The rise of Microsoft Teams over the past few years has been astronomic. Supercharged by the rise in remote working in 2020, millions of workers, and hundreds of thousands of organizations now use it every day.
If your organization started using Teams during the coronavirus pandemic, there is a good chance your employees will already be familiar with the basic functions of the tool. However, beyond organizing calls, chatting in channels and sending the occasional file, many employees make limited use of the sheer depth of the software.
Beyond its basic uses, Teams can:
By making more use of Microsoft Teams, your employees become more efficient and productive. At the same time, the organization makes more of a return on its investment.
If you are looking to increase the usage of Teams at your company, the following 4 tips will help achieve that goal.
Microsoft Teams is a deep and complex business tool. You just cannot cover everything there is to know about Teams in a handful of in-person training classes.
Of course, providing some live interactive classes is useful as a starter so users see the big picture and grasp the key concepts of the platform. However, no one can be expected to master everything about Teams in a few short training sessions – it’s just too big and complex.
Hold frequent live Q&A sessions using a webinar tool (including Teams itself!) where you make a presentation that introduces your remote coworkers to an aspect of Microsoft Teams and then allow them to ask questions about the topic.
The aim is not to offer detailed step-by-step tutorials at this stage. Instead, focus on helping users understand the platform and see ways they can use it to solve the problems that hinder seamless collaboration.
Some of the key Q&A sessions you might consider running include:
In advance of the webinars, ask users to write down their questions so that every Q&A session can be productive.
If you want users to get familiar with Microsoft Teams and use it more extensively, you need to overlay popup guides throughout the interface and get them to actively explore one feature at a time. Contextual microlearning solutions help here. They provide bite-sized learning at the moment of need so the user can learn on the go and grow in confidence.
As users keep getting more familiar with Teams through your Q&A sessions, onscreen in-context guidance will reinforce that knowledge and start to make it ‘second nature’.
Contextual microlearning can be used in conjunction with more traditional/in-person training, or it can even replace it altogether.
Microsoft frequently updates Teams and adds new features. Fortunately, they have built a great training site, Microsoft Learning Pathways. This site provides continually updated content and provides an out-of-the-box and made-for-you library of training articles and videos. You can then use this in your contextual microlearning platform and customize it as required. That saves you from having to produce your own training content too!
In 2020, Microsoft Teams played an incredible role in helping organizations around the world to respond to the coronavirus pandemic. It allowed people to keep communicating and collaborating as they worked remotely and helped limit the economic damage of lockdowns.
However, Microsoft Teams is a continually improving and changing platform. If your users are only using Teams for its most basic functionality, you will not achieve maximum return on your investment. And this is why continual learning with a contextual microlearning tool makes so much sense. Staff will keep on learning, expand usage of Teams and become more productive in the process.
To learn more about contextual microlearning, read our blog.