Taming Teams (Microsoft Teams)
Microsoft Teams is the fastest growing collaboration tool Microsoft has ever released. There’s no question that the idea of a shared collaborative space for teams to get work done is resonating. In the midst of the excitement, “Teams overload” is a common complaint. As someone working with customers on their adoption of Teams, I hear things like:
I won’t pretend that my tips below will bring you to Teams Nirvana. It’s an adjustment to move from a world where you only have one chaos to tame (email) into three or more feeds. The good news is, there ARE strategies that help. More importantly, when you do find your groove with what I affectionately call the Holy Trinity of O365 (Outlook, Teams, and Yammer), you can be more focused and productive than ever.
Here’s my Path to Teams Enlightenment:
You CAN leave a Team. It’s OK.
Just because someone adds you to a Team, doesn’t mean you have to stay in it. If you won’t be contributing, and don’t want to receive notifications, then leave it. If you still want notifications, hide the group so you don’t see it.
Don’t channel surf. Own your UX.
Whether or not you’re “that guy” that actually uses the favourite channels feature on your TV, get that guy’s mojo into your Teams client. Hide the ones you don’t want to see or get notifications for. Your left navigation should be productive for YOU.
Note: only “Follow” a channel if you want a notification for EVERY post in the channel. I wouldn’t do this except for nearly-dead channels where you want to know if anyone bothers to post there.
Get your priorities in order.
Order your teams in your left nav, with the most used / critical ones at the top. If you’re not posting in a Team at least once a week, why are you letting it clutter up your navigation? Hide the team and collapse the rest. If they need you, they’ll mention you.
Turn down notifications until it feels good.
Now set your notifications so that you only get email for mentions of YOU. The rest of the notifications can probably be left to “banner” (toast) or feed only. Notifications in apps like Facebook, Twitter, Teams, or Yammer are truly designed for one purpose: “Hey, remember me?! This app that was going to change your world?!” More than what it takes to remind you that you should be spending more time in that app is overkill.
(Caveat: It’d be really nice if we had an option for a special notification if someone in my management chain @mentions or chats me. I know where the bread & butter comes from. You CAN put your manager or anyone into Priority Access in the Privacy settings, which lets you get notifications from then even in Do Not Disturb mode.)
(Update to caveat: They listened to me! (sort of) You can now be notified if selected People come online / available.)
With this set up, you can now triage your team conversations more effectively. Type “/mentions” in the command bar to see all the places you’ve been called out. Remove that filter from your feed to find mentions of channels or teams that you’re showing. Then, walk through your teams in priority order.
And here comes the Marie Kondo moment: Don’t sweat “keeping up” with the rest. This is not email. You don’t have to read everything. Working in a more transparent way means someone else is paying more attention to the stuff that you’ve hidden, and they can @mention you if your input is needed. And speaking of @mentions…
Part of what’s contributing to Teams Overload is that we’ve all discovered the way to attract attention: that would be “@channel” or worse yet… “@team”. These send notifications to lots of people, and because everyone wants to look responsive to their notifications, you get faster answers. The problem is, just like email spam, it works for YOU, but not so much for everyone else.
Here’s an easy to remember rule set for @mentions that we’ve adopted in our teams, and it seems to be working so far. When everyone follows the Path laid out above, this works particularly well:
The 3 C@mmandments of @Mentions
Especially when getting started, every post will likely have a mention. But what you mention will vary:
- @mention a person to get a reply from that person (you may get a response from someone else first, which is cool too)
2. @channel mention when you need an answer from ANYONE in that channel
3. @team mention ONLY when you need an action/answer from EVERYONE in the team
Over time, we’d expect to see the need to @mention drop off as people just naturally spend more of their time in Teams.
Finding Stuff
Two quick tips on finding stuff in the ever-flowing river that is Teams:
- Use the filters! There’s some amazing options under that funnel icon. You can search for “windows” but narrow it down to the Operations channel in the M365 Rollout Team last November, posted by Mary. Oh, and it mentioned me and had that spreadsheet attached…
- Of course, if you remember that much about a thread, it’s probably something you should’ve Saved. Yes, saved. It’s that little bookmark icon on every post next to the “Like” button. It’s very handy when on mobile to save something for taking action when you get back to the office, but it’s great for re-finding anything. You can find all your saved posts from the menu that appears when you click your face in the top right.
Is it a new team? Or a new channel?
I could’ve started with this more basic question that, if asked more often, would vastly reduce your noise. If 90% of the membership of two teams is the same, why do you have two teams, and not just different channels in one team? If you’re trying to “hide” your activity from a small handful of people (oh, I don’t know… a manager?) then consider carefully how your culture is impacting your productivity. This is a topic for many separate posts, but I’d encourage you to review Swoop Analytic’s Teams Benchmarking Report, which talks in detail about what makes for successful Teams, including size.
If any of this helps, please chime in below. Also, check out https://aka.ms/TeamsToolkit for help with all your Teams rollout and adoption needs.
Most of my better blog posts come from a prompting from a friend, and this is one of those. Thanks to @PilarOrti of @VirtualTeamw0rk for the nudge!
