Three Reasons Microsoft Teams Training Doesn’t Work (Episode 59 Transcript)

Happy Monday loyal listeners! I’m Annie Rynd, and this is the 1,001 Business Problems Solved with Microsoft Teams podcast. As usual, I’m here to bring you valuable and actionable business improvement knowledge, all in six minutes or less.
Well, sometimes I go just a hair over, but usually we hit that six-minute mark pretty well.
Anyway, today, how about alerting you to why Teams training usually doesn’t produce results, no matter how skilled the teacher, and no matter how much money you pay to bring in the training.
Bigger companies either have a training department or bring in outside trainers, and smaller companies often send their employees to workshops or prescribe YouTube videos in hopes Teams knowledge will cause their Teams deployment to magically work.
Well, making your Teams deployment wildly succeed isn’t difficult but forking over the big bucks for training alone isn’t going to make you successful at all
If you’ve tried teams training in the past, here’s what probably happened when it was over.
A few employees were excited about the possibilities and returned to the office with high hopes. They feverishly fired off chat messages, posted in the General channel posts tab, perhaps they even moved some files into Teams.
And…I also bet that after a couple of weeks, the enthusiasm waned and if anything, employees became more confused than ever because now communications and files were in even more places!
I thought Teams was supposed to make things better! Well, it does, but here’s a little secret.
Most of the recipe for Teams success involves leadership rather than training. But, since this episode is about Training – and yes, there should be a bit of training in any Teams deployment – let’s just focus on training today.
Reason number one why teams training usually fails – too much functionality is taught! We believe that in the early going, only a handful of fundamental skills should be taught. That would obviously include chat, file management, meetings, and working in channels. If you go much beyond that, people will be drinking from a firehose, get overwhelmed, and end up using none of the skills.
Leave the advanced bells and whistles for when your business needs require them…and that’s usually not in the early days.
Your employees may be impressed, and even enthused about all the bells and whistles, but if they have to focus on more than 4 or 5 easy skills, they’ll likely just shut down. Too much to remember.
The second reason teams training usually doesn’t work is that when the training is over, the employees go back to the office and are faced with the out-of-the-box empty, generic Teams site that the IT folks handed over to them. Yuck!
It would be like a realtor showing you a house without paint or trim on the walls, no kitchen cabinets, etc. Yes, some people will see the potential, but most people aren’t exactly going to want to immediately move in!
Likewise, an un-customized Teams site won’t help your business anyway. To help your business be more productive, the site or sites must absolutely be customized to match your unique business and its processes, and it also has to be matched exactly to what the employees need when they’re working within those processes.
Don’t train employees on Teams until you’ve customized their site and certainly don’t expect them to use an un-customized site.
Speaking of expectations, that’s the third big reason Teams training usually doesn’t deliver.
Picture this. Maybe you’ve taught them just the right amount of fundamental Teams skills. Maybe you’ve even customized their site or sites to exactly match what they need in a way that gets them enthused.
Then, perhaps one or two curmudgeon employees – you know, the kind who would still be buying rotary dial phones except nobody makes them anymore – what if they simply refuse to put the training to use and adopt your awesome new customized Teams environment? What then?
Well, that third reason teams training often doesn’t deliver results is that the leader doesn’t communicate expectations for usage during the training.
We recommend that the leader of the workgroup or groups – preferably at the beginning of the training – announces to the employees that usage of Teams is not voluntary. He or she should state that all INTERNAL collaboration will be done in Teams and not email from this point forward.
That sounds awfully authoritarian, but it’s really not, especially if you did a great job customizing the site to give them what they need. I mean, who in their right mind would object to everything they need to do their jobs being in one place and well organized, not to mention the fact that you’ve just eliminated much of their dreaded email burden?
Happy adoption is obviously much better than forced adoption, and if you customized well, the employees will be happy about the change.
But be that as it may, you might still have a rotary dial phone user in your midst. Start out gently of course but end firmly if you must. Errors happen and efficiency is lost if only one person does not move fully to Teams.
After all, you wouldn’t invest thousands in a CRM or other group software and allow a rogue employee to still do that work on sticky notes, would you? ...I didn’t think so.
Anyway, that’s the three reasons for failure that you should address prior to scheduling your own Teams training.
Now, changing subjects just a wee bit, Arnie gave a workshop in Princeton Indiana several days ago and some of you may have attended. If so, thanks for coming!
His goal with that workshop in Princeton Indiana was to 1) get the attendees fired up about Teams and its potential for their organizations, and 2) teach them as much as possible in the allotted 90 minutes for them to be able to set up successful Teams sites back at their offices.
Well, the workshop was so successful that most of the attendees asked for something that is more hands-on and that would allow them to set up their Teams environments in a facilitated manner.
Because of that feedback from the group, we’re scrambling to distill our Teams deployment process into a 3–4-hour hands-on workshop. We’ll let you know how that comes along, but judging from the overwhelming feedback, I think it’s a winning idea.
If it goes as well as we expect, we’ll probably release that as a regular offering, both in workshop and online course format.
I’ll keep you updated about that.
And with that, my six minutes have flown by. I hope you found it useful and as always, do your business besties a solid and share this episode with them. I’ll see you next week. This is Annie, signing off!