Working Better Together: How to Maximise Your Microsoft Teams Adoption

Microsoft Teams is revolutionising the way organisations work together. These best practice tips will enable you to maximise your Microsoft Teams adoption. Achieve better teamwork, enhance productivity, and deliver brilliant services to your end users.

The world of work has changed irreversibly in 2020. Global events have prompted a massive shift towards remote working, and many organisations will be evaluating their need for maintaining brick and mortar operating locations as their people continue to maintain productivity whilst working from remote locations.

The move to a new hybrid working model that combines remote and office-based working will be driven by a number of factors, not least people becoming accustomed to the lack of commuting and seeing more of their family. Many will not want to transition back to their old ways of working any time soon.

Microsoft Teams usage has increased massively over the past few months. However, although Microsoft Teams has all the communication and collaboration functionality an organisation could ever want, it’s not enough for IT teams to simply deploy the software and leave their people to it.

In order to maximise your Microsoft Teams adoption and ensure optimal productivity throughout your organisation, you should work to embed the software as part of your working culture. There are three complementary exercises you should undertake to achieve this: plan effectively; understand your users; and assist in adoption and training.

Plan Effectively

At Six Degrees we recommend beginning your Microsoft Teams adoption journey with a planning workshop. When run correctly, a Teams Readiness Assessment can minimise the uncertainty, risk and time taken when adopting Microsoft Teams.

These sessions enable your organisation to plan effectively, avoid common mistakes, and design an effective user adoption process to ensure your Microsoft Teams deployment brings all the benefits of modern teamwork without unnecessary noise and disruption. ​

The planning workshop typically consists of three phases:

• Stage one – understand your requirement​
• Stage two – discover and document your existing environment​
• Stage three – initial deployment planning​

All stages have technical and human elements, which are both key to ​developing a thorough understanding of your existing environment and your ​organisational aspirations.

Understand Your Users

In order to deliver a brilliant user experience (UX), it’s imperative to understand the needs of the different types of users within your organisation. By using learnings from the planning workshop, combined with feedback from users within proof of concept groups, you can ensure you structure your Teams deployment properly.

Six key elements we have found that enable organisations to deliver brilliant UX are:

• Set Teams policies which allow enough freedom
• Provide the best suited devices to meet users’ needs
• Equip meeting rooms with Teams devices
• Provide the right amount of training
• Align your rollout with an agile working policy
• Use Microsoft Intune or another mobile device management app to enable the use of the Teams Mobile App

Assist in Adoption and Training

It’s important to remember that training users is as important now as it’s ever been, but potentially for different reasons. In days gone by, the IT literacy of some users was very low. Whilst that may still be the case with some users, in general peoples’ IT literacy has increased considerably. ​

Most people have a smartphone, tablet and/or laptop at home, and people are generally more familiar with the process of downloading and interacting with an app. With this in mind, you could think about approaching a Teams rollout differently: ​

• Use the device vendors to source some trial headsets and handsets to run a device bar​
• Include some key users in the planning workshop sessions to get super user buy-in from the start​
• Link to Microsoft-produced end user training videos, or produce your own​
• Slowly release the functionality of Teams one module at a time​
• Train out usage etiquette instead of basic functionality

Maximise Your Microsoft Teams Adoption

Microsoft Teams has all the functionality your organisation needs to achieve better teamwork, enhance productivity, and deliver brilliant services to your end users.

Six Degrees offers a Microsoft Teams Readiness Assessment to help you enhance productivity across your organisation. The Readiness Assessment has been designed to minimise the uncertainty, risk and time taken when adopting Microsoft Teams.

Does your organisation need to upscale its remote working capabilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and developing UK Government guidance? Six Degrees will deploy Microsoft Teams for your organisation within 48 hours of confirmed order with no ongoing commitment, regardless of scale or geographic spread.

Integration between Microsoft Teams and Six Degrees solutions will help you automate workflows, integrate voice and video calling, enhance meeting experiences, improve collaboration and help you to provide a modern, accessible service that enables your people to be brilliant at what they do. Contact us to learn more.