Webinar Recap: Overcoming Microsoft Teams Adoption Challenges

This week ENow co-hosted a webinar focused on strategies to master Microsoft Teams Adoption, Monitoring, and Governance. In today's fast-paced digital landscape, effective management of Teams adoption, monitoring, and governance is crucial for success to transform your Teams experience and achieve unparalleled success for your organization. 

Co-hosted with Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft MVP (Microsoft Valuable Professionals) and thought leader in the realm of Microsoft technologies, he is widely known for his dedication to empowering organizations with transformative insights and actionable strategies for optimizing their Microsoft Teams deployments. You can catch some great content including video briefings, a newsletter, podcasts, and more over at https://empowering.cloud/

In case you missed it, here are some valuable takeaways from the webinar.

Microsoft Teams – How we got here

ENow Technical Founder and CEO, Jay Gundotra, discussed with Tom the growth of Microsoft Teams and the challenges that come with it, for organizations of all sizes. There was a major emphasis on the importance of keeping up with Microsoft's constant innovation, and ensuring users are getting the most out of the technology your organization is paying for.

Microsoft Teams Today - Challenges​

Microsoft and their development (especially with all the Teams changes!) can be hard to keep up with sometimes. With the explosion in growth over the past few years, many organizations experienced an unplanned and unstructured rollout of Teams, which has led to duplication, confusion, and a disruption in productivity and collaboration. Not to mention, Microsoft Teams administrators are left with unwieldy tenants that are difficult to manage and make sense of. Despite its 320 million user base, many organizations are struggling to fully adopt Microsoft Teams features.

These challenges must be addressed from both a User and Admin perspective if you want to achieve strong adoption of Teams. It’s important to choose the right partners and vendors to help with these efforts along your Teams Adoption journey.

Adoption Strategy to Drive Value

Obviously, the evolution of Microsoft Teams and its adoption by clients skyrocketed during the pandemic. Tom provided some actionable strategies for accelerating adoption and maximizing user value from Microsoft Teams. 

5 Practical Adoption Tips for Microsoft Teams Administrators

1. Establish a Dedicated Adoption Team: Assign a specific person or team to own the adoption challenge within your organization. This team should focus on adoption, communication, and training to ensure users are well-supported and informed about new features.
2. Utilize Adoption Score and Usage Reports: Leverage Microsoft's Adoption Score and Teams Usage Reports to track user engagement and identify areas where users are struggling. There are some challenges with these built-in Microsoft tools because they take a one-size-fits-all approach, but solutions like ENow’s Adoption center module allow you to customize reports to highlight key metrics that are relevant to your organization.
3. Invest in Continuous Communication and Training: Adoption is not a one-time project due to the evolving nature of Microsoft Teams. Provide ongoing training and regular briefings to keep users updated on new features and best practices. Consider creating monthly updates to ensure users are always aware of the latest changes and how to utilize them effectively.
4. Empower Power Users and Gather Feedback: Identify and support power users within your organization. These individuals can help champion adoption efforts and provide valuable feedback on user experiences, which can be used to refine training and support strategies.
5. Implement Effective Governance Policies: Develop and maintain efficient governance policies to manage Teams effectively. This includes monitoring issues like teams without owners or with guests and ensuring governance practices do not hinder user productivity. Use tools and resources available on platforms like adoption.microsoft.com to support these efforts.

How to Overcome Barriers to Adoption

There are many barriers to technology adoption. One barrier is the shear amount of information that end-users and admins must continuously learn and understand. To make progress in adoption of Microsoft Teams, you must first understand where you’re starting from. Understanding the current state of adoption and ensuring that admins and organizations are investing the proper time and energy into it is paramount. The required energy will depend on each organization’s priorities, goals, and starting point.

One of the biggest barriers and challenges with adoption is identifying users and understanding their needs and challenges. During the webinar we asked what participants biggest barriers to Teams adoption were. They ranged from, “how time-consuming setting up file security is because many users want to use MS-Teams as a "business unit" file server,” to “users in the organization are used to using copy, cut, and paste functions for files, and these functions don't exist in Teams.” These examples illustrate the critical importance of understanding how your users want to use a tool.

It’s also important to remember that adoption efforts are an ongoing need and not a one-time event, and tracking adoption is crucial to know if your adoption and training efforts are having a positive adoption impact.

Safeguard data integrity and ensure compliance with Governance​

Governance and compliance are also an integral component of successful adoption efforts by IT Teams. Understanding who is using what and what they’re doing within Teams it critical to strong Teams governance. Even simple tactics like consistent naming conventions can go a long way in removing confusion and preventing duplication and Teams Sprawl. A good governance policy will also help safeguard data integrity and ensure data compliance when necessary.

Controlling costs- License Optimization​

Let us not forget about licensing! Licensing is a huge factor when it comes to driving value from your Microsoft investment and in today’s economy, we’re seeing more organizations (of all sizes) shift their focus to reducing licensing overspend, and ensuring users are utilizing what they’re paying for. ENow's Microsoft 365 License Optimization tool can efficiently help administrators manage licenses and downgrade users if necessary, saving valuable time, and the organization many, many dollars.

Missed the live webinar? Watch it on-demand!

Overcoming Microsoft Teams adoption challenges requires a multifaceted approach that includes strategic scoping and planning, continuous training and monitoring, and robust governance. The webinar provided invaluable insights into managing the rapid growth and complexity of Teams, emphasizing the need for dedicated adoption teams, effective use of tools like Microsoft's Adoption Score or third-party tools with more customization like ENow’s Monitoring, Licensing & Adoption tools, and ongoing communication. Addressing these challenges not only enhances the user experience but also maximizes the return on investment in Microsoft technologies. To dive deeper into mastering Teams adoption, monitoring, and governance, watch our On-Demand Webinar and explore the wealth of resources available at empowering.cloud. Don’t hesitate to contact the ENow team for personalized support.