When and how to use what to do what - don't get buried

Two years into Microsoft Teams usage becoming more standard, many professional and academic staff have learnt how to do the simple things (like being in a meeting) and how to do some really clever stuff with some of the built-in capabilities. You would think with its increased visibility, the dire and desperate need for us to have to conduct the entirety of our professional lives using the platform in the early stages of the pandemic, and pockets of best practise proving the abundance of worth in its benefits to teaching and learning and assessment, as well as student experience in community, it would be a platform dominating how we work and how we interact when it's not possible to interact in the physical plane of being in the same room together - and sometimes even when we can.

The problem is, beyond not yet having full staff buy-in on the idea, which just creates massive inconsistencies in how we communicate and collaborate across an organisation, that the over proliferation of Teams and of adding people to them has also created something of a feeling of the want to disengage through having just too many teams to bother. All too often when a colleague shares their screen in an online meeting, I see that their Team's logo has an almost insane number of unread messages or interactions shining an eerie red glow over the rest of their desktop. And on the occasions where a member of staff claims that they never heard about the thing that they were told or read about the thing that they were sent it's because it was done via one of the Teams that they are a member of and that they are just so busy and are a member of so many teams that they just can't keep on top of it all.

Now to my mind, just taking someone up on one of the thousands of offers made to them on teaching them how to properly use notification settings would take care of a lot of that can help them work better and smarter and with far less stress. But in lieu of that perfectly logical step to take on the path towards professional sanity and increased productivity and satisfaction, maybe we need to start taking a look at the why we are making so many of these Teams and whether it is always right to do so and if we are even creating the right sort of Team.

Certainly with three basic Teams templates to choose from when creating a new one, you would think it would be easy if you have at least identified that creating a Team was the way to go, that it would be a simple matter of choosing the right one for the type of Team and purpose. So you can imagine my horror when I see examples such as as staff creating Teams for student learning and don't even have the students as members been instead give them full ownership rights. Then there are the examples of a Microsoft Team being created for a student group by their module or programme leader and it being used solely for questions and answers in parallel with the Blackboard space where the content and the teaching is delivered, when Blackboard itself has a perfectly good discussion board that serves that function without sending students to two entirely separate platforms.

Then there are the staff facing examples, where are a member of staff will create a Microsoft team purely to engage in a chat with multiple individuals. This of course could be far more simply conducted by using the actual chat function within Teams without creating a Team and adding multiple participants. Then there are of course the teams that are created with noble intent by focusing on a project that needs to be completed. But in those cases more often than not it simply becomes a repository for the files associated with the project and for announcing that those files have been uploaded. The lack of engagement by the members of that project team and their reluctance to work outside of the formalised meetings scheduled from within that team mean that no continuous discussions occur and very little happens that the entire team is aware of - it's all side conversations pairs of team members had which then means the formalised meetings are spent catching everybody up on the private discussions that really everybody should have been part of in the first place.

What I'm saying is that we are now in the position of trying to improve the way we work but have instead latched onto one tool and tried to shoehorn it into everything that we do. And sometimes it's not always the best decision to take the new shiny thing and try and apply it to everything. That's actually probably the fastest way to tarnishing that shiny thing and to dull the amazingness of all that it is capable of doing.

So I thought that this week for what hopefully feels like a much shorter blog entry than normal, to simply provide a non-exhaustive but hopefully helpful guide on when when to use Microsoft Teams for particular functions and when maybe to use something else that is also entirely within our gift and wholly supported to use that could make our teamwork and our individual work and our cross-institutional work that much more effective. You can find a little slide deck illustrating this linked below.

What Should I Use When and for What?

There are teams everywhere. There are teams within programs, teams within departments and services, teams within universities, and the higher education sector itself is one giant discombobulated team striving to get to the same honourable goals of improving the education of its students. And in the digital age those teams should not be working in silos, but equally maybe we shouldn't all be members of 1000 different Microsoft Teams that aren't all quite doing the thing that they set out to do and risk undoing all the good work that those well crafted and purposeful Teams have been trying to achieve.