RealFoundations – Breaking the silos between service providers and clients
Gone are the days when it was an “us” and “them” relationship between service providers and clients.
Real estate management consulting and managed services firm RealFoundations has broken the divide by inviting clients to work together as a true team in Microsoft 365, primarily via Microsoft Teams. Engaging this way has built trust – quickly - and significantly increased the speed with which work is performed and delivered.
When RealFoundations begins working with a client, it invites the client into Microsoft Teams and establishes a team. Alternatively, the Team can be established in the client’s tenant but once the client sees the way RealFoundations works in Teams, they usually opt to join RealFoundations’ tenant.
Once a team is established on Teams, work is done in Teams channels where every chat, file, shared document, calendar, scheduled meeting and more can be accessed by every person, whether it’s the client or someone from the RealFoundations team.
Emily Fuller, Senior Manager - Application Support Services, RealFoundations.
“We communicate with our clients in real time via Teams, just like we do with our own team members,” said Emily Fuller, Senior Manager, Application Support Services, RealFoundations.
“We use Teams channels to engage regularly with clients. If I have a quick question for one of the key stakeholders from a client account, I don’t have to go over to Outlook and draft an email. I can easily tag them in a threaded conversation, or I can send them a chat.
“And if we’re communicating in chat and recognise we’d benefit from a call, I can call them directly from that screen with a single click of a button – seamless!”
There’s no longer a need to stop work in one digital environment to pick up the phone to make a call or send an email asking for a time to meet, because in Teams there is clear transparency into a colleague or client’s availability. Emily also points out that 30-minute meetings in the past are now often reduced to five-minute meetings when working out loud in Teams because information is already accessible to all stakeholders.
“Collaborating in Teams makes communicating so much faster, which ultimately leads to improvements in the quality and efficiency of our delivery,” said Emily, whose team supports property management and accounting technology applications across RealFoundations’ client base.
“The way we interact in Teams, both with our clients and with our client-serving practitioners, really eliminates the potential for issues that would result from delays in communication. Lack of responsiveness is not a complaint we receive because our clients are versed in collaborating with us in this manner, and us with them.
“Teams has simply streamlined the communication process that may hold others back from completing work and responding to questions in a timely fashion.”
SWOOP data showing RealFoundations’ Enterprise User Activity over the past three months.
Building trust by connecting remotely
Perhaps even more importantly than smooth communication is the personal connection built using the M365 suite – within RealFoundations and with clients whom, Emily says, sometimes feel more like team members than customers.
There are at least four Application Support practitioners who report to Emily, whom she has never met face-to-face. While she understands the importance of in-person interaction, Emily feels she has as strong a relationship - if not stronger - with these four people she’s never met in person, as she does with colleagues whom she previously shared an office with prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s because working collaboratively on M365 is not just about working next to someone but working with them on every aspect of delivery.
“Even though the whole Teams ecosystem is relatively new to most companies, there is a very real personal connection you’re able to build within your group, regardless of the virtual aspect,” Emily said.
“From a teammate experience, and the interpersonal relationship experience, I think the Teams environment has really fostered that ‘work-together’ mentality because it’s not just a phone call or an email, it takes some of the formality of scheduling a call or having to send a perfectly drafted and punctuated email, out of the equation.”
One way Emily believes using Microsoft Teams channels and chat has helped build trust quickly with clients is the way communication has become informal, as if you’re talking with your colleague sitting next to you rather than a client in another company.
“Chat messages and threaded conversations have removed the stigma of business communication which enables us to focus more on the decisions that needs to be made or the outcomes we’re working towards, without worrying much about the formalities associated with email messages,” she said.
“No one is ever going to judge a chat the way that they may infer specific tone from an email message. And the emoji and GIF options help lighten the mood, as needed.”
Similarly, working together in Teams means everyone, and everything, is more accessible because you can see where people are, when they’re available, what everyone is working on and how work is progressing.
“The accessibility of another individual via Teams just makes collaborating smoother and more efficient,” Emily said.
“We are no longer required to plan a formal communication event to contact one another. Clients and colleagues can see my status as available and reach out with: ‘Hey do you have five minutes?’ and my response is either ‘I’m sorry, I don’t right now but I can call you in an hour’ or ‘sure thing, let’s hop on a meeting’.
“Not only does Teams enable accessibility to individuals, we also gain more transparent access to knowledge, documentation, calendars, ‘in-progress’ work product, and even learn more about an individual’s personality.”
Emily has found you can learn a lot about someone’s personality by the way they interact in Teams channels. Do they use emojis or GIFs? Are their communications formal or casual?
Looking through a client’s messages in Teams channels often gives Emily an insight into their personality – are they relaxed, are they organised, do they need extra support, are they comfortable using Teams?
“We’ve also seen clients’ personalities in Teams change. At first, they may be very careful in the way they interact, apprehensive a bit to lose the formalities. And then six months later you can tell this is a truly collaborative and safe relationship by the comfort they display in messaging,” Emily said.
“Formality is important, but in day-to-day collaboration, if you focus too much on how proper everything needs to be, you really miss out on the ability to quickly get to the root of an issue and devise a plan for resolution.
“For us, Teams has enabled us to work very collaboratively across distance (spanning multiple time zones and geographic locations) and maintain our personalities. It’s shifted the mindset around those things where if I want to have a quick chat, I can have a quick chat. If I want to have a formal communication, I can absolutely do that too.”
Emily points out that even if the whole team is in the office, nobody walks around saying; “Greetings, I hope my communication finds you well” and nobody ever ends a real-life conversation with “regards”.
Dropping the formalities by working in Teams saves huge amounts of time, Emily says, and has developed stronger relationships with clients and colleagues alike.
Collaboration champions
RealFoundations’ RFMS (RF Managed Services) department, of which Emily is a member, is made up of 35 US-based employees responsible for delivering ongoing services spanning Accounting, Lease, Data, Automation, Application Support and Modern Workplace Services to clients across all real estate sectors. It was one of the top three organisations ranked in SWOOP Analytics’ 2022 M365 benchmarking of 3,773 departments for medium-sized departments – those with between 20 and 50 members.
A screenshot of Microsoft Teams usage from SWOOP Analytics for RealFoundations’ RFMS for the past three months.
Lindsey Zollner, Senior Manager, Presence and Asset Support, RealFoundations.
In ranking departments in SWOOP’s analysis, all seven of SWOOP’s Collaboration Habits - Email Liberated, Asynchronous Collaborator, Chat Liberated, File Sharer, Community Contributor, Screen Sharer and Camera Confident – are combined to give an overall collaboration score for every member of the department, which is then compared with the 3,773 departments benchmarked in the 2022 report.
Lindsey Zollner, Senior Manager, Presence and Asset Support at RealFoundations polled a sample of service line leaders in RFMS asking them to describe their collaborative behaviours in M365 as they relate to SWOOP’s Seven Collaboration Habits.
Email Liberated - Shows how good you are at collaborating in Teams Channels and Yammer compared with sending emails.
It’s estimated 95% of RealFoundations’ Application Support delivery communication is performed in M365 and its applications (Teams, Planner, SharePoint, OneDrive, etc). Defined Microsoft Teams are created, and threaded conversations are carried out in designated channels to support efficient and fast decision making, both with internal RealFoundations-only teams and teams where external clients are invited to join to collaborate. Using Teams rather than email in Outlook brings transparency and simplifies the client onboarding process.
Every function within Teams is leveraged across RealFoundations; from organised, threaded conversations, meeting polls, tasks and planners, file sharing and editing, recorded meetings with transcriptions, lists for data capture, OneNote notebooks, whiteboards and more.
Elimination of email reliance creates flexibility for staff. “If a practitioner needs to step away for an appointment, they don’t return to a slew of unread emails that require application of logic to locate the latest update – everything exists in a historical, threaded conversation,” Lindsey said.
Asynchronous Collaborator - Shows how good you are at collaborating in Teams channels and Yammer (asynchronous) compared with collaborating in Teams meetings/calls (synchronous).
Because clients are also invited into RealFoundations’ M365 Teams as guests, it means everyone can work together on any piece of work or file, all in their own time. Collaborative revisions to documentation allow multiple practitioners and/or clients to review and modify files in real time or asynchronously.
When decisions are made by clients, all practitioners are notified with @mentions, and both clients and practitioners alike can easily refer back to the communication stream in the future, if necessary.
Chat Liberated - Shows how good you are at collaborating in Teams channels and Yammer compared with collaborating in chat.
The majority of work conversations happen in Teams channels, by design, for transparency and ease of transition to the way work is delivered.
Every employee at RealFoundations has a bi-annual review, and part of that review looks at their collaboration habits, using data from SWOOP for Yammer and SWOOP for Microsoft Teams. The SWOOP dashboards also identify the most collaborative teams, departments and individuals across the firm. Everyone knows posting in Teams channels and Yammer boosts their personal collaboration habits and their SWOOP persona, which is an incentive to work out loud in Teams channels and Yammer, contributing to the competitive nature of the employees.
File Sharer - Shows how good you are at working with files on SharePoint (shared by default) compared with OneDrive (private by default).
All documentation and deliverables are stored in SharePoint and accessible via Teams, which benefits both RealFoundations’ clients and client-serving practitioners. With version history enabled, there is no longer a requirement to create multiple versions of the same document when revisions are applied – every version and modification exists in the original file.
File sharing also means clients can access any document in the Teams channel, giving them the speed and independence to access every piece of work without the requirement of emailing a practitioner to request a file.
Time saving is another huge benefit of file sharing on SharePoint via Teams. If a client wants a few words changed in a document, they can go to the channel, locate the file, and revise immediately without having to share multiple versions via email.
Community Collaborator - Shows how good you are at balancing participation in Yammer communities with working in Teams.
At RealFoundations, Yammer is the place to share information across the entire enterprise, ask a question, get real-time support and generally build a culture of collaboration.
Yammer notifications are elevated to Teams when the Announcement or @mention functions are used.
“RealFoundations employees share and consume a great deal of real estate and related technology information from Yammer communities,” Lindsey said. “Yammer is often a better avenue than Teams to broadcast information to an extended community and promote social collaboration to a larger audience.”
As a professional services firm, RealFoundations staff attends about 50 real estate conferences every year. They create a Yammer community for each conference which enables RealFoundations practitioners share information, capture knowledge, and expand the reach to the rest of the organisation.
Screen Sharer - Shows how good you are at sharing a screen during Teams meetings/calls.
Screen sharing is one of the best ways to work together and troubleshoot in real time. One of the benefits of working in Microsoft Teams is the ability to immediately call and screen share with a colleague or client to resolve an issue or collaborate on a deliverable.
“Sharing the screen helps keep everyone's attention on the topics being discussed with the ability to access and display files as examples to support issue resolution or forward movement,” Lindsey said.
RFMS team’s screen sharing data from SWOOP Analytics for the past three months.
Camera Confident - Shows how good you are at turning on a camera during Teams meetings/calls.
Camera ON is a cultural expectation and setting default for all users at RealFoundations and has been an active part of its enterprise collaboration practice for the past decade.
“Seeing someone's reaction to a comment can be a great indicator to knowing if you need to elaborate more, pause and wait for response, or continue moving on when the consensus is in agreement,” Lindsey said. “While not all clients are comfortable using cameras at first, most will eventually do so upon recognising that video capabilities are the standard for RealFoundations.”
Learn more about how knowledge is harvested at RealFoundations and why email is where knowledge goes to die, get expert advice from RealFoundations on how to write a great post and how working out loud in places like Microsoft Teams means thinking more about what you’re going to say.
