The General Channel Best Practice (Episode 60 Transcript)

Happy Monday loyal listeners! It’s a cold wet day here in the Midwest and I’m glad I was indoors over the weekend when so many were at that cold and muddy Kentucky Derby!

I’m Annie Rynd and this is the 1,001 Business Problems Solved with Microsoft Teams podcast where we help you solve a common business problem in six minutes or so every Monday.

Today, I’m going to tell you what you can do with that General channel you were required to have up until a few months ago, and also what you can do with that first channel you’re now required to add when you create a new Teams site.

This best practice solves multiple problems in a workgroup.
So what’s this General channel about?

Well, like I said, until recently you got a channel named General any time you created a new Teams site. Unfortunately, since most workgroups don’t know what to do with channels anyway, that channel just usually became a catch-all for everything, which kind of defeats the purpose of having channels in the first place, but that’s a subject for another day.

Anyway, you got your new Teams site and you were stuck with that General channel and you weren’t even allowed to change its name.

As of a few months ago, when you create a new team, you don’t get that required General channel, but you are required to name your first channel. This usually catches people off guard, so they just throw something on there without much thought.

Well, here’s where Annie comes to the rescue.

When you name that new channel, name it something like, Manager Communications or Words from the Boss, or something like that. That’s because, well you guessed it, this channel will be for communications from the boss man or lady or multiple men or ladies if you have multiple bosses in your workgroup.

If you are still stuck with that old general channel from the past, that’s ok. Just begin using it for communications from above.

That not only gives that channel a purpose, but it solves a big problem that exists in most organizations.

In the old days, when you used that dreaded ancient tool called email, if you were the manager, you’d send an email to the masses if you needed to get the word out about a new policy, procedure, company picnic, or whatever.

Then, your employees would handle that email in any of a number of ways. Some would drag it to a folder called boss. Some would just let it scroll down the page with their other 46,000 emails. Some would just delete it after reading it because they thought they could remember all the details.

Regardless, that was so ineffective because if an employee thought to himself, self, what was it that boss sent out to us months ago? Then he’d have to ask you or another employee again, spend 30 minutes looking for the email, or just wing it and screw the whole place up.

Well, if you designate the General or Words from the Boss channel as the single solitary place where those communications from above are stored, then at least they always know where to look.

Whether they scroll down through that string of channel posts or do the smart thing and use that powerful teams search engine to find it, at least there is a single source of the truth and those communications are always findable.

To make this method work, you need to do a couple things.

First, make sure the manager or mom & pop business owner is the owner of the teams site. You do that by clicking the ellipsis next to the teams site name in the navigation panel in Teams, click on the members tab, and change the status of the manager from member to owner.

As with all step-by-step instructions I give you, if you’re listening to this in the distant future and my steps don’t work, that means Microsoft has changed the menu again. As you should always do in that case, simply ask Copilot “how do I make someone an owner of my teams site” and it will give you updated instructions.

So after the manager is an owner, go into the Teams site settings again. You will see a setting in there where you can click the little radio button to make it to where only the owners of the Teams site can post new topics. That ensures that communications only come from the boss or bosses.

Now, even though the boss is the only one who can post, any team member can still reply to original posts. This is good because there may need to be clarifying questions or discussions about a post.

And that’s my best practice for getting the most out of that first channel. Now, before you race off to your to-do list, let me remind you of something I covered several weeks ago.

Many employees new to Teams, and some who are veterans even, are opening Teams and finding that their Teams button is now missing from the app bar on the left side. If you look under Activity and Chat where the Teams button used to be, it’s gone.

That’s a terrible move by Microsoft and I wish they’d stop doing it. Here’s how you get it back because if you listen regularly to this podcast, you know that we advise leveraging the Teams sites heavily.

Because Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to combine chat and channels, you’ve got to go to chat to undo things. In chat, at the top of the list of chats in the navigation panel, you’ll see another ellipsis. That’s the three little dots.
Click it.

Then, click on customize view and you’ll see two buttons at the top: Combined and Separate. Simply click on separate and your teams button will magically reappear.

And with that, I’m going to go throw another log on the fire. Can you believe we still need heat in southern Indiana in May? Crazy stuff.

Be sure to subscribe if you haven’t already and share it with all your business besties. Until next Monday, this is Annie over and out!