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How to Take Microsoft Teams Adoption from Good to Great

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If you’ve read one of our earlier blog posts then by now you’ve probably got some executive buy-in, rolled Microsoft Teams out, and have been steadily gaining traction and training your end users. Perhaps roughly half your team has started using Microsoft Teams and moved away from legacy platforms. But how do you take this “okay” adoption rate and accelerate that to a great pace of adoption?

In this article, we’re going to go over three simple ways to boost your adoption from “okay” to fantastic!

microsoft teams

Tip 1: Create a Teams-First Mentality

First, you want to educate the people you’re working with on how best to start their day with Microsoft Teams. Here are a few ideas:

  1. Try to push forward the idea of making a post in Teams 20min before your weekly call that details what everyone’s been working on for the past week. That way, you might be able to take your call from 30min to 5min just by having everyone be more organized.
  2. Instead of having to pass an Excel document back and forth via email, put an Excel tab in Teams and encourage working on documents directly from there.
  3. Speaking of email, Microsoft Teams has a great way to share email messages. You used to have to go to Teams, find the channel, copy the link and then forward the email address to that channel, but now there’s a built-in way to share an email directly to Teams from Outlook.

The idea here is to find any excuse to make Microsoft Teams the first place you’re collaborating off the bat. These and other quality of life examples should help draw employees in and showcase just how efficient Teams can be.

Looking for a way to get your Teams adoption from good to great? This post should help: Click To Tweet

Tip 2: Give Props to Early Adopters

A little praise can go a long way. That’s why it’s vital to recognize early adopters and champions for getting people inside. This could be as simple as a peer to peer plan where you create a channel specifically for champions and post daily/weekly highlights of ways early adopters and champions are positively impacting the Teams adoption effort.

Unsure who your most dedicated Microsoft Teams users are? Simply look at your most popular Teams and see who posts the most. Invite these people to the channel, note their Teams activity, and give them a shout-out. Better yet, there are third-party apps for giving kudos that you can introduce directly into Teams. For instance, Disco allows you to put together badges and give kudos to people. This gamifies the entire process to see who can get the most points by using and spreading knowledge about Teams.

microsoft teams

Tip 3: Use Microsoft Teams for Large Meetings

Lastly, it’s important for staff and people managers to leverage Teams as much as possible for company-wide and organization-wide broadcasts. I’ve seen people use Teams for chats before switching to a third-party tool to do a town hall without realizing that Teams has the ability to host these live events out of the box as well.

Do your best to get those larger group meetings into Teams as opposed to defaulting to an established process. This lets the company know that Microsoft Teams is going to be your primary collaboration platform. The less they see other brands in that collaboration process, the more likely they’ll think “Teams-first. Teams is how we work together now.”

Reminder: 250 is the standard upper limit for a teams meeting. Considering using Teams live events if you need a larger broadcast!

Bonus

Help users learn where to work most efficiently. There are situations where Teams might not be the answer. Whether you have a governance plan or information architecture policy or you work with your management or executive team, figure out what content you want to have in Teams and if there’s any content you want to stay in a static SharePoint site or another app like Yammer.

microsoft teams

What’s important here is to make sure you publicize that methodology and how you want people to access those tools. Advertise it somewhere everyone has access, refer to it, make sure people are following it, and gently guide them to the right location if they mess up and post to the wrong spot.

Finally, if you want to create an environment that really helps focus people and gets them to the correct location, look into investing into a third-party application like AvePoint’s Cloud Governance software. Cloud Governance allows you to build a questionnaire that asks the user how they want to work and who needs to be involved, and automatically provisions things such as whether it’s the correct SharePoint site or Team, if it’s an internal or private Team, and more. That kind of software is going to allow you to help end users make the right decision so they don’t get frustrated after getting told multiple times that they’re using the wrong asset.


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Sam Valme
Sam Valme
Sam Valme is Senior Director of Partner Experience at AvePoint, working out of our Arlington, Virginia office.

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