Who remembers the days when Microsoft Teams was a product that businesses required product adoption with?  

We are only talking but a few years ago, when the world was slowly learning about this thing called Teams, people would ask 

“ It’s a meeting space right? ”

Ah… those good old days when months were taken to carefully create a strategy on how to educate and communicate with people on the product, and how it would make life easier for them. Working out the impact that the product would have on the people, and understanding how best to introduce this new collaborative hub to varying generations of people in the organisation. Gosh, in those days, we were still explaining that ‘the cloud’ wasn’t a physical cloud in the sky, but a “fancier data centre of servers that’s bigger and better than the basement server rooms in the building”   

Mind you, I remember working on adoption plans for the very first beta product that Teams was, and like most Beta products, it was very limited in functionality, and rolling this out in the organisation was a barrel of laughs!  

Frantically locking down the security settings because sensitive data was accidentally shared by a PA to the whole company, or restricting groups because the CEO was now emailing confidential information to a group named ‘senior team’ rather than his distribution list. Even the fast tracking of Windows10 updates to reduce some of the major user errors that Teams created back then was its own fun challenge. But it’s fair to say these are all fun stories of the past; the Teams product has changed so much over the past 5 years or so. 

The uptake and evolution of Teams, is mainly thanks to the C word! 

Yep, I said it and I’m talking about it yet again🙄. But it’s true, since the world was shut away in their homes thanks to a nasty virus and employees found the freedom to act like an office version of a minotaur ‘top dressed for work, bottom part still in PJs’ (yes you know very well you’ve done that at some point in the last 2 years). Every organisation was thrusted into using Microsoft Teams like a bullet from a gun, living online, chatting to colleagues with only initials as their faces (put your cameras on people!). How that adoption curve grew over a noticeably short period is something less than impressive.  

Now … since every organisation out there has been stiff armed into switching Microsoft Teams on without much thought into best practice or how to ensure people are using the functionality correctly and fully, I have but one question for you. Do you think businesses still need change functions to help them adopt this product? If your answer to this is no, then in some ways, I’d agree that you are correct.  

However, in other ways I’m sorry to say but you’re wrong. People need help more than ever with Teams these days, but it’s not like the adoption needs of 2019. Now we are facing an even more interesting phase in thebusiness change world… the phase of reinforcement!  

What is reinforcement?  

Us in the Business Change Management world talk reinforcement all the time, and whilst it usually happens towards the end of a change strategy, we would always be thinking about reinforcement planning from the very start.  Reinforcement management is ‘what helps make the change truly stick’. It’s about making the product ‘such a business lifeline for colleagues’ that the more they use it, the more they need it, leading to the snowball effect that has colleagues begging for more.  

The main pain points that the corporate world face now with full throttle introduction of Teams are: 

Inconsistent use of the Teams across departments

How sales are using the tool is hugely different to the legal team. Have you created good team site creation plans that incorporate everyone in the right engagement channels? 

Lack of functionality use

Are your colleagues just using it as an instant messaging and conference tool? What about the plug ins, task management, integrations into other products?   

Best practice guidance

Have you put good guidance into the use of tool? Should you allow the colleagues to be using Gifs or entirely switching some functionalities off? What language style should your colleagues be using? And should behaviours be restricted into set channels i.e. social chat in a social channel? 

Lack of mobility and accessibility functionality

Do colleagues know how to use all the options to make this truly accessible for all? Quick help with how to download and use on a phone would really go a long way. 

Using Teams in a balanced healthy way

Are you encouraging your colleagues to ensure their products are switched to ‘quiet’ out of office hours, so they remain in a good work life balance? 

Enhanced silos and lack of interaction between other departments and teams

Let’s face it, having interactions with other departments whilst not always work related, are truly important for mental and social wellbeing. Ensuring that you encourage that interaction through Teams or at least integrations  of other tools, such as Yammer into a team site is paramount to this.  

Training materials

The danger here is that there is so much open-source training on the web now that it can be quite conflicting for colleagues if your tenant restricts specific settings. Having company specific training with key messaging and best practice behaviours through the training is priceless, not to mention frequent updates relating to new releases in the product. You can never over communicate this. 

Lack of Document Management strategy

And whilst this isn’t specific to reinforcement, we can’t stress this importance enough. When colleagues are giving freedom to create sites and channels as they choose, this (even private channels) creates a huge mess behind the scenes for IT teams to clean up. I’d recommend that you consider an automation tool like Reflekt | Microsoft 365 Governance, Lifecycle and Automation tool (konsolute.com) to prevent this from happening in the first place. 

So, what can you do to start helping your colleagues now, other than working through the specific pain points addressed above? 

You could always start by seeking counsel from a technical consultancy to help with system enhancements and of course (why else would we write a blog on reinforcement) seek guidance from a change consultancy such as ourselves. But if that’s not on your financial radar, then the best way to start working on this as an organisation is to promote someone internally to be in charge or a M365 champion group. Have this team work on objectives to improve the frameworks set, share things that work well on the system, and adopt those as baseline improvements. Empowering people across departments means you will have a collaborative approach moving forwardwhere colleagues would take ownership to support and encourage their peers to use the Teams more effectively. 

Why not introduce something completely new and intriguing to colleagues? If you have followed our company media, you may have seen we have our BEE: Interact adoption games available. 

Bringing gamification into the corporate world by letting you discover ‘your Teams hero’, which is persona-based, fun learning experience with interactive quizzes and reinforcement throughout the game. Your colleagues won’t even realise they are learning, just feel like they are having some light-hearted play during their working days. 

Find out more here

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