The Challenge of Microsoft Teams Mainstream Adoption

January 22, 2020

The Challenge of Microsoft Teams Mainstream Adoption

With all the buzz around Teams, it seems like everyone is using it. In fact, according to recent Microsoft data, there are now 20 million daily active users of Microsoft, making it the fastest growing product in the company’s history. That’s an incredible achievement. But is everyone using it? And what are they using Teams for? Let’s look at the numbers to gain a perspective…

Microsoft recently divulged that there 200 million monthly active users of Office 365. Because Teams is part of Office 365, Teams users must be Office 365 subscribers. Let’s calculate how many of the 200M Office 365 subscribers are using Teams. While it is impossible for observers to reconcile the difference between the ‘daily’ and ‘monthly’ active users provided in the Microsoft data, we can still make a quick approximation as follows:

So, by Microsoft’s (perhaps) optimistic numbers, approximately 10% of Office 365 subscribers are using Teams. Of those, many are likely using Teams strictly for unified communications, migrating from Skype for Business as that service is being deprecated. The bottom line is that the percentage of Office 365 subscribers using Teams for conversations is likely less than 10%.

Today's Teams Users are Early Adopters

Some of you may be familiar with Prof. Everett Roger’s model for diffusion of innovations, shown below.

According to this well-accepted model, you can see that while the number of Teams users is huge, usage is limited to ‘Innovators’ and ‘Early Adopters.’ These folks are risk-takers who look to technology to solve their problems. In short, these people are your co-workers who seek out technology and figure out how to use it on their own.

The First 20 Million Is (Not) The Easiest

Getting innovators and early adopters to use technology is relatively easy, if they can imagine how it might be useful. The majority of people, usually called mainstream users are far harder to corral. These people are generally averse to change; they feel comfortable with the tools they have, even if a better alternative exists.

So, to get mainstream users in your organization to use Teams, you will need to do more than simply make it available to them. There are several key obstacle to overcome and there are several strategies to help you do so.

Bringing Teams to Mainstream Workers

Attend the harmon.ie webinar Teams Adoption and harmon.ie to learn the three main obstacles to getting mainstream workers to use Teams. The webinar will also introduce two major strategies to overcome these obstacles. It will also explain how harmon.ie can help achieve Teams adoption with minimum effort.

Register now to attend.

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