In this blog, I\u2019ve pulled together a list of Microsoft Teams<\/a> best practices I have let slip and my plan of action to make those best practices part of my regular workflows again. Keep reading to learn how to boost your collaborative efforts with a few simple changes.<\/p>\n Over the past couple of months, I\u2019ve been using Microsoft Viva<\/a> Insights to schedule focus time on my calendar for completing tasks, maintaining work-life balance and being more productive. But, using Microsoft Viva Insights as part of your digital hub can improve collaboration with your team in even more ways. Moving forward, I will leverage Viva Insights to establish better meeting habits (not multi-tasking, providing advance notice of meetings, starting and ending on time, and so on) by periodically reviewing my own personal \u201cMeeting habits\u201d report.<\/p>\n I love this report because it tells me where I\u2019m doing well and where I can improve. Some of this may be beyond my control \u2013 people scheduling meetings that overlap other meetings on my calendar after asking if that\u2019s ok, for example. Or when scheduling meetings with large numbers of participants, it is sometimes impossible to schedule meetings without any overlap. As you habitually use this report for feedback about your meeting habits, adjust your habits to eliminate the poor practices and reinforce your good habits, you will be able to manage your time much better, giving you more time to focus on what\u2019s most important.<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of chats you get in an average day, especially if you feel pressured to respond immediately. I\u2019ve let my responses and follow-ups get away from me, so my goal is to improve my response time to chat messages and team or channel conversations people tag me in.<\/strong><\/p>\n Sometimes I will read a message but not reply because I don\u2019t feel I have the time to respond completely. I recognize this may not change due to the numerous conversations I participate in, which compete with other higher-priority tasks. Therefore, I resolve to do the following:<\/strong><\/p>\n These are only a few ways I intend to improve my chat communications. Next, we\u2019ll look at some best practices for note-taking in Teams.<\/p>\n Taking notes has become an activity fewer and fewer people are doing in the workplace. I\u2019m sure there are many reasons behind this, but I\u2019ve heard recently that people are simply turning on meeting recordings and transcriptions during their Microsoft Teams meetings<\/a>. While that does help keep a detailed record of the meeting discussions, I still find it useful to summarize these meeting notes, especially those in which the team requires tasks or follow-ups.<\/strong><\/p>\n Taking notes is a Microsoft Teams best practice for collaboration to ensure notes are co-located with the related team or channel and also to help the end user stay within the flow of their work (i.e., reduce context switching to other applications). However, I don\u2019t always follow through with this best practice. For example, if I haven\u2019t prepared for a Teams meeting where I need to take some notes, I\u2019ll take notes in Outlook because it\u2019s already open.<\/p>\n Instead, I should open OneNote and find the right notebook and section to create a new page for these notes. All that \u201cextra work\u201d would take about a minute, so I use the quick Outlook solution to save 30-60 seconds. Ultimately, that time savings is lost when I need to find or share the notes later.<\/p>\n The Microsoft Teams best practice I will follow and encourage others to do to combat this is simple: more intentional notetaking.<\/strong> Use the tools at your disposal, like OneNote, so everyone in the meeting will have access to your notes and leverage the \u201cTo do\u201d and \u201cPlanner Plan\u201d task management from these meetings. One new Teams Premium feature and a Viva Sales feature will use artificial intelligence to automatically create and assign these tasks from the meetings, which will greatly help.<\/p>\n While spring is often the season of the deep clean, the Microsoft Teams best practice is to clean up quarterly. Over the years, I got lazy in managing teams I own or am heavily involved in, thus creating some confusion and frustration for our team members. The confusion comes from having too many places to find information or collaborate within; having old, outdated or no longer relevant information to sort through; and being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of conversations and documents in Teams. By reducing this volume periodically, others can more easily find relevant conversations and documents they need to collaborate on.<\/strong><\/p>\n I am currently the owner of over 20 teams and a member of over 80 teams. Believe it or not, most of these are active teams, but we should delete or archive the ones we no longer use. Thankfully, we have Orchestry<\/a> to help us do much of the work related to the cleanup of these teams, including deleting and archiving teams, removing guests and gaining further insights into their overall usage and adoption.<\/p>\n I\u2019m looking forward to Orchestry\u2019s upcoming features for channel management because I\u2019ll be able to better manage archiving individual channels. A more difficult task ahead is a general reorganization of our teams. When we do this reorganization, we\u2019ll leverage private and shared channels to help reduce the number of teams and channels we manage so team members can find information more easily. We\u2019ll also continue to improve our use of Orchestry in standardizing our project teams, auto-provisioning feature-rich channels and tabs, and standard project management artifacts.<\/p>\n And for those who don\u2019t have Orchestry, you can still do some degree of channel management using out-of-the-box features of Teams and SharePoint, such as manually deleting channels and manually archiving the files to another more permanent SharePoint site.<\/strong> Note, however, that there are no out-of-the-box features to export channel conversations, Planner plans, applications and so on from these channels.<\/p>\n Microsoft Teams best practices make collaboration and communication easy and effective, but only if we stick to them. While it\u2019s easy to let these guidelines fall by the wayside during our day-to-day workflows, our collaborative success suffers in the long run. I resolve to get back on track with these best practices. Will you?<\/p>\n\n Microsoft Teams Best Practices to Remember<\/h2>\n
Take Full Advantage of Microsoft Viva<\/h3>\n
![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/centricconsulting.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Screen-Shot-2023-02-20-at-11.34.55-AM.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nImprove Collaboration and Communication in Chat<\/h3>\n
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Get (Back) Into the Habit of Taking Notes<\/h3>\n
Don\u2019t Save Clean Up for the Spring<\/h3>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n