviours within the team is learning from each other. When someone encounters a problem, they will try and find the solution and then share it with the entire team.
Like Katherine’s Beachheads team, the People Advisory Team made the conscious decision to work in Microsoft Teams channels.
The wider People & Kōrako leadership team has always led by example, posting in Teams channels. The People Advisory team made the collective decision to do training with NZTE’s Digital Engagement Specialists, which gave them the initial overview of how they could use the M365 tools.
“We made a commitment as a team to do that together, which was part of our team focus on improving our ways of working,” Phoebe said.
“But we’ve recognised that for us it is ongoing and we need to continue to put effort into building better habits and proactively learning how we can use the tool better.”
Sailing to success
The top-ranked NZTE team, coming in at No.6 from more than 67,000 teams ranked in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 benchmarking is a team established for a specific project.
The SailGP race in San Francisco. Australia won the event, followed by New Zealand, with Great Britain in third place.
The project was to promote New Zealand’s Active Investor Plus visa program at an international sailing competition called SailGP, which finished in San Francisco in May. The visa program encourages investors who align with New Zealand’s values to migrate to Aotearoa (New Zealand).
The end goal of the project was to promote the visa program at a host of hospitality events in San Francisco, bringing together potential investors, New Zealand companies, private sector specialists, NZTE and more.
NZTE’s SailGP team members are also geographically dispersed, working in different time zones. Establishing a team within Microsoft Teams and working in Teams channels was the obvious - and natural - place to work, said Samantha Walsh, NZTE’s International Investment Activation Manager.
Working this way in Teams breaks down hierarchies, giving every person equal say, no matter what their role or where they are geographically located.
“The Teams channel means there’s no ego, we’re all just there to get the project going and humming and happening,” Samantha said.
“There’s also various levels of comfort with technology but we all collaborate on Teams and it’s a really easy place for us to all come together.”
A huge advantage of using Teams over email, Samantha said, is being able to hold different conversations.
Samantha Walsh, International Investment Activation Manager, NZTE.
“Sometimes we would be getting in the weeds about one thing but also needing to touch base about something else, and you could do that and tag someone and say; ‘Anthony, I need your quick response on this’ and put it in the right thread so you could go back to that context,” she said.
Samantha taps into the features on Teams to prioritise work, using the Important or Urgent feature, highlighting or using bold text, and she continually edits documents or posts from agendas and actions from meetings, tagging relevant people into conversations.
She also utilises phone notifications to be able to quickly reply to messages in the Teams channel or chat, which was incredibly helpful with various working hours.
“Teams is what we used to collaborate as that cross-functional team to help us communicate across time zones, share important documents and updates, and keep each other informed as everyone had different roles to play in that activation,” Samantha said.
Attendees at one of NZTE’s SailGP events in San Francisco.
All three NZTE teams identified in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023 M365 & Microsoft Teams benchmarking habitually turn cameras on during Teams meetings, giving them strong scores in SWOOP Analytics for M365’s Camera Confident habit, they are all Email Liberated, it’s second nature for them to screen share during Teams meetings and share files, and their differing time zones mean they are Asynchronous Collaborators.
When Samantha returned home to Connecticut after the SailGP event in San Francisco, her Outlook inbox was flooded with emails. Like most people after a few days away, she felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of emails.
“Even just being away for a few days, my inbox gets insane because it’s so hard to find things, whereas I know if I just go to Teams I’ll be able to find whatever I’m looking for pretty quickly and I can cut through the noise,” Samantha said.
Now the SailGP activation is complete, the team on Teams will begin to slow down once the post event follow ups and communications are complete.
Samantha will “unpin” the team on her Microsoft Teams list, but the team will remain there to resurface for the next event, or to tap into the knowledge when it is next needed.
