Microsoft Teams: Teams and Channels versus Chat
July 28, 2023 6:02 AM Subscribe
How can I get Microsoft Teams users to stop sliding out of channels and into chats? Teams and channels have many more features and are better for info sharing and discovery.
However, even my own teams don't use the channels we've set up like:
Team: Some Group
Channel: Team 1
Channel: Topic 2
Instead, they create side chats with 2-3 people or use meeting chats post-meeting, so info is getting splintered and telephone gamed. How can I avoid this? Should I?
I feel like the Team channels encourage openness and sharing, and chats create exclusion if it's something like "how to best secure AWS" or "here's a problem the team needs solved".
However, even my own teams don't use the channels we've set up like:
Team: Some Group
Channel: Team 1
Channel: Topic 2
Instead, they create side chats with 2-3 people or use meeting chats post-meeting, so info is getting splintered and telephone gamed. How can I avoid this? Should I?
I feel like the Team channels encourage openness and sharing, and chats create exclusion if it's something like "how to best secure AWS" or "here's a problem the team needs solved".
I meant to add: My company migrated from Slack to Teams about 3 years ago and the first thing everyone did was create "team chat" chats to mimic the Slack style of a continuous team (small-t team) conversation channel.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:13 AM on July 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:13 AM on July 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
Best answer: If you knew how to do this, Microsoft would hire you as a Teams evangelist and adoption guru.
In my giant company the median user doesn't use Channel chats at all in a given month. This even holds true for the people responsible for bringing in and shepherding Teams into the company. EndsOfInvention raises good usability questions and frankly the path of least resistance for end users is just to default in asking in 1-on-1 chats. The most successful internal users of Channel chats that I have seen where there is a community of people who have "the channel religion" and model the desired behavior and use the Channels like they are meant to be used. Going so far as to purposefully move a 1-on-1 chat into the Channel chat to answer.
Ultimately this is a people problem not a technical problem. Go back in time and trying to get people to use a centralized knowledge repository vs doing ad hoc calls/chats/emails is a struggle as old as networked computers.
posted by mmascolino at 6:20 AM on July 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
In my giant company the median user doesn't use Channel chats at all in a given month. This even holds true for the people responsible for bringing in and shepherding Teams into the company. EndsOfInvention raises good usability questions and frankly the path of least resistance for end users is just to default in asking in 1-on-1 chats. The most successful internal users of Channel chats that I have seen where there is a community of people who have "the channel religion" and model the desired behavior and use the Channels like they are meant to be used. Going so far as to purposefully move a 1-on-1 chat into the Channel chat to answer.
Ultimately this is a people problem not a technical problem. Go back in time and trying to get people to use a centralized knowledge repository vs doing ad hoc calls/chats/emails is a struggle as old as networked computers.
posted by mmascolino at 6:20 AM on July 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
Best answer: Perhaps people feel more comfortable with smaller-scale Teams chats because they feel they have a fuller picture of who's reading. When you're collaborating in person, you generally know who's in the room with you, and can adapt what and how you communicate to those social facts. When you're communicating on a channel, it takes more effort to see who's reading. That means it's easier to mess up in some way, like being inappropriately casual. The diffuse nature of these things also means you can't necessarily count on any particular coworker to see or acknowledge the message. Targeted chats with just the people you identify as relevant to a problem can get closer to the in-person experience, IMO.
Sometimes I suspect that the people who design these tools do not have a strong intuitive grasp of human social behavior, and this is one of those times.
posted by eirias at 6:30 AM on July 28, 2023 [22 favorites]
Sometimes I suspect that the people who design these tools do not have a strong intuitive grasp of human social behavior, and this is one of those times.
posted by eirias at 6:30 AM on July 28, 2023 [22 favorites]
Best answer: I'm the kind of person you'd need to convince. Admittedly I'm the very opposite of a power user, but I do not understand what advantages a channel has over chat. Also finding the right channel can be annoying and confusing, whereas I can pretty quickly identify the 1 or 2 people who have the info I need.
Having said that, we have a whole team chat, so we do ok with information sharing, at least within our own team.
posted by pianissimo at 6:38 AM on July 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
Having said that, we have a whole team chat, so we do ok with information sharing, at least within our own team.
posted by pianissimo at 6:38 AM on July 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
Team channels encourage openness and sharing
Does your corporate culture reward openness and sharing?
posted by zamboni at 7:02 AM on July 28, 2023 [5 favorites]
Does your corporate culture reward openness and sharing?
posted by zamboni at 7:02 AM on July 28, 2023 [5 favorites]
Best answer: We* can't even make this stick internally, so I have no idea how anyone else does. Most ad-hoc, day-to-day communication happens in chats, not in channels. Channels tend to get used for cross-team or broadcast communication.
*I work for Microsoft; this post is entirely my own opinion and should not be understood as representative of my employer's opinions or position.
posted by parm at 7:08 AM on July 28, 2023 [7 favorites]
*I work for Microsoft; this post is entirely my own opinion and should not be understood as representative of my employer's opinions or position.
posted by parm at 7:08 AM on July 28, 2023 [7 favorites]
The only way you're going to get people to stop this is to turn off private chats, and I don't think you want to do that.
posted by rhymedirective at 7:13 AM on July 28, 2023
posted by rhymedirective at 7:13 AM on July 28, 2023
Another issue, at least in my org, is that notifications for channels are default off - and you have to go into each channel individually to turn them on. A lot of folks don't know this, so on the rare occasion a channel is created people don't get in the habit of using/checking it and it quickly dies on the vine. I have also had folks complain that mobile notifications for channels are less consistent than chats.
My org doesn't even have an all staff Team, or department Teams. We pretty much just use chats and have chats called things like "Marketing Team," and personally I pin those to make them easy to find/access. Plus it seems like (as not an IT administrator person) setting up a Team has implications across the Office 365 ecosystem. Like, I can't use Planner the way I'd like to because we don't have departments/projects set up as Teams; but if we did, I think it would create Teams groups/channels and who knows what else?
Finally, as others have mentioned - chats *feel* private even if they aren't.
posted by misskaz at 7:16 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
My org doesn't even have an all staff Team, or department Teams. We pretty much just use chats and have chats called things like "Marketing Team," and personally I pin those to make them easy to find/access. Plus it seems like (as not an IT administrator person) setting up a Team has implications across the Office 365 ecosystem. Like, I can't use Planner the way I'd like to because we don't have departments/projects set up as Teams; but if we did, I think it would create Teams groups/channels and who knows what else?
Finally, as others have mentioned - chats *feel* private even if they aren't.
posted by misskaz at 7:16 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
My company has inadvertently pushed some sharing in channels vs chats by making the history of chats 90 days while the history for a channel is the lifespan of the Team group. That being said, we still do a lot of chatting but it's mostly in meeting chats, not personal chats. We're aggressive believers in recurring meetings.
We're a weird duck, we don't use bcc and always use reply all.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:51 AM on July 28, 2023
We're a weird duck, we don't use bcc and always use reply all.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:51 AM on July 28, 2023
Honestly, the Teams UI is a dog's breakfast and MS doesn't seem interested in improving its usability. So many basic features have been missing for far too long (for example - why can't I pin a team? Right now I can only pin a channel. Why can't I create groupings of teams to manage the absurd number I'm obliged to be part of?).
I believe your only option now is to say something like 'team, let's continue this on the public channel so others can also contribute'. Also, depending on your org's policy the teams chat may disappear too quickly for it to be useful.
Sorry, I have no answers, and MS really needs to do a better job if they want teams to be the linchpin of their collab strategy.
posted by sid at 8:26 AM on July 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
I believe your only option now is to say something like 'team, let's continue this on the public channel so others can also contribute'. Also, depending on your org's policy the teams chat may disappear too quickly for it to be useful.
Sorry, I have no answers, and MS really needs to do a better job if they want teams to be the linchpin of their collab strategy.
posted by sid at 8:26 AM on July 28, 2023 [9 favorites]
You can also ask your team members to summarize decisions in private chats into channel posts/replies.
Thinking back to my old workplace, I would’ve been the type of person to comply with that. Client A has an issue that needs to be handled with a minor, special procedure -> I pull the team lead and account manager into a private chat -> we discuss options for the best way to do it -> a decision is made -> public channel gets a two line recap of what client needs and an overview of the agreed-on solution -> in the future searching for $clientName or $projectType will bring up the channel post
posted by itesser at 8:29 AM on July 28, 2023 [5 favorites]
Thinking back to my old workplace, I would’ve been the type of person to comply with that. Client A has an issue that needs to be handled with a minor, special procedure -> I pull the team lead and account manager into a private chat -> we discuss options for the best way to do it -> a decision is made -> public channel gets a two line recap of what client needs and an overview of the agreed-on solution -> in the future searching for $clientName or $projectType will bring up the channel post
posted by itesser at 8:29 AM on July 28, 2023 [5 favorites]
Personally, I think of Teams chats as “a written phone call” (casual, a bit ephemeral, useful for decision making but not the same as an emailed decision). I think of channels as NOTHING.
Literally I never think of them, I was reminded they exist by your question, and I see no purpose to them. I’m a successful people and program manager, and considered tech savvy. So.
posted by samthemander at 8:48 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
Literally I never think of them, I was reminded they exist by your question, and I see no purpose to them. I’m a successful people and program manager, and considered tech savvy. So.
posted by samthemander at 8:48 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
Literally I never think of them, I was reminded they exist by your question, and I see no purpose to them.
The point, in so many words, is that they are actually SharePoint sites.
SharePoint sites can be used independently and are also used by Teams for file storage (these are called Teams-connected sites). A Teams-connected site is created automatically whenever you create a team.
This enables all kind of kludges that third party vendors hype as 'integration.'
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:02 AM on July 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
The point, in so many words, is that they are actually SharePoint sites.
SharePoint sites can be used independently and are also used by Teams for file storage (these are called Teams-connected sites). A Teams-connected site is created automatically whenever you create a team.
This enables all kind of kludges that third party vendors hype as 'integration.'
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:02 AM on July 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
To build on the above, it is a combination of SharePoint for storage, an Exchange Online mailbox for receiving mail and the Teams layer coordinating all this plus hosting "Teams apps" which can be anything from just showing a static web page to hosting Power BI dashboards to people writing bespoke software.
Like most of Microsoft's platform type solutions, it is very flexible and allows people to do many things the original creators never imagined...but what it really means is that casual users do a hodgepodge of random, convoluted things and are mystified by all the other bells and whistles that exist to support features they aren't using.
posted by mmascolino at 9:14 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
Like most of Microsoft's platform type solutions, it is very flexible and allows people to do many things the original creators never imagined...but what it really means is that casual users do a hodgepodge of random, convoluted things and are mystified by all the other bells and whistles that exist to support features they aren't using.
posted by mmascolino at 9:14 AM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
I feel your pain. Teams just doesn't do channels well. For reasons, we have both Teams and Slack. In Teams nobody uses channels. In Slack everybody does. (IT Administration wants to migrate everyone to Teams , users want to stay with Slack)
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 1:55 PM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 1:55 PM on July 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
The job of collecting, organizing, and making available important information is just that, a job in itself. I don't think it's wise (or fair) to expect employees to do this themselves when they're just trying to solve problems in the course of doing their regular work.
We have weekly all-hands video meetings, where people discuss problems that have come up recently, and how to address them.
But ultimately, our manager is primarily responsible for (1) making the final decision about what should be done in a given situation, and (2) updating our our wiki, which is our resource for all that kind of information.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:04 PM on July 28, 2023
We have weekly all-hands video meetings, where people discuss problems that have come up recently, and how to address them.
But ultimately, our manager is primarily responsible for (1) making the final decision about what should be done in a given situation, and (2) updating our our wiki, which is our resource for all that kind of information.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:04 PM on July 28, 2023
Use the calendar and filestore parts of the Teams to pull people away from chats.
My current workplace falls into chats, because they're like mail distribution lists and the culture is addicted to email, and because the approvals needed for a Teams setup is bureaucratic pain.
posted by k3ninho at 12:46 PM on July 31, 2023
My current workplace falls into chats, because they're like mail distribution lists and the culture is addicted to email, and because the approvals needed for a Teams setup is bureaucratic pain.
posted by k3ninho at 12:46 PM on July 31, 2023
Response by poster: Hi everyone -
Thanks for the suggestions. I agree that the Teams UI is a challenge, although it's gotten much better since we first had to move from Slack 5 years ago. I think there are a couple of good points:
* No matter how transparent management is (me), people will want to go off and have semi-private chats about what I just said.
* If there's a recurring meeting like a standup, people will just use that in between the meetings. You *can* call meetings from a channel, but that can bring in too many people.
I'm aware of the hodgepodge of underlying tech (SharePoint etc). If anyone's interested, one important difference between channels and chat is that if you ever do a Teams tenant merger (two companies), the chat history is going to be tossed and the Teams/channels are going to get migrated. Another is that the Files tab in channels is more permanent since it's tied to a secret SharePoint site.
What I think I will do is:
* Give up the idea of channels for each team, even though that's kind of what Teams are for.
* Keep Teams/channels for topics such as "AWS Discussion" that should be opt-in for anyone. We also have developer support channels with 2000+ members and people seem to "get" those.
* Bring in our in-house Teams admins to give us their perspective and a demo of various features we might be missing.
* Stress to the teams the importance of monitoring the shared channels we do keep, and replying on those. As an accountable manager, if people choose to not interact there, the alternatives are email (yuck) and weekly all-hands meetings (double yuck). Right now if I post in our shared General channel "everyone, please complete training X by Friday", I often get 1-2 acks out of 25 people. It worked fine on Slack for some reason.
* Make a team "working agreement" so everyone gets on the same page. Some people just may not know how to use it (settings, pinning, etc). In a virtual work environment, one big downside of chat is that people get left out and work gets duplicated. And anything involving *actual work* like responding to an incident or taking on work needs to be communicated to the whole team; that can be in the channel or by just taking assignment of a Jira ticket.
Honestly I think it's a combination of bad UI, bad instruction on when to use one vs. the other, and natural under-communicativeness of technical people (lurking). The best solution, which is everyone in one physical office collaborating, isn't gonna happen in a global economy/post-COVID. I don't miss going into an office, but my old co-located agile teams were much, much more productive due to proximity.
posted by caviar2d2 at 11:06 AM on August 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
Thanks for the suggestions. I agree that the Teams UI is a challenge, although it's gotten much better since we first had to move from Slack 5 years ago. I think there are a couple of good points:
* No matter how transparent management is (me), people will want to go off and have semi-private chats about what I just said.
* If there's a recurring meeting like a standup, people will just use that in between the meetings. You *can* call meetings from a channel, but that can bring in too many people.
I'm aware of the hodgepodge of underlying tech (SharePoint etc). If anyone's interested, one important difference between channels and chat is that if you ever do a Teams tenant merger (two companies), the chat history is going to be tossed and the Teams/channels are going to get migrated. Another is that the Files tab in channels is more permanent since it's tied to a secret SharePoint site.
What I think I will do is:
* Give up the idea of channels for each team, even though that's kind of what Teams are for.
* Keep Teams/channels for topics such as "AWS Discussion" that should be opt-in for anyone. We also have developer support channels with 2000+ members and people seem to "get" those.
* Bring in our in-house Teams admins to give us their perspective and a demo of various features we might be missing.
* Stress to the teams the importance of monitoring the shared channels we do keep, and replying on those. As an accountable manager, if people choose to not interact there, the alternatives are email (yuck) and weekly all-hands meetings (double yuck). Right now if I post in our shared General channel "everyone, please complete training X by Friday", I often get 1-2 acks out of 25 people. It worked fine on Slack for some reason.
* Make a team "working agreement" so everyone gets on the same page. Some people just may not know how to use it (settings, pinning, etc). In a virtual work environment, one big downside of chat is that people get left out and work gets duplicated. And anything involving *actual work* like responding to an incident or taking on work needs to be communicated to the whole team; that can be in the channel or by just taking assignment of a Jira ticket.
Honestly I think it's a combination of bad UI, bad instruction on when to use one vs. the other, and natural under-communicativeness of technical people (lurking). The best solution, which is everyone in one physical office collaborating, isn't gonna happen in a global economy/post-COVID. I don't miss going into an office, but my old co-located agile teams were much, much more productive due to proximity.
posted by caviar2d2 at 11:06 AM on August 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
You're right that some conversations are ideally best done publicly for later reference, but the fact is Teams sucks and as a result this won't always happen.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 6:11 AM on July 28, 2023 [16 favorites]