8 Best Practices for Getting the Most Out of Microsoft Teams Channels

What is Microsoft Teams, and how can your business be integrating it? We’re so glad you asked. 

Teams is a chat-based collaboration platform that allows easy document sharing, online meetings, and countless more useful features for efficient business communications. Teams allows departments or groups within organizations to come together and collaborate on a common goal. 

To best utilize Microsoft Teams, you need first to ask these questions:

What is the goal?

What is the project? 

Who in your organization will help achieve this goal? 

What work will items need to be accomplished to achieve the goal?

Once you decide to use Teams within your organization, certain best practices will help you achieve your goals more efficiently and effectively. 

8 Best Practices for Microsoft Teams Channels 

1. Manage your notifications. Do you get “notification fatigue”? Manage and specify which notifications you would like to receive and relevant and necessary for your workflow. Only turn on notifications for vital channels to complete your job and check other channels on an as-needed basis.
2. Use the @ tag sparingly. Speaking of notifications…tag people sparingly and only when absolutely necessary within channels. Pinging people too frequently with the @ tag runs the risk of them ignoring you after a certain amount of time if your tags are not always relevant to their work. Using the tag sparingly means your team members are more likely to take your tags seriously when you tag them.
3. Create new teams and channels slowly. With numerous teams and channels, you run the risk of unnecessary complexity and disorganization. Remain on top of all channels you create – if something becomes off-topic, it belongs in a separate channel.
4. Add teams and team members slowly. Build your team and channels slowly and thoughtfully. The great thing about Teams, if you don’t have to add everything at the beginning. You can continue to grow your teams and team members as you need different groups to collaborate. 
5. Use direct chats for one-to-one messages. Chats on specific topics should take place in the appropriate channel. Using chats, you only notify the person you are aiming to communicate with without unnecessarily notifying an entire group.
6. Utilize the ‘General’ channel. When the team leader creates a team, they may need to share general team goals, best practices, or updates. Use the General channel for these purposes.
7. Utilize moderation in channels as needed. Turning on moderation in various channels allows team members to control who can reply to posts or start new posts within a particular channel. Note that team owners are moderators by default; additional non-owner moderators can be specified.
8. Customize how you view the channels in your team. Use the Hide or Show functions to display the channels you use most frequently.  

If your business is not already using Microsoft Teams to collaborate, we highly recommend it. Questions about how to start using Teams or whether Teams might be right for your business? We’d love to chat with you. Contact PK Tech here.