Lately I have been involved in quite a few Microsoft Teams implementation projects. Mostly to do deep dive sessions with both business and IT, to explain the fullest potential of Microsoft Team and how to reach that potential in their organisation. Usually, these sessions take place after a pilot phase or even when Teams has already organically grown to a more heavily used platform (where sometimes IT feels out of control, but that is for another time). One of the topics that almost always comes up, is the feeling of end-users that they are overwhelmed. The amount of conversations and notifications can increase rapidly, and people find it difficult to manage this for themselves. This is a logical reaction of course, because Teams is new for them, and they have not yet embedded the use of Teams in their daily work, in their daily habits.

What we have found to really help in finding a balance for people in the use of Teams, is defining a set of best practices, or rules if you will, that everyone agrees on. What do we expect of each other, how can we improve our experience in Teams, and how can we bring more structure to the use of Teams in our daily work pattern. I have compiled such a list of best practices and rules, based on already available adoption content from Microsoft and (mostly) on our own experiences, both internally at Portiva (we are a heavy user of Microsoft Teams ourselves) and at our customers. I decided to call the list:

A unified approach to personal happiness in Microsoft Teams

But feel free to change the title for your own organisation

Here’s the list of items I found useful. By all means, add your own if you feel I left out some important topics (even better, let me know, so I could add them to my list). For your convenience, I have also added a Microsoft Word version of these items for download at the end of this article. Continue reading →