Why You Should Go All in On Teams - Part 2 (Episode 55 Transcript)

Happy Monday! I don’t know about where you’re at, but this early spring warm weather is making me want to get up and away from my computer and outside to listen to all the songbirds that are suddenly very active.
I’m Annie Rynd and I’m the faithful hostess of this 1,001 Business Problems Solved with Microsoft Teams podcast.
You know computers are a wonderful invention. They help us get more done, but unfortunately, they also consume much of our days when, let’s face it, we’d rather be outside listening to birds or flying a kite.
In your business, maybe you’d rather be selling to more customers or providing more services to your customers than clicking away on your computer doing things that your customers don’t pay you for.
If you tuned in last week, I went through a litany of non-value adding computer activities that occupy too much of your time, and your employees’ time.
This week, I’m going to give you a quick list of the benefits you can expect if you leverage Teams strategically in your business, and then follow that up with how to do it.
So, if you’re new to Teams, or if you’ve already been using Teams but wondering why you aren’t seeing radical transformation, listen up!
When you properly deploy and leverage Teams, you will experience the following benefits:
•Everything will have a place and everything will be in its place
•Files, threaded conversations, apps, and more will be neatly organized by process rather than randomly scattered throughout a shared drive or in employees inboxes
•Employees will know without a doubt where everything is located
•If they don’t know, the mighty Teams search engine will almost instantly locate it for them
•Your business processes will be streamlined, standardized, and obvious to new employees once you give them a tour of your Teams environment – won’t it be great to not have to spend days or weeks showing new employees where things are at?
•You will stop paying for many third party apps such as Zoom, calendly, dropbox, and more because the Microsoft 365 suite of integrated apps will handle nearly all your business needs
•You’ll have an A I tool called copilot that integrates seamlessly into your office apps, which I can say from first-hand experience, automates many repetitive tasks and allows your employees to do other value-adding work.
I could go on and on about what benefits you’ll get by strategically and enthusiastically deploying Teams in your business, but I bet you’re already sold at this point, especially since you're likely already paying for it!
First, as you venture into the world of Microsoft Teams, you must keep in mind that Teams is not your father’s software. It is designed to become your business operating system rather than just a nice tool for individuals to pick up and use of their own volition.
As the leader of your business, if you simply put it out there for your employees to use, you’ll be completely underwhelmed, wonder what the big fuss was about, and even lament that Teams has complicated things for you and your employees.
That’s why it is so important for you to deploy Teams in a strategic fashion and do so with a focus on improving the workgroup processes within your business more-so than improving your employees’ work.
Of course teams will improve your employees’ work experience and productivity, but as the leader, your focus should be centered upon improving workgroup collaborative and information management processes. Improved individual productivity will happen for sure, but it will be a side product of workgroup improvement.
If you strategically deploy Teams, you will instantly surpass the productivity of your competition because most businesses – if they use Teams at all – implement Teams and see little improvement.
If you’ve listened to many of our past episodes, you know that the four steps to guaranteed Teams success are to:
1. Customize your Teams sites to exactly match your work processes first and foremost
2. Train your employees on only the basic fundamentals of Teams
3. Expect them to use what you’ve given them ( that means using Teams for internal collaboration rather than email and texting ) , and finally,
4. Modeling good Teams usage to reinforce your expectations.
Now, there are finer points to those four steps of course. In fact, we have a free 30-minute video course over at teams quick start dot com. That course will teach you everything you need to know for your business to outperform competition, while also getting you outside to listen to those spring songbirds sooner.
And, if you happen to live within driving distance of Princeton , Indiana, Arnie will be conducting a free Transform with Teams workshop on April 11 – that’s in exactly eleven days.
The workshop will be at noon central standard time at the Gibson County Chamber of Commerce just east of the square. Lunch will be provided and you can register at go Gibson dot org. If you go, be sure to tell Arnie you heard about it on the podcast.
Now, it’s time for me to step outside and enjoy this warm weather. I hope you can do the same. Until next week, this is Annie signing off!