3 ways “teams” are being identified in Microsoft Teams
You might think that with a product named “Microsoft Teams” the starting point for forming a “team” is the same for everyone. From our experience, this is far from the case. In this article we identify three different ways “teams” are being formed on Teams.
1. Establishing a Digital team
This is the regular anticipated way of establishing a team on Teams. Basically, anyone can create a digital team, name it, provide a description, and then start inviting others to join. Who you invite is entirely up to the team owners. Some will decide to align the team with their formal organisational team; others might align it with a group activity or project. Whatever the purpose, the team is established with its own support infrastructure, which includes a place to store team specific content, an ability to add applications relevant to the team and also to divide the group work up into thematic channels for easier management and co-ordination.
2. Establishing a Chat team
For those of you who are regular users of chat applications like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc., we tend to have favourite groupings of people we communicate with regularly. Perhaps they are close family or friends we can conveniently message together. The group chat feature is also available in Microsoft Teams. Files can be shared on OneDrive and recently the ability to have threaded chats has been introduced. While it has an informal feel to it, it is the fastest way to start communicating with groups of people on Teams. Some organisations have also introduced governance rules to manage the creation of a team on Teams which adds to the lower set up “cost” of a chat group.
3. Your Active Directory team
The third way of identifying a team on Teams is through the formal organisation chart reflected in your Active Directory (or equivalent) profiles. This is where the relationships between managers and direct reports are established. Let’s call these “Directory Teams”.
This use case is used by Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics, which is now being surfaced through Viva Insights. Viva Insights draws information from many sources like your Outlook email, calendar, calls, meeting, chat, and files usage. Importantly though, it does not currently draw insights from Teams Channel or Yammer discussions. What this means is that Viva Insights does not know about “Digital Team” memberships, or Yammer Communities for that matter. In order to report on team activity, it relies on analysing the activities of people who report in to a manager.
Is there a problem with this?
One could suggest it shouldn’t matter how a team is identified, as long as it identified. The problem is that there is absolutely no assurance that teams formed in these three different ways are in any way consistent. In a worse case, we could have teams being partially duplicated with crossed purposes and complete mayhem!
The following table summarises the pros and cons of each team type:
We can see here the Chat and Directory Team types are at either end of the informal/formal team interaction continuum:
How to decide how to form your digital team?
Deciding how to form your digital team depends on how your organisation is currently structured, or perhaps how it wants to be structured. The options can range from a total alignment of Directory/Digital and Chat groups to totally separated and independent.
An example of a static/stable organisation structure is a large, often franchised retail chain. Franchised businesses are built to a formula. If you work in a retail shop, the people you chat with, interact with, co-ordinate with, tend not to vary much day-to-day. In this case the “directory” structure should be replicated in the digital space. At the other end of the scale, we see large software development organisations with a mixture of product and project work. For these types of organisations, your position on the organisation chart is purely for the convenience of the payroll system. Your chat partners may be a combination of friends at work and professional contacts, who you may or may not be currently working with on a day-to-day basis. Your Digital team might be just for the project/s you are currently working on.
Here’s the rub. While certain business types naturally align to a particular business structure, this is determined by the executive leadership. For example, industrial icon and behemoth General Electric is now recognised as having a flat and flexible organisational structure. On the other hand we have the new-age tech focussed behemoth Amazon, seen to have a hierarchical structure right down to the team level. Therefore, when considering how to structure your digital teaming spaces, you need to be mindful of the aspirations of your executive leadership. What is their foundational philosophy of how the business should be structured and run?
The Digital team, supported by Channels and Channel discussions, we believe is optimised for modern agile ways of working. Teams can be formed and disbanded as the needs arrive, without sacrificing the expected team support infrastructure i.e. managed shared content repositories, searchable threaded online discussions, team tools available to all members in one place etc..
Setting up your digital space
With Microsoft Teams, we believe that one action should be not negotiable. You must have Digital team spaces, optionally with channels. It is only through digital teams that you can realise using Teams as your digital hub. As the hub, Teams orchestrates your flow of work, providing direct access to the information and applications you require, all in one place. If you are using Teams without a Digital team, then you are missing out on the huge advantage Teams provides over the plethora of other telephony only providers in the market.
Who should be included in your digital teams? The best rule of thumb is “people that are interacting and depending on each other on a day-to-day basis”. These are your “working” teams. By applying this rule of thumb you should find your Digital teams will be smaller, rather than larger. Once established, this digital team should have a clearly stated purpose, a charter for how team members are to interact, for example, how Channel discussions, Chat and Meetings are to be used. You will also discover how much your Digital team/s overlap your Directory and Chat groups.
If there is indeed a strong overlap, life can be easy, as Chat and digital teams activity is easily aligned to the formal structure and its trickle-down goals. If the overlap is less than expected, this doesn’t flag a problem with your structure. It simply means you are working in a more agile and, likely, flat structure.
For many of us, higher levels of flexibility and independence is more welcome than the alternative. Flexibility and independence comes with a price however. Organisational stakeholders need to be engaged with. Functional leaders will be looking to also build larger digital teams, aligned with the formal structure. These are not “working” teams. These are “information sharing” teams with the purpose of maintaining alignment with organisational goals. It’s important to not to conflate “information sharing” and “working teams”, as this can completely undermine the positive team dynamics of “working” teams.
Chat groups and meetings
While the ad hoc nature of Chat groups might be attractive for getting group communication happening quickly; Chat groups on their own are not teams. Chat groups are not accountable, cannot assure that team information artefacts are being developed or shared effectively, and cannot provide assurance that organisational goals are being met. This doesn’t mean you should avoid Chat. However, you need to develop the right balance between chat and channel discussions. Doing all your work in Chat is not recommended.
When your digital team is working well, with a healthy interaction in channel discussions, you may find most of your meetings are ad-hoc. There will always be times where threaded discussions are insufficient for dealing with a more complex issue; provoking a need to escalate the discussion to a synchronous meeting, to be effective. This leaves scheduled meetings for interactions outside the working team. Perhaps your line managers may schedule a weekly catch up for the division. Or perhaps your working team needs to engage with another working team, or even an external party. Either way, meetings should be driven by the needs of the working digital teams.
In summary:
Aim to have all your teams identified as formal digital teams.
Be careful to distinguish between “working teams” and larger “information sharing teams”.
The role of Chat and Meetings should always be to service the needs of the “working teams”, as this is where the rubber hits the road for creating tangible business value.
