5 signs you need to take Microsoft Teams off the shelf and plan implementation

Digital collaboration is not the future. Digital collaboration is now. In fact, it’s yesterday and the day before that. Still, feel like there’s no need in your organization for a change that can actually help your employees improve their performance and efficiency? Take a few minutes to consider these five topics
that are warning signs that you need to step up your digital workplace game and take Microsoft Teams off the shelf and into your business.

1. Your employees are still collaborating on shared drives

File shares, shared drives, you can call them what you want. But they are not practical. Decades ago, IT reserved a spot for your department on the Z, Q or T drive and told you to be happy there. Back then, it was a fitting solution for the sharing of internal documents, but today, shared drives are a legacy that every IT department wants to get rid of – and so do your business users.

No real-time collaboration, a tiresome process to add colleagues to secure groups and unfit for mobile or easy and secure use away from the office: let’s face it, shared drives have little or no place in a digital workplace that prioritizes collaboration.

2. You are using email for everything

Email was invented over 30 years ago. Back then, it was a great idea: let’s send digital letters and packages to everyone all over the world. Now, everyone hates email. Busloads of people are dragged into classrooms to learn how to handle their inboxes. Employees enter a company and they spend more than a third of their time emailing instead of putting their skills to work. 

Email is being used for project management, to store data, to group tasks and for communication about just about anything from the latest organizational change to the decision made on the lunch venue on Friday. We are addicted to email, that’s why we use it. It’s a familiar and comfortable environment. But is it really suited for collaboration? 

3. Your millennial staff have panic eyes

New generations with ambitious youth born in the year 2000 (seriously, how scary does that sound?) are entering the office floor. This is a generation that is digitally native (smartphones, chat, cloud-based apps), but not email native (like you). We are pushing an old (ancient, in IT time) invention on them and forcing them to use it and be collaborative. 

I cringe when I see new employees receive their computer on their first day and then someone from HR explains to them that colleagues will be sending electronic mail messages. And then they receive a VPN token or get introduced to Citrix to access the file shares. The look on their faces. It’s sheer panic. These kids have strong ideas about how they work, and you better be ready to offer them the technology they grew up with.

4. You are (mis)using OneDrive for Business to collaborate

We know how it works when you rollout Office 365: you start with Exchange Online to move the mailboxes to the cloud and then OneDrive for business replaces the personal drives. Once that is a fact, everyone starts to create and share OneDrive folders to give others access to their documents and enable collaboration. 

Yes, this allows collaboration, but remember this: OneDrive for Business is your personal workspace. You can work together on documents, but for any collaboration that involves a certain volume of communication and documents, this is not the right tool. There is only one owner of the documents and if that person leaves the organization, you have 30 days to retrieve all the documents they have been sharing with colleagues. After that, the OneDrive account is wiped. Good luck with that!

5. Your employees are happily using shadow IT apps

Everyone needs and wants to collaborate. Naturally, your employees will absolutely look outside your IT organization to help them do that. They use their private accounts to set up collaborations via Google Drive, Dropbox, Trello, WhatsApp or even Facebook. These are all great tools that serve a specific purpose. But do you want your employees to decide what tools are used?

Do they even know the risks involved when your business-critical company data is shared on servers you don’t even know who has access to? It works for them, sure. But what if one of your staff leaves and takes all the data with them? You have no control over your data and no idea who is sharing with whom. I would say that’s a scary idea, or at least a cumbersome one.

You will find more benefits of using Microsoft Teams in this article ;).

Recognize these signs?

In that case, it’s time to consider rolling out Microsoft Teams in your organization. 

Create a governance framework beforehand together with IT, HR and communications and get representation from your business users. Launch a few pilots and learn from them. Identify, train and inspire digital ambassadors to help unroll the change out to all corners of your organization. 

Need support or advice? Teams for Teams has your back. We know how this works and offer both the technical and change management skills to make digital collaboration in your organization a success!