"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships" – Michael Jordan
New culture of work
Just like sports, fostering a culture of teamwork is essential for a productive enterprise. Teamwork is about team members working together, building upon each other's expertise, sharing their experiences, expressing their opinions and thereby building culture that helps companies innovate. Hallmark of a highly productive team is culture where members believe in sharing information rather than keeping it to themselves. Again, just like any team sports, team members need to cultivate trust among each other. They need to believe that whole is always greater than a pie. And just like Michael Jordan said, aim at winning the championship, not individual games.
So, what is all this to do with Microsoft Teams? It is:
- The spirit of working in open,
- Sharing by default,
- and Trusting by default.
Emails and Instant Messaging applications have made us all productive by speeding up time is takes to communicate between team members, and now it is time to speed up the reach of information. If we want to speed up our innovation, we need to:
- Change our culture,
- Our habit and
- Our tools of communication.
At the same time:
- We need to start trusting,
- We need to start sharing, and
- We need to start building upon each other's contribution.
Please note, sharing in this context does not mean compromising on information protection or compromising security. Information is the new oil, and it needs to be protected. Context here is sharing within your team members with all the controls and policies appropriately configured for security, privacy and compliance.
If you are using emails and IMs are your primary communication tools, and still are on the fence on adopting Microsoft Teams, this article will walk you through benefits that your team is missing by not making the change. It's a team effort, the team has to be all in to gain the benefits.
Why Conversations rock!
Emails restrict the consumption of information to folks who are chosen by the author of email. Whereas by using Teams conversation, information is available to all existing as well as future members of the team.
Benefits of Teams conversation compared to emails
- Conversations are available to new members who join the team. New members can quickly ramp up on history and context.
- Access to conversation is removed when members leave the team. In case of emails, the information is available in the member's inbox even when they leave team.
- Information is always available in the context of a team. Emails are transactional in nature and do not live within a team's context
- Author of conversation can use @ mentions to notify specific members, channel or a team. This generates a notification for the consumer of the information thereby raising the importance for the consumer. Emails do not have such notification functionality
- Conversations in Teams can be supplemented with pulling information directly from an app (either Microsoft, enterprise or 3rd party app).
- Ability for members to like conversations thereby increasing the significance of the information
Why Teams Chats is better
Teams provide persistent chat between 2 or more people, whereas instant messaging (IM) is transactional in nature where the context is lost when conversation ends
Benefits of Teams Chat compared to IM
- Teams provides persistent chat that preserves conversation context.
- Members in a chat can pull in new members. Since conversation is persisted, new members can view conversation history
- Member can add a Tab that pulls in data from apps
- Files shared in chat are automatically stored in OneDrive. Permissions to the file are automatically updated for members in the chat
- Members in chat can quickly get access to all files shared in the conversation through Files tab
Why meetings in Teams are cooler
Meetings in Teams allows members to be productive by providing access to conversations and recordings before and after the meeting.
Benefits of meetings in Teams compared to Skype For Business
- Meetings scheduled and recorded within a Teams channel is available to new members.
- Plugin-less meeting join from Edge or Chrome browser
- User is alerted if they are speaking on mute. How cool is this!
- Ability for members who are not in invite to join meetings
- Persistent conversations during and after meeting