Three Tips To Increase Microsoft Teams User Adoption (And Productivity)
Productivity is defined as achieving more with less, so one way to boost productivity is to optimize your current way of doing things. For companies who are currently using Microsoft Teams, it can simply mean getting your employees on the same page regarding internal communications. For example: If Slack and Microsoft Teams are both used in your company, you can improve productivity by getting all employees on Teams, which helps you reduce errors due to information silos and internal miscommunication.
Unfortunately, driving mass Microsoft Teams adoption can be quite tough due to common doubts about the following: accessibility, information-sharing capabilities, and interoperability.
Read on for a few tips on how you can quell these doubts, drive Teams user adoption, and improve overall productivity!
- Highlight Microsoft Team’s Accessibility Features
If you have employees with certain physical limitations, assuaging their fears about the lack of accessibility on Microsoft Teams by highlighting relevant features can go a long way towards adoption. Since there have been articles on improving the overall user experience on Teams, in this article we want to highlight accessibility features you can showcase to your employees since that might potentially be the largest roadblock to adoption.
- Live Captions
Those with hearing disabilities can enable Live Captions during Teams meetings, which provides real-time subtitle-style captions on-screen. This would improve the meeting experience for those with hearing disabilities and help those who rely on written recaps after the meeting!
- Chat Translations
It has become increasingly common to work with colleagues from all around the world. Unfortunately, not everyone speaks English as their first language. Fortunately, Microsoft Teams has a built-in inline message translation feature. When activated, messages and threads are translated automatically into a user’s preferred language. As of now, most of the major world languages are covered by this feature.
- Voice Messages
For those with disabilities or joint conditions, voice messages are a convenient and pain-free way to communicate long messages. In fact, there are many writers with arthritis who get relief by reducing their daily writing tasks as much as possible and using their voice for other tasks like dictating notes or sending messages. Your employees can do all this with Microsoft Teams too by holding the little microphone button down to record their messages!
2. Improve Information Sharing Capabilities
In a workforce that is increasingly remote, a good messaging application should make sharing information as easy and organized as possible. Scratch that — the importance of good information-sharing capabilities extend to different collaborative environments like Confluence too. Even though Confluence might be more elaborate in terms of functionality, users can still improve efficiency when sharing information thanks to third-party apps like Excel-like Tables of Confluence, which provides extensive data visualization capabilities to structure and organize information more effectively.
Fortunately, sharing information is also super easy with Microsoft Teams thanks to the ability to create project-dedicated channels which help team members segment discussions and share information more effectively. These channels can help you share information with your colleagues more easily. You can share any links or files in the right channel and they are instantly accessible to the relevant colleagues.
Unfortunately, there is a slight issue of information (links) being misplaced this way, especially when there are too many teams and channels. It can be easy to get distracted while you’re opening a message and lose track of the channel a link is shared in.
Fortunately, Microsoft Teams can easily integrate with third-party apps like Link Spotter to resolve this issue. This app can quickly help you spot all the links from your Teams channels and gather them in a single tab. You can then directly start working with the link, copy it, or even start a conversation with the person who shared the link.
3. Ease Your Employees Into It
“All the people I work with are on Slack workspaces. I don’t see why I have to switch to Teams. It’s such a hassle!”
This refrain (or some variation of it) is very common. After all, more than 90% of businesses report using at least two messaging apps for various reasons. Since messaging apps can now be considered critical infrastructure in an increasingly remote workforce, it does make sense to use several apps as fail-safes.
The key here is to ease them into the transition — not cut them off cold turkey. Consider third-party apps that can seamlessly link different types of messaging apps by centralizing all messages into a single interface. That way, you can avoid the mental barriers of “learning an all-new system” or “it’s such a hassle to make the switch” and ease them into using Teams.
Subsequently, they might be more receptive to the existing benefits of Teams and eventually transition to Teams full-time of their own accord.
Keep It Simple
At the end of the day, it’s not so much about pushing Microsoft Teams onto your employees as it is highlighting the pre-existing benefits of the app and easing them into it.
Focus on highlighting its accessibility features and compatibility with a wide range of third-party applications that facilitates better interoperability and information sharing. In this case, apps like Link Spotter and Mio can really help you achieve those goals.
With these tips and enough time, you’ll soon see your Teams adoption rate and productivity skyrocket!
