In an earlier post, we looked at the current state of Microsoft Teams adoption and noted that today’s usage is primarily limited to early adopters. We then described the 3 main obstacles to achieving mainstream adoption, namely, changing people’s behavior, trying to reconcile disconnected conversations split between email and Teams, and not being able to find information when number of Teams channels (inevitably) proliferates.

Overcoming Teams Adoption Obstacles

There are two keys to overcoming hurdles to Teams adoption and gaining acceptance among mainstream business workers; they are:

• Reduce the amount of change needed to use Teams – behavioral psychologists have definitely shown how introducing nudges that make it easy for people to do the right thing, will increase desired behavior. In the case of Teams, people already spend their days in Outlook. Enabling users to initiate Teams conversations directly from Outlook goes a long way to getting people to use Teams. Trying to entice or coerce users to use Teams generally doesn’t work with mainstream users; these folks are generally happy with the tools they already use (i.e. Outlook).
• Start with High-value Business Cases – when it’s clear to business users what they stand to gain from using Teams, they will be more likely to invest the effort to engage. Providing them with Teams-based workflows for high-value business cases will bring them around. For example, if you can show how Teams helps account managers work with clients faster and with fewer errors, you will get their interest. The same goes for other common business workflows, like those used in case management, customer support, and project management.

harmon.ie Drives Mainstream Teams Adoption

harmon.ie drives Teams adoption to mainstream users by offering the following capabilities:

• harmon.ie makes it extremely simple to initiate and join Teams conversations directly from Outlook. Users simply drag and drop emails and attachments from their Inbox directly to Teams channels in the harmon.ie sidebar, without leaving the Outlook window. Users are even prompted to add required metadata so information can be found later.
• harmon.ie makes it easy to search and filter emails and documents stored in Teams so that information can be found quickly.
• ·harmon.ie makes it easy to implement typical business workflows for common, high-value use cases like account management, case management, and project management.

To see how this works in practice, view the recorded webinar Teams Adoption with harmon.ie.