In my last blog post, I discussed common working styles with Teams and why it is important to understand which category your colleagues fall into. In this post, I will point out some tips and tricks to save time and promote collaboration in Microsoft Teams.
Use Microsoft Teams features to minimize distractions
Determining one’s signal-to-noise ratio is pivotal to user engagement. It’s easy to drown in a sea of notifications, interruptions, and distractions. With Teams, your users can easily manage these deterrents.
The key is to first determine a suitable signal-to-noise ratio with “signal” being the things you and your team should care about. “Noise” includes the things that get in the way of the things you care about. The whole goal of Teams is employee collaboration and productivity.
If Teams is not making you more productive, consider leveraging the following Teams features:
- Subject Headers
- Add subject headers to your conversations to reduce clutter
- Mentions
- Use @mentions to call attention to your message in conversations. This directs the message to the person or group of people you intended and lets them know their attention is needed.
- Theme
- Change your theme based on how you prefer to see things (dark, high contrast, etc.).
- Notifications
- They keep you current with what’s happening in your Teams. Turn them on, turn them off, choose how and when to be notified.
- Follow
- “Followed” channels show up in the activity feed and notifications. Only follow channels relevant to you or your immediate projects to keep your activity feed manageable and minimize “noise.”
Support end-users with valuable, time-saving tips
There’s no right or wrong way to use Teams. But there are some ideas and concepts that can help make end-users more productive, more quickly.
- Reference the Getting Started in Teams in the General tab
- When an issue/question is resolved, @mention the entire group for closure and visibility
- Learn the five keyboard shortcuts
- Check out these “hacks”
- Record meetings and post the Stream video back to the Teams channel
Create a Communication Site
Using Teams channels to share information is a great start. These items can be pushed out to more people and promoted throughout the organization.
I recently co-presented a webinar with my colleague, Joel Oleson, where we discussed Teams migration, consolidation, extensibility, and how to promote successful user adoption. A recording of our Build Your Modern Workplace Hub with Microsoft Teams can be found here.
