Tips for Increasing Microsoft Teams Adoption

After Skype for Business’s dreadful-to-some retirement, Microsoft Teams chirped its way right into our lives and introduced a brand-new way of meeting our remote work needs. It’s a modern communication and collaboration hub for teamwork and thread-based conversations. Although a large number of end-users relied on the messaging and communications features that Skype provides, Teams is much more than a rebranded, exciting version of Skype for Business. A Skype-to-Teams project may have been on the roadmap already, and it was hurried along. Their reliance and familiarity with Skype is a major reason that people find it difficult to come to terms with Microsoft Teams adoption.

The question remains, what do we do to Increase Microsoft Teams Adoption? I have a few tips for you to take into account to while working on the adoption of teams in your company.

Having a Microsoft Teams Adoption Strategy in Place

An organization should always proceed with Microsoft Teams Adoption in stages, workload by workload. The more the employees start using Teams, the easier it will be to reach maximum adoption. Nonetheless, it’s essential to have a Microsoft Teams Adoption strategy in place for how to get a larger number of users on board to ensure successful adoption.

Empower Your Champions

Champions are essential to spread awareness, adoption and educate other employees in your company. A champion’s a person who is generally inspired by helping others and is fascinated by new technology. This person helps other employees use it in alignment with your best practices. Depending on the size of your company, you can turn this into a formal part of the person's role, but more often than not, employees take on this role themselves because of their motivation to help others.

Highlight Productivity

Microsoft Teams is specifically designed to cut down on the time that employees spend rummaging from task to task, looking for files, and looping the right people in. Your In-house IT teams can highlight productivity advantages that they would be able to benefit from by adopting Microsoft Teams.

Providing Options During Your Microsoft Teams Adoption Phase

Every organization, regardless of its industry, size or culture, follows the technology adoption life cycle. Don’t think that you can skip it because you can’t. Ensure that you can facilitate to the different categories of adopters while deployment:

Innovators

Provide innovators access to Microsoft Teams early on and let them make mistakes. They shouldn’t really mind as long as they can use the tool, and they typically try to work out any kinks themselves. This will do half of your job for you.

Early Adopters

Let the Early Adopters use Teams but keep in mind that they may need a little more support in terms of training and understanding what the tool can be used for. You want to get the early adopters on board since you can use them to help promote Microsoft Teams to the early majority and late majority. Evidently, the innovators in your organization will happily use any tool, but if you can show value with the early adopters you have a greater chance for success with employee engagement.

Early Majority

This type requires most of your effort. This is where you need to have a plan and stay organized. Getting executives involved to explain the ‘why’ of Microsoft Teams will prove to be incredibly useful here. Basically, if you can get the early majority on board, great, but this group will need quite some convincing around the new ways of working that Teams offers.

Late Majority

In most cases, the largest and most challenging group of users in your company will consist of the late majority. You can probably repurpose a lot of content developed in the early majority group, but this group will require the most in terms of time, training, guidance and support.

Laggards

You have two ways to approach this set of people and which way you choose depends on your strategy. In some organizations you simply mandate that Teams is to be used and force the laggards to switch tools. It’s not the most productive way, but it is definitely effective. A better approach, however, is to offer a path from the current work tools into Microsoft Teams and provide some time for the laggards to adjust to the transition.

5 Tips for Successfully Increasing Microsoft Teams Adoption

Let’s get right into it, shall we?

Simplify Teams

Work with your Team owners. Find out what works well and what does not in their existing Teams to analyze where to focus your efforts. Help Team owners identify the tasks in their Team and guide them to create channels that reinforce those tasks. This will provide excellent conditions for adoption because it reflects how a team would work in the physical world on a project. This will also help identify scenarios and work processes that are recurring and take up most of their time. Build the Team around those processes.

Encourage People who are Avoiding the Use of Teams to Use it

For some employees, the pandemic was not the best time to learn how to use new tools to do their job. The unfamiliarity drives your employees back to the way they have always done things because it’s comfortable. Get in touch with the ones who are vocal about their difficulties with Microsoft Teams and hear them out. Listen closely and identify the common stressors and complaints people have about using Teams. This will help you focus your energy on sharing relevant skills and clarifying why and how to use the various features of Teams.

Use @Mentions

Using @mentions in a message enables the message to appear in the Activity Feed for the person, tag group, channel or Team mentioned. Then one can scroll through the messages mentioning them from one location in the Teams app. This reduces the effort they’d have to make to catch up with messages they have missed.

Run Adoption Campaigns

Create Adoption campaigns that address the common scenarios. If you are trying to build a collaborative team culture, try these campaigns:

Use Teams and OneDrive together

File management in Teams might cause a hassle because it can sometimes be really confusing. There are a few places where you can upload attachments to a conversation. When the conversation is in the Teams Chat app, files shared or uploaded to a conversation are stored in OneDrive.

Things You Should Definitely Avoid Trying to Speed Microsoft Teams Adoption

You can’t control it every step of the way, okay? Make peace with that because trying to rush it will get you nowhere but in a messy gravy. Here are a few things that are a definite no in your process of Microsoft Teams Adoption.

Dump Microsoft Teams on Your Team Out of Nowhere

Making Microsoft Teams suddenly appear one day when users log into their computers is literally the worst way to deploy it. This may seem obvious, but countless organizations rolled it out this way. This may work for a small and targeted piece of software but for something as complex and powerful as Microsoft Teams, it just doesn’t. Don’t do it, okay?

Put them on the Bicycle without Training Wheels

Like with all new tools, your Microsoft Teams users need training. It’s even more effective to have customized user training for your organization. Although this may be a bit too expensive, so a combination of training for Microsoft Teams benefits as well as customized training for specific capabilities that you have deployed can be a good way to go. You can always hire a trusted Microsoft Gold Partner to get the job done for you.

If you haven’t already, get a second opinion on Microsoft Teams Consulting and deploy Teams at your organization for smoother collaboration in your workforce. All you need to do to get in touch with us is book a cloud strategy call today!