Microsoft’s Strategic Shift to Microsoft Teams
At Microsoft, a company-wide initiative is underway to enhance team collaboration using Microsoft Teams. This shift represents a fundamental change in how employees interact, communicate, and conduct meetings, with Teams serving as the central hub. Guided by robust change management processes and comprehensive training programs, Microsoft is empowering its workforce to fully leverage the capabilities of Teams. As adoption expands, the company refines its strategies based on user experiences and insights, to facilitate a smooth transition to the modern workplace. Digital transformation relies heavily on effective teamwork, and Teams serves as the core tool for enabling that transformation.
Microsoft Digital team, is evolving through its own digital transformation journey, recognizing the potential of Teams to revolutionize operational efficiency. Teams offers significant enhancements to collaboration, teamwork, and overall productivity within the Microsoft 365 suite. These enhancements include:
- Centralized Hub: Microsoft Teams acts as the central nexus for all teamwork functions within Microsoft 365.
- Comprehensive Communication: It addresses the collaboration and communication needs of a diverse workforce by offering chat, meeting, voice, and video capabilities in a streamlined user experience.
- Seamless Integration: Teams integrates with all Microsoft employee’s key applications, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, Planner, Stream, and Power BI, providing employees with a unified platform for information and tools.
- Customization Options: The platform allows team members to customize workspaces through tabs, connectors, and bots, and the extensible development platform supports the build of team-specific applications.
- Enhanced Meeting Experience: Teams optimizes the meeting experience with conferencing devices and supports private and group meetings, as well as scheduling and free/busy calendar features.
- Integrated Security: By integrating enterprise-grade security through Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Azure Active Directory, Teams supports and aligns with primary identity and access management solutions.
Combined with Microsoft 365, Teams builds a hub for modern collaboration and teamwork by empowering employees to connect with each other in ways that transform the business and fully realizes digital transformation.
Facilitating Adoption Through Change Management
Within Microsoft, decisions to adopt a workstyle change usually originate at the organizational or executive level. However, the drive for change is often initiated in response to changing business needs. Microsoft’s diverse teams require a range of work methods, and the adoption of modern workstyles is the primary focus of Microsoft Teams. Management recognizes that each group presents unique needs, which are a key factor in guiding change. While allowing employees to use Microsoft Teams in preferred ways, Microsoft also recognizes that a snapshot of “a day in your digital life” helps people visualize Teams’ benefits. Common workplace tasks are integrated to show Teams value. For example:
- Morning Routine: Using Microsoft Outlook for emails and schedules, Microsoft Teams for project updates, and Microsoft 365 productivity apps, OneDrive, and SharePoint for document creation and review.
- Commuting: Employing Microsoft Teams for meetings and chats, and Teams and Stream to watch live meetings and Outlook for calendar connections.
- Office Meetings: Microsoft Teams for both small and large meetings, using conference room hardware and anonymous participants.
- Team Collaboration: Utilizing Microsoft Teams for communication, video sharing, screen sharing, and shared file authoring for teams.
- Company-wide Connection: Utilizing Yammer and Microsoft Viva Engage for company updates, knowledge sharing, and SharePoint for site creation and news publishing.
Underlying Microsoft’s change management is the strategy to manage change by managing change with one person at a time. Change management processes focuses on meeting each employee’s needs, including awareness of the need for change, motivation to support it, understanding how to make the change, ability to acquire necessary skills, and reinforced organizational support to make the change permanent.
Structured Change Implementation
To coordinate adoption effectively, Microsoft uses a structured, documented process to help its adoption team. This process allows initial change to be scaled into the beginning of company-wide adoption and features:
- Awareness: This method delivers the message, establishing a first impression that captures employee interest and enthusiasm. This pillar involves tasks like understanding the role Teams plays, visual campaigns to build awareness, and internal social channels to build excitement.
- Engagement: This pillar involves the engagement starting with running a pilot program for testing readiness and creating buy-in with stakeholders by designing engagements and establishing Q&A opportunities. Tools, guidance, and training ensures employees have the resources to succeed with Teams.
- Measurement: Keeping track of engagement, this pillar requires actionable feedback for refining the adoption process, by gaining metrics for progress and establishing active feedback systems.
- Management: This is the final and longest lifecycle of any pillar in the change management process and means continually supporting Teams by implementing any feature changes and gathering feedback to refine and improve the process.
Microsoft’s Strategy
Microsoft recognizes that implementing Teams adoption is a behavioral and social change. Because employee ingenuity supports business success, engagement and retention improves. Teams was built as a chat-based workspace in Microsoft 365 with persistent chat, accessible files, customizable and extensible features, and the security teams need. Successful adoption of Teams isn’t just about technology, but rather about a change in behavior and a new way of working demonstrated by employees’ adoption of new behaviors like:
- Chat Over Email: Transitioning email to chat for streamlined team communications.
- Cloud-Based Operations: Utilizing all Microsoft 365 components in the cloud.
- Embracing Flexibility: Customization in Teams to support empowerment and promote business results.
- Mobile Capabilities: Supporting employees to work from any location.
The spark, ignite, bonfire communications framework: The marketing of the campaign includes capturing the message placement in which audience’s the attention is captured and used to create interest and engagement. Interest grows into new behavior patterns and sustainable business outcomes.
The sparks are initial announcements targeted to:
- Target Audience: Engaging the entire organization, refining communications based on company roles, and determining how employees may use Teams in their daily work lives.
- Key Messages: These messages, focused on teamwork and personalization, included “Chat for today’s teams,” “A hub for teamwork,” and “Customize for each team.”
- Communication Channels: Placement includes internal websites, readiness tools, and social campaigns.
The ignite of the process is designed to translate initial interest into action and initiate adoption. The process includes a communications and readiness internal launch event with monthly elements of readiness materials and product roadmap alignment. The process also focused on:
- Creative content for employee engagement.
- Campaign execution with a focus on tools and proper use.
- Campaign reporting to measure impact and measure weekly active users, with web traffic, training surveys and Yammer engagement as metrics.
As a result, the bonfire of the process should lead to sustainable business outcomes and cultural change. The most important aspect of the bonfire is that it should integrate with the organization’s high-level technology and culture strategy. Here are some of the things Microsoft learned:
- Capitalize on the reach of your initial marketing campaign.
- Understand the primary use cases for your organization.
- Understand the use cases in your organizational tool set and the associated appropriate-use scenarios.
- Understand the impact of Microsoft Teams on your existing collaboration and teamwork tools.
- Align new capabilities and features to your organization’s strategy.
- Understand your audience.
- Plan for executive sponsorship.
Conclusion
By adopting Microsoft Teams, the company is focusing on digital transformation and collaboration. The strategies outlined in this process, from initial awareness to ongoing management, are examples of Microsoft’s commitment to enabling successful adoption and maximizing productivity through technology and cultural shifts.
