RealFoundations - Think more with Microsoft Teams

Working out loud in places like Microsoft Teams means thinking more about what you’re going to say.

Having to make the effort to think more before typing is a good thing, and it’s one of the reasons RealFoundations CEO Chris Shaida encourages his 300+ employees to work out loud in digital spaces.

“Whenever someone comes to me saying; ‘I’m worried about what I might say’, then I have a whole speech about; ‘Well, think harder about what you’re going to say’,” Chris said.

“The virtue of working out loud is we have to think more. That’s a good thing. That’s a feature, not a bug. We’re reigniting how we use communication sites.”

It’s this sort of approach to disrupting traditional communication and collaboration that makes RealFoundations a world leader in digital collaboration.

SWOOP Analytics data proves RealFoundations (RF) is at the forefront of digital collaboration, having won multiple SWOOP Awards as one of the world’s most collaborative organisations.

RealFoundations is a provider of management consulting and managed services, solely focused on helping real estate companies around the globe run better. Headquartered in the United States, with offices in Australia, Hong Kong, India, Singapore and the United Kingdom, RF has partnered with more than 450 real estate developers, owners, operators and investors to solve some of real estate’s most complex challenges. It prides itself on being ahead of the pack when it comes to digital technologies to get work done.

In 2016, RF became one of the world’s earliest adopters of Microsoft Teams. Together with Yammer, RF uses Teams as the place to work. The entire organisation was well entrenched in working on Teams and Yammer when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and forced everyone to work from home in March 2020.

Chris Shaida, CEO, Realfoundations.

“I think there was a fair amount of pride that developed at RF in March and April that we were ahead of the game,” Chris said.

Even so, Chris said they were still a long way from making the most of Teams.

“I couldn’t get people to turn video on half the time until March,” he said.

“For the first two years, video was a relatively small part of Teams.”

That soon changed when everyone began working from home. Chris encouraged everyone to turn on their cameras for meetings, telling them he was the ugliest person in the world and he was willing to be on video, so why can’t they?

Combating video fatigue

Chris explains there is no denying that the influx of video meetings has led to video fatigue – which doesn’t come directly from looking at a screen but from the hours of looking into someone else’s eyes. Spurred by recent research from Stanford University and other sources, RealFoundations is actively working to find solutions to combat video fatigue.

In a physical meeting, people look into another human’s eyes less than 10 per cent of the time. Think about a physical meeting. You take notes, you look at the whiteboard, you look out the window, you turn your head when someone opens the door. On a video call, you’re usually looking into someone else’s eyes the entire length of the meeting.

“There are all these ways we’ve evolved as humans to be in each other’s presence politely and be attentive without having to look in the eye because looking in another human’s eye lights up all sorts of neurons,” Chris said.

“When you think about species survival, human eyes are one of the most important things to read if you want to stay alive. So it’s exhausting to look in another human being’s eyes for 45 minutes, our brains are firing like crazy.”

RF has hired a theatre expert to help teach employees how to feel comfortable to get up and move around during video calls, while still listening and being attentive.

“With the idea that if we get better at utilising our full work space, then we’ll be less exhausted and less prone to burnout,” Chris said. “We can still get some of the signals you get as human beings without having to stare into somebody’s eyes for an hour.”

Best practice teams

RF has seven teams in the top 0.15% of SWOOP’s 2021 benchmarking of almost 100,000 teams on Teams.

The top three ranked teams include an internal RF strategy team, an internal client project team and a team working with external clients as guests.

Lindsey Zollner, RF’s Senior Manager, Presence and Asset Support, said while all three teams dramatically differ, the one component they share is their organised approach.

Lindsey Zollner, Senior Manager, Presence and Asset Support, RealFoundations.

“We strive to consistently include a subject line in every thread and an @mentioned colleague or Team channel for expanded visibility,” she said.

“We aim to minimise the orphaned responses (stand-alone replies to conversations that are not posted within the main thread topic), and seasoned collaborators have incorporated the practice of maintaining conversation replies and documents in a single thread about a given topic, which helps preserve the history of completed tasks and decisions.”

RF’s No.1 ranked team, according to SWOOP data based on high productivity measures, is called NextTen – a team to discuss the next 10 years of RF trajectory.

It’s been used by just five RF executives for the past five years and has become a rich repository of notes and knowledge. There is a weekly, 90-minute call in the channel and the team has 100% reciprocity, meaning every post receives a reply, a true sign the team is working collaboratively.

As new projects are established, a new channel is created. Once that project is complete, the channel will “go dark” Chris said, because it has reached the end of its life, but the knowledge remains in the channel and is accessible through various search avenues.

“We’re very big on channel threads versus private chats to move work forward. I also spend 15 minutes a week reminding people what a thread is and honing in on the importance of subject lines and consistency. Orphaned responses get lost in the channel.”

Chris said during the weekly NextTen meeting, executives get work done, rather than just discuss it. The initial discussions are done in the channel so when it’s time to meet over video, it’s time to work with OneNote and other tabs and apps on Teams.

“We believe that some of where we are in 10 years from now is shaped in what we’re doing in the next 10 minutes and the next 10 days, so it’s not just vision,” Chris said of the NextTen team.

“There’s also all sorts of decisions that need to be made by the executive committee in any organisation. There are decisions we can make in a matter of a couple of minutes that it will take others to do in days.

“The subject matter in this team isn’t just long-term, it’s a mix of long and short-term topics. If it was just long-term, it probably wouldn’t have the same vibrancy because it would be a project and it would die.

“Working like this helps us think about the next 10 years every day.”

Which place when?

When RF launched Teams in 2016, it had years of experience using Yammer as the key collaboration tool. With a culture of sharing on Yammer, it took a little direction early on to differentiate when to work in Yammer and when to work in Teams.

Chris said it soon became a simple formula.

“Yammer was like our digital water cooler, the digital bulletin board, the place to go to share ideas about enduring topics,” he said.

“Teams was like our project team room.”

Teams is the place for day-to-day work and Yammer is the place to share knowledge and learn from others’ ideas.

“They have very complementary but distinct uses for us,” Chris said.

Some of the RealFoundations team in the US pre-COVID-19.

“Yammer is the place where any practitioner can go to learn things, share things about knowledge of topics of enduring interest to us as a firm.

“Teams is where we go to do shared work, or share goals, with defined teammates and we go back and forth all the time.”

People may be in and out of Yammer throughout the work day, whereas they’ll spend most of their day working in Teams. As for email, that may take up a minute or two a day.

Measuring collaboration with SWOOP Analytics

With Yammer and Teams as the catchall for knowledge and collaboration at RealFoundations, how can they ensure the right people are contributing the right knowledge, and no pieces of the puzzle are being left out?

That’s where SWOOP comes into RF’s story.

Right from the start, Chris wanted to measure engagement on Yammer and Teams. As a result, RealFoundations was one of SWOOP’s early customers for SWOOP for Yammer and SWOOP for Teams.

Twice a year, RealFoundations uses SWOOP to benchmark its employees. It’s an opportunity to see how each staff member is contributing, collaborating and sharing their knowledge with the rest of the organisation on Microsoft Teams and Yammer.

If, for example, a senior leader is identified as an “Observer” by SWOOP, based on their online behaviours on Teams and Yammer, they can be helped to improve their collaboration.

“We bake that into the performance review process,” Chris said.

“People see where they stand, they see their persona. It is not a negative thing. The measurement is important and we’ve been tracking the expansion of that measurement beyond Yammer into Teams and through the other parts of Microsoft 365.”